The Digital Markets Act: Shaping Fair Competition in the Digital Age
The European Union introduced the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a comprehensive regulatory framework to ensure a level playing field in digital markets.
The Trusted Shops Trustmark stands for quality and conveys trust to your shop’s visitors. Why? Because only online shops that meet our quality criteria, handle customer data responsibly, and offer customer-oriented service can be awarded the Trustmark. To check your shop for compliance with these criteria, an audit is carried out by the true experts of trust: meet our certification team!
Once you have decided to apply for the Trusted Shops Trustmark, a dedicated contact person will take you through the on-boarding process. They will remain your personal contact at Trusted Shops.
There is another expert, though, who will assist you with certification. Our certification experts are qualified commercial lawyers who deal with e-commerce law every day and have already checked hundreds of online shops for compliance with our quality criteria.
“Our aim is to make sure that new members go through the audit as quickly as possible so that they can start benefitting from our trust solutions as soon as possible. My team has built up years of experience, which online retailers can only benefit from.”
Ferit Özdemir, Head of Trust Assessment
The audit report
Within one week after signing the contract, your contact person will get in touch with you for the audit you need to go through to be awarded the Trustmark. If your shop’s website was still under construction or being relaunched when the contract was concluded, you may of course decide when you want us to start with the audit.
The certifier will then begin to put your shop through its process, which is structured according to a country-specific audit report involving more than 100 criteria. What is mainly checked is to what extent consumer protection is guaranteed by your shop. The areas checked are:
- Identity and accessibility
- Data protection and security
- Cancellation policy
- Products and prices
- Delivery and payment
- Ordering process
A report will be sent to you by e-mail no later than 10 working days after the start of the audit. Only the points requiring improvement are sent to you so that your workload is kept to a minimum. Finding out that your website has areas for improvement is quite normal. Indeed, no shop meets all criteria right from the start.
You will have enough time to make the necessary changes, for which we’ll tell you exactly what you need to do. If you have any questions, please just get in touch with your certifier until all criteria are met. It usually takes 3 weeks to complete the audit.
“We're in close contact with the customer throughout the audit process. We can thus quickly clarify all outstanding issues. We've already worked with all common shop software solutions too, which is very helpful when helping shops implement our criteria.”
Sabrina Breuer, Commercial Lawyer
The Trusted Shops Trustmark
After completing the audit, you will receive an e-mail with a link to your Trusted Shops profile. If you have already integrated the Trustbadge into your online shop, the status of your certificate will automatically change to “valid”. Users visiting your online shop will now be able to check your Trusted Shops certificate by clicking on the Trustbadge. Of course, you can also use the Trusted Shops Trustmark for other marketing purposes.
Indeed, as soon as your Trustmark is activated, the Trusted Shops Buyer Protection becomes active, too. This means that online shoppers are protected against financial loss if something should go wrong when placing an order with your shop. This has a positive impact on your conversion rate.
Should something change in your online shop, e.g. because of a relaunch, you may, of course, arrange a follow-up check or re-discuss defined points.
