Online Sales Restrictions and Platform Bans: What Brands Can Still Control

Online sales restrictions are the vertical battleground of the last decade: brand owners defending positioning and service, retailers defending channel freedom, and authorities defending consumers’ ability to shop across borders and platforms. The rules are now reasonably settled — and considerably more permissive than they were in 2017. This guide sets out what suppliers may and may not do online, as part of the vertical-agreements pillar of our Competition & Antitrust hub.

Where did the online-sales rules come from?

From two decisions that framed everything since. Pierre Fabre (2011) held that a de facto ban on internet sales — requiring a qualified pharmacist to be physically present at each sale — restricted competition by object and could not be justified by the need to advise customers or protect a prestige image (as then argued). Coty (2017) then confirmed that a narrower restriction — banning visible third-party marketplaces within a selective luxury system — was lawful, distinguishing Pierre Fabre because retailers remained free to sell online through their own channels and to advertise online.

Between those poles, national authorities produced a decade of divergent enforcement (Germany’s Bundeskartellamt was notably stricter on platform bans than French or Dutch practice), which the 2022 VBER and its guidelines set out to harmonise. The current framework’s organising principle is the effective-use test: suppliers may impose requirements on how online selling is done, but nothing that in practice stops the distributor using the internet as a genuine sales channel. That test, rather than any list of forbidden clauses, is what modern drafting should be measured against — alongside the block exemption‘s share thresholds.

What restrictions are permitted today?

A meaningful toolkit. Suppliers may set quality standards for online sales — site design, product presentation, imagery, authorised-dealer identification, customer-service standards — provided they are proportionate and applied consistently. They may require an online shop of appropriate standard and, in selective systems, prohibit sales via visibly third-party marketplaces. They may operate dual pricing reflecting genuinely different channel costs, and set different criteria for online and offline sales.

They may also restrict active online advertising targeted at territories reserved to others — territory-specific ad campaigns, local-language sites aimed at another’s exclusive area — while general online advertising and a general website remain protected as passive selling. And, importantly, suppliers can require dealers to operate physical premises where the product genuinely warrants it, as a qualitative criterion within a selective system. What remains prohibited: banning online sales, requiring per-sale approval, blocking use of the supplier’s trademarks in the dealer’s online search advertising, preventing use of price-comparison services as a class, and geo-blocking passive orders from other member states.

What is the parity-clause problem?

Parity (most-favoured-nation) clauses require a seller not to offer better prices or terms elsewhere. Wide parity covers rival platforms and channels; narrow parity covers only the seller’s own direct channel. Wide parity softens competition between platforms — no platform can win share by lowering its commission, because the price cannot move — and European authorities moved against it in the hotel-booking sector from 2015, with several countries banning even narrow parity in that industry.

The 2022 VBER removed wide retail parity from the block exemption entirely, making it individually assessable; the DMA then prohibited it outright for designated gatekeepers, and Booking.com’s designation brought the largest travel platform inside that prohibition. Türkiye’s Rekabet Kurulu has run parallel enforcement in accommodation and food-delivery platforms. For any marketplace or intermediary, the practical rule is now: narrow parity may be defensible with real free-riding evidence; wide parity should be treated as unavailable in Europe, and the commercial model rebuilt around genuine value rather than price-fixing-by-contract, as our DMA guide details.

How does geo-blocking law interact with competition rules?

They overlap and reinforce. The EU Geo-blocking Regulation (2018) prohibits traders from blocking or limiting customers’ access to online interfaces, or applying different conditions, based on nationality or place of residence in defined situations — a consumer-protection instrument enforced separately from competition law. Competition law then catches the agreements behind such practices: a supplier requiring its distributors to geo-block, or to refuse cross-border orders, imposes a hardcore passive-sales restriction.

The Commission’s decisions in the video-game sector illustrate the combination: Valve and five publishers were fined a combined €7.8 million in 2021 for geo-blocking Steam activation keys to prevent cross-border purchases of PC games — territorial partitioning implemented technically rather than contractually. The lesson for any business with regional pricing: technical measures that reproduce a prohibited contractual restriction are analysed as that restriction. Regional price differences are lawful; engineering the market so customers cannot act on them is not.

What should suppliers do now?

Rewrite online policies against the current framework rather than inherited caution. Many brand owners still operate pre-2022 rules that forbid more than the law requires — losing distribution reach for no legal benefit — while others carry legacy clauses (price-comparison bans, blanket marketplace prohibitions outside a genuine selective system, wide parity) that are now clearly unlawful.

The practical sequence: confirm the distribution model (selective, exclusive, free) and whether it is properly constituted; confirm the share position against the safe harbour; then map each online rule to its permitted basis, deleting any that cannot be justified. Document the rationale for marketplace and presentation rules — Coty protection depends on a coherent image-protection logic, not on assertion. Finally, brief the e-commerce and brand-protection teams: takedown programs aimed at genuine counterfeits are unproblematic, but the same tooling used against authorised dealers’ discount listings converts brand protection into RPM.

How do these rules apply to platforms as suppliers’ counterparties?

Two relationships need separating. Where a marketplace resells on its own account, it is a distributor and the normal vertical rules apply — the supplier may impose quality criteria but not fix its prices. Where the marketplace intermediates third-party sellers, the 2022 framework treats it as a supplier of online intermediation services, with its own restrictions on the sellers assessed under the vertical rules — and the block exemption unavailable where the platform also competes on the market it intermediates.

That last carve-out is significant: hybrid platforms cannot rely on the safe harbour for their seller terms, so parity clauses, ranking conditions and data terms must be justified individually — and for designated gatekeepers, the DMA simply prohibits several of them. Suppliers selling through such platforms should note the corollary: many of the terms imposed on them are now individually assessable, which makes complaint and renegotiation more viable than it was five years ago.

What does enforcement look like today?

Increasingly national and increasingly data-driven. The Commission’s e-commerce sector inquiry seeded a decade of national cases across Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Nordics, and authorities now use web-scraping and price-monitoring tools of their own to detect uniform online pricing and vanished discounts. Türkiye’s Rekabet Kurulu has run parallel e-commerce work, including its e-marketplace sector inquiry and platform investigations.

The practical implication for suppliers: online conduct is observable from outside the company in a way that offline conduct never was. A brand whose authorised dealers’ online prices move in lockstep after a policy change generates a detectable signature, and complaints from excluded online sellers arrive with screenshots attached. Compliance in this area has to assume visibility rather than obscurity.

What should an online-policy document contain?

Five sections: the distribution model and why it is constituted as it is; the objective online criteria with their product-specific justification; the express confirmation of pricing freedom; the advertising rules distinguishing general from territory-targeted campaigns; and the enforcement procedure — who assesses breaches, on what evidence, with what escalation. Publishing it to the network is itself protective, because uniformity is provable only against a written standard.

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