Live selling rules: platform, legal and data protection

Live selling rules sit in three layers: platform policies from TikTok and Meta for LIVE and commerce, distance-selling law that gives customers a cancellation period and requires clear pre-order information, and data protection rules on consent and customer data. State the essentials in your pinned comment and your WhatsApp confirmation, and check tax and invoicing rules locally.

What are the general rules for live selling?

Selling during a live video is still selling at a distance: your customer cannot touch the item before they order, so the same layers of rules apply as to any online shop. The platform you stream on sets rules for the content and the commerce activity itself, and TikTok and Meta each publish these separately from ordinary consumer law. Consumer protection law then governs the sale itself: what you must tell a customer before they order, and how long they have to change their mind afterwards. Data protection law governs what you do with the customer details you collect through comments, direct messages and delivery forms. Finally, invoicing and tax follow your own country’s rules and are not something a platform or an app can set for you. None of these layers is unique to live selling, they are the same rules that apply to a webshop or a phone order, applied here to a comment-based sale.

What are TikTok’s rules for live selling?

TikTok’s Community Guidelines apply to everything on the platform, including LIVE, and are published at tiktok.com/community-guidelines. On top of the general guidelines, TikTok sets conditions specific to LIVE itself: TikTok’s official guidance states that you must be aged 18 or older to go LIVE, that an account confirmed to belong to someone under 13 is removed, and that an account confirmed as under 18 loses access to LIVE and other age-restricted features. TikTok can ask for age confirmation before letting you go live. Beyond age, treat claim codes, buy-words such as “mine” or “reserve”, and the order in which you honour comments as your own shop’s rules, not TikTok’s, since TikTok does not set these. Write them out plainly at the start of every show and repeat them in your pinned comment, so viewers who join late still see them before they comment on an item.

What are Facebook’s rules for live selling?

Meta’s Commerce Policies, published at facebook.com/policies_center/commerce, apply to any attempt to buy, sell or trade products across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, including through Marketplace, Shops and the WhatsApp Business catalogue. They set out categories you cannot sell at all, among them illegal, stolen or counterfeit goods, weapons, adult products, controlled substances and unauthorised financial products, along with other categories that need extra approval before you can list them, such as event tickets or gift cards. Commerce content must also meet Meta’s wider Community Standards on top of the Commerce Policies themselves. If you run your live on Facebook or Instagram and take orders through comments, the sale still counts as commerce activity under these policies even though no formal Shop listing exists for each item, so keep your claims accurate and stay out of the categories Meta restricts.

What does UK law require for live selling?

In the UK, the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 govern any sale made at a distance, comments during a live stream included. Before the customer orders, you must give clear information covering, among other things, the main characteristics of the goods, the total price including taxes, any delivery charges, your identity as the trader, and how the customer can cancel. Once the order is placed, the customer usually has 14 days to cancel it: for goods, that period runs from the day they receive the item, and if you fail to give the required cancellation information, the period can extend to 12 months. Some goods are excluded from the right to cancel, including items made to the customer’s specification or clearly personalised, and goods that deteriorate or expire quickly. The EU’s Directive 2011/83/EU sets out closely matching rules for other European countries: the same 14-day withdrawal period, similar pre-contract information duties, and a requirement that any online order button carrying a payment obligation says so clearly.

What does GDPR mean for live selling?

UK GDPR treats the phone numbers, addresses and order details you collect through comments and WhatsApp like any other personal data. Article 6 sets out the lawful bases for using it: for fulfilling an order, the basis is usually that processing is necessary for the performance of a contract with the customer, while sending marketing messages normally needs a separate basis, such as consent. Article 5 then sets the ground rules for how you hold that data: it must be collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a way that is incompatible with those purposes, kept adequate and limited to what you need, and not retained for longer than necessary. In practice for a live seller, this means one customer’s order history should not be shared with another seller without a lawful basis, and old customer records should be reviewed and removed rather than kept indefinitely just in case.

How LiveShopia does it

LiveShopia builds a customer file automatically from a person’s first order: their identities across channels, phone number, address, language and consents, plus a trust level based on past orders. Customers do not need an account, and there is no blacklist shared between sellers, each seller’s customer data stays with that seller. The order confirmation goes out over the WhatsApp Business Platform using the seller’s own number and Meta-approved message templates, with all bot text editable in English and Romanian. LiveShopia does not issue invoices itself, the seller’s own invoicing software does, through a connector, at the moment the seller chooses.

Frequently asked questions

What are the general rules for live selling? Live selling is subject to the platform’s own rules for LIVE and commerce content, ordinary consumer protection law for distance sales, data protection law for customer details, and your own country’s invoicing and tax rules. None of these is specific to live selling, they are the standard rules for any distance sale, applied to a comment-based order.

What are TikTok’s rules for live selling? TikTok’s Community Guidelines apply to LIVE as they do everywhere on the platform. TikTok’s official guidance also requires hosts to be 18 or older to go LIVE, and removes accounts confirmed to belong to someone under 13. Beyond that, claim codes and buy-words are the seller’s own shop rules, not TikTok rules, so state them clearly at the start of each show.

What are Facebook’s rules for live selling? Meta’s Commerce Policies apply to buying and selling activity across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, including sales taken through live comments. They list categories that cannot be sold at all, such as illegal, counterfeit or stolen goods and unauthorised financial products, plus categories that need extra approval, and they sit alongside Meta’s wider Community Standards.

What does UK law require for live selling? The Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 require clear pre-order information, such as price, delivery costs, your identity and the cancellation procedure, and usually give the customer 14 days to cancel after they receive the goods. If you do not provide the cancellation information, that period can extend to 12 months. Some personalised or perishable goods are excluded from the right to cancel.

Does GDPR apply to live selling? Yes. Order details collected from comments and WhatsApp are personal data under UK GDPR, usually processed on the basis that it is necessary to fulfil the customer’s order. That data should be collected only for that purpose, not shared with other sellers without a lawful basis, and not kept for longer than necessary.

Your next step is to look at how a customer record is built and kept, one file per customer, so you always know what you can and cannot do with their data.