A Belgian company website must display, in a directly and easily accessible way, the company's full identity: legal name, registered office address, company number (CBE), VAT number, a contact email address and, for regulated professions, the professional body or supervisory authority it answers to. This is not a footer formality. It is the first thing the Economic Inspectorate looks at when it opens your site.
And the findings are harsh. During its control campaign run from 1 February to 6 December 2024, with results published on 5 August 2025, the Belgian FPS Economy analysed 2,158 websites and social media pages belonging to Belgian companies. 47.7% did not display the mandatory information about the service provider and 45.7% did not show their company number. Across the 2,664 establishments inspected in total, 67.3% were in breach of at least one rule of economic legislation.
In other words: half of Belgian business websites are at fault on a point that takes twenty minutes to fix. For an SME or a freelancer, that is pointless exposure, especially since those same details are what reassure a prospect hesitating to send you an enquiry.
What the law actually requires
The obligations come from the Belgian Code of Economic Law, which transposes the European rules on electronic commerce and consumer information. They apply as soon as you carry out a professional activity online, even if you sell nothing on the site.
The identification details
This information must be permanently accessible, without an account or a form, and stay on the site:
the exact legal name of the company, or your own name if you are a sole trader
the geographic address of the registered office (a post office box is not enough)
the company number from the CBE and, if you are liable for it, the VAT number
an email address and a fast, direct means of contact
for regulated activities (accountant, architect, estate agent, broker), the professional body and professional title, plus the supervisory authority where the activity requires authorisation
Half of Belgian business websites are at fault on a point that takes twenty minutes to fix.
The details about price and ordering
As soon as a price appears, it must be the total price in euros, VAT and taxes included, and delivery costs must be announced before the order is confirmed. Paid options cannot be pre-ticked. Finally, the final order button must state unambiguously that it commits you to a payment, with wording such as "Order with obligation to pay".
Showcase site or online shop: two levels of obligations
Not all sites are in the same boat. The distinction between a showcase site and an online shop directly determines how long your list is.
A showcase site must cover the identification details, a privacy policy compliant with the GDPR and cookie management with prior consent. That is the base layer, and in most cases it is enough.
An online shop adds general terms and conditions of sale, information on the 14 day right of withdrawal with its model form, delivery and payment terms, the legal guarantee of conformity and the complaints procedure. If you sell a digital product or service, you must also state its technical compatibility and its limitations.
On the personal data side, the cookie banner remains the most frequently misconfigured element: we set out the correct configuration in our article on cookies, the GDPR and Consent Mode v2.
What forgetting it costs
The risk is no longer theoretical. Failures to meet information obligations expose you to administrative fines of up to 10,000 euros, on top of possible refunds to consumers and compensation claims.
The FPS Economy has also sped up its means of action. Since September 2025, working with the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium, it redirects internet users trying to reach a site considered unreliable to a warning page, through the BAPS system. 30 sites have been handled this way and nearly 25,000 internet users have been warned. Eight sites were removed from the list after bringing themselves into compliance.
Failures to meet information obligations expose you to administrative fines of up to 10,000 euros.
The financial penalty is not even the worst scenario. A site showing no address, no company number and no terms of sale looks like a dubious site, at exactly the moment Belgian buyers are learning to be wary of those.
Where to place these details so they also convert
Compliance and trust play out in the same place. According to the FPS Economy, 75% of Belgians bought online over the past year, against a European average of 69%, and 84% of them ordered from a Belgian seller in the last three months. Proximity reassures, but it has to be visible.
In practice, structure the information across three levels:
The footer, present on every page: legal name, address, company number, VAT, email, plus links to the legal notices, the privacy policy and the terms of sale.
A dedicated "Legal notices" page, indexable, restating everything in plain terms. It is also a page that generative AI readily cites to verify that a company exists.
The contact or checkout funnel, where the information must appear at the right moment: costs announced before confirmation, a consent box that is not pre-ticked, an explicit payment button.
These blocks must stay readable with a keyboard and a screen reader: the same requirements described in our article on website accessibility apply here. A legal notice locked inside a modal window you cannot close is no better than a missing one.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to display my home address if I work from home?
Yes, if your company's registered office is your home. The law requires a real geographic address. Freelancers who would rather not expose their home use a business address from a domiciliation provider or a coworking space, which is perfectly legal as long as the registered office is properly recorded there in the CBE.
Does a Facebook or Instagram page fall under the same rules?
Yes. The FPS Economy inspections covered websites and social media pages. A professional page must therefore also make it possible to identify the company, usually through the "About" or "Information" section.
Can legal notices be copied from another site?
That is the most widespread bad idea. The copied text contains another company's data, does not cover your activity and often carries clauses that do not apply to your case. Terms of sale in particular commit your contractual liability: they must match what you sell and your real lead times.
My site is in French, Dutch and English: does everything need translating?
The information must be understandable for the audience you are targeting. If you sell in Flanders, the Dutch version must carry the same legal information as the French one, including the terms of sale and the withdrawal form.
Priority action plan
Check your footer: legal name, address, CBE number, VAT, email. If a single one of these is missing, you are in the 47.7%.
Create or complete a dedicated "Legal notices" page, reachable from every page, and link the privacy policy to it.
Review the cookie banner: genuine prior consent, refusing as easy as accepting, no tracker dropped before the click.
If you sell online, reread your terms of sale line by line: 14 day right of withdrawal, model form, legal guarantee, costs announced before confirmation, explicit order button.
Do the round every six months and at every change of registered office, legal form or offer. A detail that was accurate in 2024 may be wrong today.
These twenty lines of text will never make the commercial difference on their own. But they close a door that many Belgian SMEs leave wide open, and they give the hesitant visitor the one thing they are looking for before writing to you: proof that there is a real company behind the page. If your contact form converts poorly, this article deals with the other half of the problem.
Unsure whether your site is compliant? We build it in from the website design stage for Belgian SMEs and freelancers.
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August 29, 2026
7 min read
