Age Verification Age Gate | age check only on flagged goods

About the Extension

Spirits, vapes, bladed products, fireworks. The moment your range carries a legal age limit, you have to decide how the shop handles it. Most answers put a door in front of the whole shop and ask every visitor for their age on the first click. Including the one who came for a wine glass.

The problem

A prompt at the entrance hits everyone and stands between the visitor and your range before they even know whether they want to stay. Pull the restricted goods out of the shop instead and you lose them in Google at the same time. Hide single products by hand and sooner or later you miss the search results, the cross-selling or a Shopping Experience where the goods still show up.

The solution

In the administration you flag which categories and which individual products are age restricted. Everything flagged disappears for visitors who have not confirmed their age. The prompt only appears when somebody actually reaches those goods. Shoppers who never look at restricted goods never see it.

What's in it for you

No popup for visitors it does not concern. The question sits at the goods, not at the front door. Your home page, your blog and the rest of your range stay as reachable as they would be without the plugin.

Your restricted products stay findable. Search engines and the link preview services of social networks cannot answer a question. The plugin treats them like confirmed visitors, so flagged products stay in the index and a shared link keeps its image and title.

One flag covers a whole branch. Switch it on for the Spirits category and every subcategory and every product inside is protected with it. Including the products you add next week.

Every sales channel gets its own age. Trade channel without a check, consumer channel at 18, a third one at 16. The browser stores the confirmed age instead of a tick, so a confirmation for 16 does not open a channel that asks for 18.

No answer counts as no. As long as a visitor has not answered, their age is unknown. Flagged products stay hidden in category listings, in search results, in the preview below the search field, in cross-selling and in Shopping Experiences.

How the plugin works

Setting it up takes four steps: install, activate, enter the age you want checked, then switch the flag on at the category. You will find that switch on every category and every product in the "Custom fields" card, in the "Age Check" tab, and it is called "Activate age check".

When a visitor without a confirmed age opens a restricted product or category page, the server stops the page before it builds it and sends them to the home page with the age prompt. Two buttons wait there: "I am over 18 years old" and "I am under 18 years old". The number follows your setting.

Confirm, and the visitor returns to the address they asked for in the first place. Decline, and they stay on the home page while the flagged categories disappear from their main navigation. They are not asked again. The answer sits in the browser for 30 days.

Flagged categories stay in the menu while the question is still open. Otherwise nothing would ever lead a visitor to the prompt, and a shop whose entire range is restricted would look empty.

The prompt shows up on the home page only, and only after the server has refused a page. It does not turn up on your contact page, and it never interrupts an order in checkout.

Typical use cases

Spirits next to glassware. Your shop sells whisky, glasses and gift hampers. Only the whisky sits behind the prompt, everything else stays open to everyone.

Vapes and e-liquids. The main category carries the flag, and liquids, hardware and every subcategory below inherit the protection.

Knives and outdoor gear. Only individual blades are flagged, rucksacks and lamps stay open.

Trade and consumer channel on one installation. The trade channel runs without a check, the consumer channel at 18.

Technical facts for your IT team

• Shopware 6.7, PHP 8.2 or newer.
• On activation the plugin adds its own custom field set and links it to product and category. Shopware tables stay untouched, no extra database tables are created.
• The plugin sends no data to external servers. The answer sits in the cookie ageCheckSix with a 30 day lifetime and holds nothing but the confirmed age, no personal data.
• The cookie registers itself in your cookie consent dialogue as "Age confirmation" in the group of technically required cookies.
• The HTTP cache keeps three separate entries: unanswered, declined, confirmed. A page built for a confirmed visitor is never served to an unconfirmed one.
• The block works on the server, not in the browser through JavaScript. Turning off JavaScript gets nobody past it.
• Errors in the subscribers go into a dedicated log channel and never break a page.
• Uninstall without the "keep user data" option and the plugin removes its custom field set, the field, its configuration values and its snippets.

To be honest

The prompt is self-declaration, not an ID check. Anyone who clicks "I am over 18 years old" gets through, and nothing is verified. If your goods require a verified check with identity or delivery confirmation, you need a second product that does exactly that.

The same honesty applies to the search engine exemption. It runs on the user agent, and a user agent can be forged. That is a deliberate trade of protection for findability.

One more limit: the plugin governs what is visible in the shop. A basket a visitor filled earlier is not emptied by it. Flag a single category and try it, and within a few minutes you will see whether this approach fits your range.

Legal notice

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