Germany's BFSG: What Online Shops and Service Providers Must Do Now

Why online shops and service providers are at the centre of the BFSG

Since 28 June 2025, Germany's Accessibility Strengthening Act (BFSG) has been in force. It is not a niche public-sector topic: at its core it targets companies that offer digital products and services to consumers. Online shops, appointment booking, customer accounts, banking and reservation flows are named explicitly – exactly the features most commercial websites earn their money with.

If you run a shop or sell, initiate or enable bookings for services online, you are very likely covered. An exemption applies only to micro-enterprises in the service sector – fewer than ten employees and at most €2M annual turnover. Pure B2B offerings without a consumer relationship are generally out of scope. Important: this is a technical assessment, not legal advice – if in doubt, clarify the scope with a specialist lawyer.

Which parts of your shop are actually affected

Accessibility doesn't end on the homepage. The BFSG is about the entire path a customer takes from the first page to the order confirmation. For a shop, these are the focus areas:

• Product lists and filters: categories, sorting and filters must be keyboard-operable and understandable to screen readers – not driven by mouse and colour alone.
• Product detail pages: images need meaningful alt text, and variant selectors (size, colour) must be correctly labelled.
• Cart and checkout: every step must work without a mouse, required fields must be clearly marked, and error messages must be unambiguously tied to the field they concern.
• Customer account and forms: registration, login and address forms are among the most common stumbling blocks.
• Confirmations and invoices: confirmation pages, emails and PDF invoices fall under the requirements too.

The typical barriers in e-commerce

The same patterns recur in practice – and nearly all of them are fixable:

• Errors signalled only in red: conveying "please complete this field" through colour alone helps no one with low vision. The message must exist as text and be linked to the field.
• Keyboard traps in modals: cart layers or cookie banners you cannot escape with the keyboard.
• Payment iframes: embedded payment fields (credit card, PayPal) must also be operable and labelled.
• Status by colour only: "in stock" green, "sold out" red – imperceptible to some without text or an icon.
• Contrast in sale designs: light-grey prices, thin discount badges and low-contrast buttons fail every audit.

WooCommerce, Shopify & co. – what it means for you

No shop system is "accessible out of the box". WooCommerce, Shopify and others give you a solid foundation, but actual compliance depends on your theme, your plugins and your content. Especially with heavily customised themes or many third-party plugins, most barriers emerge only from the combination. A standard theme is no free pass – what matters is what actually reaches the browser in the end.

What to do now

The pragmatic path has three steps: measure the current state honestly, prioritise by risk, then fix in code – not with a bolted-on overlay script that leaves the real problems untouched. I explain why in detail in Overlay tools vs. a real accessibility audit. And the points warning-letter senders check first are in my BFSG checklist.

For WordPress shops, my plugin Kipphard Accessibility Audit checks your actually-rendered HTML right in the admin and helps with the accessibility statement. If you don't want to handle remediation yourself, I take it on as a BFSG audit and remediation service – from a single checkout fix to a fully accessible relaunch.

Conclusion

For online shops and service providers, accessibility has been mandatory since June 2025 – and the checkout is the most critical stretch. If you audit and fix the path from product page to order confirmation in a structured way, compliance is achievable at manageable cost. Get in touch if you want to know where your shop stands.