Age verification: How to Prevent Sales to Minors Without Losing Customers

If you sell products that might be age-sensitive for people that are under legal age, you need to conduct age verification on your WooCommerce store.

In this article, we’ll start by explaining why your store needs to have age verification for preventing sales to minors. We’ll also go over some useful tips that can help you prevent sales to minors without losing customers.

Do You Need Age Verification On Your Website? 

You are not required to have an age-gate on your store by law, but some businesses do need them for the products they sell. Businesses that sell age-sensitive products such as tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis need to have age gates that restrict underage users from purchasing their products.

Age verification is also suitable for businesses that need control over who sees their content so that they have an easier time publishing the type of content they want to. 

You may require some sort of age verification if you sell products such as:

• R Rated movies. If you sell movies or games that are intended for adult audiences only, you might need to set up an age-gate on your store. This can also include entertainment games or videos that are rated for audiences above the age of 18 or in some cases over 16.  
• Products that require legal age. Alcohol, e-cigarettes, vapes, or cannabis goods are not available for purchase for people under the legal age in most countries. Also, it’s important to note that the legal age for some products might be different than others. This may also be different according to the country’s laws. For instance, in the United States, the legal age to purchase tobacco is 18 years of age but you need to be at least 21 to purchase alcohol products. 
• Gambling services. It’s also necessary for you to set up age gates if you’ll be providing gambling services on your WooCommerce store.
• Contests. If you’re looking to run contests for specific age groups, you might want to consider using an age verification plugin to validate the contestant’s age. Using a date picker with validation is a great option for sites that organize contests for their visitors or members.
• Memberships. If you run a membership site that publishes adult content or age-sensitive topics such as cannabis or vaping, you need an age verification plugin to provide age-gate pop-us on your site. This can help you restrict the content that was published with members over the legal age in mind.

Agy: Intuitive Age Verification For Your Website

Agy is a powerful, intuitive, and mobile-friendly WordPress plugin that lets you set up age verification for your WordPress site or WooCommerce store. You can customize, set different options and protect your website using Agy’s powerful age verification system.

Key Features:

• Agy is very easy to set up, even for users who have no experience with age verification plugins. It provides an intuitive interface and options that are easy to understand.
• Agy offers different design and styling options to create a responsive, modern age gate for your customers.
• Lets you add checkboxes to the checkout and registration page of WooCommerce.
• With 3 different verification modes to choose from, Agy lets its users decide which one suits their customers and store the best. 
• Agy uses a modern, secure way of verification through integration with the Klarna Sofort Ident API. This altogether provides a much more secure way of verifying your customer’s age.
• Agy lets users blacklist or whitelist specific products to ensure you don’t lose sales. 

Useful Tips To Prevent Sales To Minors Without Losing Customers

Here, we’ll go over some useful tips that can help you prevent sales to minors without losing customers.

1. Restrict users with age verification

Users that are not above the legal age should not be able to buy age-sensitive products from your store. You need to provide an age verification pop-up to help prevent minors from being able to purchase such products. By setting up age verification, users that are under the defined legal age won’t be able to register or login to your website. These users will also be not able to access all of your content or buy age-restricted products from your store. This way, you can prevent sales to minors since the age verification will prevent anyone under the legal age to fully access your store or the products you sell.

Agy can help you set up age verification in a few clicks. Here’s how:

After you’ve installed and activated the plugin, navigate to Settings → Agy from the WordPress admin panel and click on the General tab.

Select the type of age verification you want to use on your store by selecting one of the three options next to Display mode. Additionally, you can set the required age verification in the meta box next to Minimum age. Now visitors on your website will be prompted to fill out an age verification pop-up. 

Here’s what it looks like on the front-end:

2. Provide content and products specifically for users under the legal age

Providing content or products specifically for minors or people who are not above the legal age can help attract more visitors to your store. You might consider offering products that are suited to meet the demands of minors looking to access your website.

For instance, you can create separate pages for minors only. These pages will have content specifically for the users that are under age. Additionally, this can help you gain more brand loyal customers as all of your customers don’t have to be over the legal age to buy from you or view your content.

You can do that easily with the help of a WordPress age verification plugin such as Agy. To get started, download and install the plugin. Next, navigate to Settings → Agy from the WordPress admin panel and click on the WooCommerce tab.

Here, you can access the different options that let you use age gates on your WooCommerce store. Tick the checkbox next to Activates the Sofort Ident API to activate a real age verification system for your WooCommerce store. You can also tick the checkboxes under Registration and Checkout to enable the age gate on checkout and registration pages on your store. Additionally, this also saves age information for repeat customers so they don’t have to enter it each time they access your store.

Go to the product page and select the product(s) to be exempted from the age gate. By doing this, you can sell products specifically to minors without sacrificing sales.

Here’s what it looks like on the back-end:

The product won’t have an age gate on the front-end so customers under the legal age can purchase it:

3. Organize contests for minors

Organizing age-restricted contests can help you form a better understanding with customers or members that are not above the legal age yet. Providing such an opportunity for users that are usually restricted from purchasing your products lets them feel like they’re a part of your community.

Additionally, this is also a great way to introduce new people to your brand or business. Organizing contests will also provide a better opportunity for new people to get a better feel for your offering. 

With a responsive age verification plugin like Agy, organizing contests specifically for people over and under the legal age is simple and easy to do. To get started, you need to install and activate Agy on your WordPress site.

Next, navigate to Settings → Agy from the WordPress admin panel and click on the General tab.

Select the type of age verification you want to use on your store by ticking one of the three options next to Display mode. Additionally, you can set the required age verification in the metabox next to Minimum age.

Here’s what it looks like to visitors:

And then you can set up a similar registration page for minors and disable age verification:

Conclusion

Restricting access to your products and content shouldn’t be difficult at all with the help of a robust age verification plugin like Agy. You can also provide age-specified content or products that prevent sales to minors without losing customers.