If your US store ships to the EU, the EAA applies to you.

Why the EAA reaches across the Atlantic

Article 2 of Directive (EU) 2019/882 defines scope by where the service is provided, not where the company is incorporated. If a German consumer can complete a checkout on your storefront and receive the goods in Berlin, your service is being provided on the EU market. The German implementation (BFSG) is even more direct: any operator placing services on the German market falls within scope, with limited exemptions for microenterprises (under 10 staff and under €2M revenue).

Practically: most US merchants with an EU shipping option, an EU-language storefront, or EUR pricing are in scope. The threshold is presence on the EU market, not local incorporation.

The German Abmahnung mechanism

Unlike US ADA enforcement (which runs through demand letters and class actions), the dominant pattern in Germany is the Abmahnung: a private warning letter from a law firm, typically asserting concrete WCAG violations on named pages, demanding an undertaking (Unterlassungserklärung) and reimbursement of the firm's costs.

The economics for the lawyer scale: send hundreds of templated letters with an attorney-fee anchor in the €700–€1,500 range and chase signatures. The economics for the merchant are inverted: signing the standard template can lock you into impossible promises, while ignoring the letter risks a contractual penalty and an unfavorable court record.

US merchants typically receive these via their Impressum / contact email associated with the EU storefront. Germany has no automatic exemption for foreign senders.

What "compliance" means in this context

It does not mean perfect WCAG conformance. No automated tool produces that, and the EAA itself anticipates partial conformance with mandatory disclosure. What enforcement actually wants to see, in order:

1. A published accessibility statement (EAA Article 4 mandatory) with the seven required disclosures.
2. Evidence of continuous due diligence — repeated assessments, not a one-off audit from 2024.
3. A feedback mechanism (concrete email or form) for accessibility complaints.
4. A documented process for fixing issues raised through that feedback.

That list is achievable for any competent ecommerce operation. What it requires is record-keeping, not a stack rewrite.

What does not work

• Overlay widgets. The FTC's $1M penalty against AccessiBe in 2025 made this category a liability, not an asset. Don't paste a JS widget across your site and claim accessibility — it doesn't survive scrutiny in Germany either.
• One-time audits from 2023. Insufficient on the continuous-diligence axis. An audit older than 12 months is read as the absence of process.
• "Working on it" without artifacts. Verbal commitment to accessibility is irrelevant in a procedural context. You need timestamped scans and a published statement.

What works for US-based teams without a German lawyer on payroll

Three concrete steps:

1. Add a continuous WCAG monitoring service (any vendor, ours or otherwise) that produces weekly or daily scans with timestamps and exportable PDFs. The scans themselves are the artifact.
2. Publish an accessibility statement at /accessibility in both English and the target EU languages (German first if you fulfill DE orders). Include the seven required disclosures. Use real, current scan data, not boilerplate.
3. Designate a real contact in your customer-support inbox for accessibility complaints. Document responses. This is part of EAA Article 4.

Where WCAGdesk fits

We're a continuous WCAG monitoring service designed for the cross-border buyer:

• Read-only crawler from a US-friendly user agent (we identify ourselves clearly and respect robots.txt).
• WCAG 2.1 AA via axe-core 4.11 — the same engine inside Lighthouse and Chrome DevTools, so results are reproducible by your dev team.
• Daily or weekly schedule, exportable PDF reports for your legal file.
• Auto-generated accessibility statement in English and German, prefilled from real scans and quarterly refreshable.
• Pricing in USD ($149 / $299 / $599) with Paddle as merchant of record handling EU VAT.

We are not lawyers. We are not an overlay. We are the timestamped, defensible source of truth your lawyer would otherwise have to assemble manually.

Who shouldn't use this

Microenterprises (under 10 staff and under €2M revenue) are exempt under EAA service requirements. If that's you, you may not need monitoring yet. We'd rather tell you that than sell you something irrelevant.

US merchants with no EU shipping, no EUR pricing, and no EU-language storefront are out of scope. If you genuinely don't sell into the EU market, the EAA does not apply.