September 2026 checklist for in-scope WooCommerce consumer-goods journeys

Eight to ten weeks before the date

Confirm who owns the implementation and who will approve the legal and country-specific interpretation. Read the current Your Europe guidance and Commission practical files directly. Assess the product, buyer, transaction, target market and applicable national law; then inventory only the consumer-goods journeys, countries, storefront languages and WooCommerce experiences determined to be in scope. Do not begin by installing a plugin and treating its defaults as the policy decision.

• Record primary-source URLs and access dates.
• List sales countries and storefront languages.
• Identify classic versus block cart and checkout.
• Separate legal-guarantee notice work from any GARAN work.

Six weeks before

Obtain the official colour files from the Commission distribution and preserve their checksums. Decide how languages are selected: fixed store language, WordPress locale, WPML or Polylang. Build a staging matrix that includes guest journeys, simple and variable products, product, cart and checkout surfaces, mobile widths and the active theme.

If using a plugin, document the exact version and inspect its privacy behaviour. A notice-display extension should not need customer, order, address, payment or cart data. If licence validation exists, record the narrow operational payload separately from shopper traffic.

Four weeks before

Implement on staging and test the actual templates. Scan the QR code from the rendered page, review image sharpness and colour, zoom to 200%, navigate by keyboard and check whether sticky headers or cookie banners obscure the notice. Confirm that caching and optimisation do not replace, crop or recolour the asset.

Test translated routes independently through checkout. Neither stable Notice27 1.2 nor the current private candidate provides production order-received or transactional-email placement. Capture screenshots of the supported journey and note failures with the theme or extension responsible.

Two weeks before

Run an approval review with the source register, placement matrix and screenshots. Remove duplicate or ambiguous placements. Confirm that public copy does not claim certification, endorsement or guaranteed compliance. Prepare a rollback that restores the previous storefront without changing payment configuration.

Schedule the deployment outside a high-risk sales window, but do not postpone verification. After release, smoke-test homepage, product, cart, checkout and current payment entry without completing a purchase.

After release

Set monthly source-review reminders through September, then a recurring quarterly review. Retest after theme, WooCommerce, block-checkout, caching or multilingual changes. Preserve evidence by date rather than overwriting the only screenshot set.

Notice27 can automate selected WooCommerce placements and language-file handling, but this checklist remains useful with a manual implementation. The important result is a traceable, source-led process—not dependence on a particular plugin.

Assign an incident path before it is needed. If a notice disappears, changes language unexpectedly or interferes with checkout, the team should know who can roll back the display layer, who verifies the current official file and who approves restoration. The rollback must leave payment configuration and unrelated store data untouched.

Finally, review public wording around the implementation. Product pages, help text and agency handoffs should describe what was installed without claiming legal advice, certification or EU endorsement. Keep the distinction between the legal-guarantee notice and GARAN visible wherever customers or staff could confuse them.

Archive the completed matrix and set the next review date.