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E-commerce

Age verification for alcohol and restricted goods

Ask the wallet one question. Is this person over 18. It answers with a signed proof and nothing else. You get a compliance artefact and store a boolean, which is about as little personal data as the obligation allows.

The problem

What teams do today

Age gates on restricted storefronts are either useless or invasive. A birth-date dropdown proves nothing and satisfies nobody. A document check works, but it drops conversion at checkout and leaves a wine shop holding identity documents it has no business keeping.

01
An artefact that survives an audit, unlike a birth-date dropdown
02
Nothing identifying collected, so the check adds little GDPR exposure
03
Repeat customers reverify in seconds with no document to re-photograph
How it works

Three steps with Authbound

  1. Step 01

    Gate the purchase, not the site

    Put the check at add-to-cart or checkout. Gating the whole storefront kills your organic traffic for no compliance benefit.

  2. Step 02

    Ask for one attribute

    We request age_over_18 and nothing more. The shopper sees exactly that on their consent screen.

  3. Step 03

    Keep the proof

    The order carries a signed verification reference. No document, no birth date, nothing that identifies the shopper beyond the order itself.

Rules in play

National alcohol and tobacco sales law, GDPR data minimisation, eIDAS 2.0

Live demo

We built Halcyon Cellars, a company that does not exist, to show this running inside a finished product. The wallet flow in it is the real SDK.

Open the Halcyon Cellars demo
Questions

What people ask

What do we actually receive?
A signed assertion that age_over_18 is true, plus the issuer identity and a timestamp. No name, no birth date, no image, unless you explicitly ask for them.
Is a boolean enough for a regulator?
The proof is signed by a government-recognised issuer and checked against the EU trust list, which is stronger evidence than a scan somebody eyeballed. Requirements still vary by member state and product, so confirm the standard for your market.
Where should the gate sit?
At purchase intent. Verifying only shoppers who were going to buy anyway costs you nothing in traffic and nothing in conversion.

Built on Authbound Identity Verification. One API key covers every flow you add later.

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