Age Check: Restricted Products Stay Hidden Until the Age Is Confirmed

About the Extension

A visitor types "lighter" into your search box and gets the cigars along with it. Nobody asked how old they are. If you sell age-restricted goods, that is exactly the moment you want to avoid.

The problem

Shopware ships without any age gate. Shops that want to protect part of their range hide the category in the navigation and hope nobody finds it. The search finds it. So does the product slider on the home page, and cross-selling does anyway. Your Challenge 25 policy stops at the shop door, and hope is a poor substitute for a control.

The solution

On the first visit a popup opens with two buttons: "I am over 18 years" and "I am under 18 years". You decide which age is checked. Anyone choosing the lower button no longer sees the flagged products and categories anywhere in the shop. Not in listings, not in search, not in the navigation, not in recommendations.

What's in it for you

You protect exactly what needs protecting. Every product and every category carries a tick box called "Activate age check". The rest of your range stays visible to everyone, including visitors who clicked "under 18". A mixed range of lighters, barbecue tools and cigars does not lose its harmless half.

No back door through the search box. The plugin steps in at nine places at once: category listing, search results, suggestions in the search field, main navigation, cross-selling, product detail page and the CMS elements product box, product slider and buy box. A restricted item does not surface because somebody took a detour.

One channel strict, the other normal. The switch and the minimum age belong to the sales channel. Your trade channel for resellers runs without the popup, your consumer shop runs with it. Two channels, two rules, one plugin.

No external verification service, no cost per check. There is no third party, no API key and no invoice based on the number of checks. The visitor's answer goes into a cookie in their browser and nowhere else.

Set up in a few minutes. Install the plugin, activate it, set the minimum age, tick the box on the products and categories concerned. No template work, no line of code.

How the plugin works

The visitor answers once and the answer sits in a cookie for 30 days. If they confirm the minimum age, nothing about the shop changes. If they click "under 18", the plugin filters every storefront product query from that moment on: flagged items and every item in a flagged category drop out before the page is built. Open a restricted product page directly and the item is reported as unavailable. Arrive on a restricted page through an old link or a bookmark and you land on the home page. Checked and unchecked visitors get separate cache keys, so cached pages never mix.

Typical use cases

Off-licence and tobacco shops with a mixed range. The shop sells cigars, whisky, lighters and glassware. Only the first two categories get the tick, the accessories stay visible and sellable for everyone.

Knives and outdoor gear. Lock knives and flick knives are flagged, rucksacks and camping stoves are not. A visitor who does not confirm their age simply finds the knife shelf empty.

Media with 18-rated titles. A shop selling films and games flags the individual titles instead of the whole category. The category stays browsable, the restrictedtitles are not in it.

Technical facts for your IT team

Shopware 6.7, PHP 8.2 or newer. The plugin changes no Shopware tables: the flag lives in its own custom field set called "Age Check" on product and category. The plugin sends no data to external servers. It sets a single cookie named ageCheckSix, valid for 30 days, SameSite=Lax, and Secure on HTTPS. Its content is either "check" or "uncheck". No date of birth, no name, no personal detail. The cookie is registered in Shopware's cookie configuration as technically required and appears in the consent dialogue. Filtering happens inside the storefront search criteria, plus one query per page load for the flagged categories, capped at 500 categories per sales channel. Every intervention runs inside try/catch with its own log channel, so a plugin error does not take the page down. On uninstall you decide via the "keep user data" option: without it, configuration, snippets and the custom field set including your flags are removed; with it, everything stays in place for a later reinstall. Interface and help texts come in English, German and Dutch.

To be honest

This is a self-declaration by click, not an identity check. Anyone who lies about their age gets through, and no cookie changes that. Where the law demands proof of age for your goods, for instance on delivery of alcohol or tobacco, you still need an ID check at the doorstep. This plugin gives you the visible age control inside the shop, not the document check. It also stops nobody at the checkout, it makes items invisible. If that is what you need, take it for a spin.

Legal notice

We accept no liability for legal requirements. Please check the use of this plugin with a qualified legal advisor.