Compliance routing for online marketplaces

Marketplaces sit at the intersection of platform-liability, seller-verification, and consumer-protection regimes that don’t apply to first-party sellers. ClearLaunch maps your platform’s structural shape (who transacts, how you facilitate, what data you handle) to the regulations that follow.

Covers 131 regulations across the canonical marketplace domains, including the EU and US frameworks most marketplaces hit at launch.

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Regulations specifically affecting marketplaces

EU P2B (Platform-to-Business). Terms-of-service requirements, ranking-parameters disclosure, internal complaint-handling, mediator access. Applies to any platform connecting business sellers with EU buyers, regardless of platform size.

EU DSA marketplace tier. Articles 30 to 32 cover marketplace-specific obligations: seller traceability, random sample checks on offered products, and notification interfaces. The VLOP tier (45M+ EU MAU) adds risk assessments and Article 37 independent audits.

EU GPSR (General Product Safety Regulation). In effect since December 2024. Applies product-safety duties to online marketplaces with EU-shipped products, including verified-trader checks and product-recall participation.

DAC7. Annual reporting of seller revenue and tax-ID information to EU member-state tax authorities. Affects marketplaces facilitating sales above documented thresholds.

EU Digital Markets Act (DMA). Gatekeeper obligations including anti-self-preferencing, data-portability, interoperability. Narrow real-world applicability (a small handpicked set of designated gatekeepers per the European Commission). ClearLaunch flags DMA awareness when your input thresholds suggest gatekeeper status.

Country-specific marketplace laws. UK DMU, Japan TBPA, India platform-competition rules, US state platform-liability variations. Routed by selected markets.

Per-business-model routing

The wizard’s business-model block asks four structural questions: who transacts on your platform, who the participants are (consumers, businesses, individual workers), how involved you are in the transaction itself, and your data-handling role. Each answer routes a different slice of the 131-regulation corpus.

A pure facilitator (information-only) doesn’t typically trigger fulfillment-side product-safety obligations; a fulfillment-handling marketplace does. The wizard surfaces what shifted when your shape changes so the routing is visible, not opaque. See /methodology#predicates for the conditional-requirement mechanics.