Selling Alcohol Online in Ireland: Website Rules

The site was finished. Photography done, product pages loaded, launch email sitting in drafts. Then someone asked whether the six pack offer on the home page was actually legal, and the launch stopped for a month.

That scene is a composite of conversations I have had with people who make drink for a living. It always lands in the same place. They were told the licence was the hard part, and nobody mentioned that the website is a regulated surface too.

If you brew, distil, press cider, run an off-licence, or post out a hamper with a bottle of wine in it, your product pages sit inside the Public Health (Alcohol) Act 2018. Some of that Act applies to you today. One section that will reshape every product page you own has been pushed out to September 2028, which sounds comfortably far away until you read what it asks for.

What applies today, and what is queued behind it

Rule	Status	What it does to your website
Minimum unit pricing (section 11)	In force since 4 January 2022	No price shown anywhere on your site may fall below 10c per gram of alcohol
Restrictions on promotions and price offers	In force	Rules out most of the standard e-commerce discount toolkit
Health warnings for online sellers (section 12(5))	Deferred to 3 September 2028	Six items of information, in English and Irish, in a prescribed form
Permitted content of an alcohol advertisement (section 13)	Not commenced	Would limit product pages to a fixed list of allowed elements

Two of those are live. Two are not. The trap is that the two dormant ones decide how your product pages need to be built, and the build you commission this year is the build you will be editing when they wake up.

The €1 floor is a website rule, not just a till rule

Minimum unit pricing came in on 4 January 2022. The floor is 10c per gram of alcohol, and because a standard drink in Ireland contains 10 grams, the arithmetic lands on €1 per standard drink as a minimum, as Citizens Information sets it out.

Most producers know this. What gets missed is section 11(6)(b) of the Act, which makes it a separate offence to advertise or promote the sale of an alcohol product below that minimum price. Not sell. Advertise.

Your website advertises prices. So does the cached version of your website, the price in your product feed, the number sitting in an old landing page you forgot to unpublish after last summer's promotion. If a stale page still shows a case price from before your last increase and that price now sits under the floor, the page is the problem, not the till.

That is a practical argument for being able to edit your own site the same day you notice something. If a price correction means emailing a developer and waiting for a slot, the exposure lasts as long as the queue does.

The discount code you probably cannot run

This is where drinks retail diverges hardest from ordinary e-commerce. The promotional toolkit that every online shop reaches for is largely closed to you.

Citizens Information sets out that happy hours are illegal in Ireland, along with loyalty schemes that reward customers for buying alcohol, offers that discount or give away drink when it is bought alongside another product, and short-term price promotions lasting less than three days. Section 23 of the 2018 Act, which empowers the Minister to regulate this area further, spells out bonus points and loyalty card points by name.

Read that against a standard online shop. A points balance that customers can spend on anything in the catalogue. A "spend €50, get free delivery and a free glass" bundle. A flash sale that runs Friday to Sunday. Each of those is normal commerce and each needs legal advice before it goes anywhere near a drinks catalogue.

I told an off-licence owner once that compliance was a question for his solicitor and the website was a separate job. Wrong answer. The advice came back as a list of changes to product pages and checkout rules, and he paid a developer by the hour to make every one of them.

The lesson stuck: on a regulated product, the legal advice and the build are the same conversation. Other trades hit this too. The words a regulator will not let you publish on your own website work the same way, and the sequencing matters more than the spend.

Drinks retail online is ordinary e-commerce with a fence around the promotional toolkit.

September 2028 is a product page deadline

This is the section nobody sees coming. Section 12(5) of the Public Health (Alcohol) Act 2018 says that a licence holder who sells alcohol online must ensure that a set of information is "prominently displayed, in both the English and Irish language, in the prescribed form on the website of the person concerned."

The set is not small. A warning about the danger of alcohol consumption. A warning about drinking during pregnancy. A warning about the link between alcohol and fatal cancers. The quantity in grams of alcohol in each product you sell. The energy value of each product in kilojoules and kilocalories. Details of the HSE public information website.

Per product. Bilingual. In whatever form the regulations eventually prescribe.

Section 12 was due to commence on 22 May 2026. Reading the commencement order again this morning, the operative wording is blunt: the Minister for Health signed S.I. 422 of 2025 on 3 September 2025, amending the earlier order so that section 12 "shall come into operation 3 years after the date on which this Order is made". That puts it at 3 September 2028.

So what does a deferral mean for an owner-operator? It means you have roughly two years to be ready, and it means the readiness question is not really about warnings. It is about whether your product template can carry six extra fields in two languages without somebody rebuilding the shop.

That is a platform question. On a closed builder, you get the fields the vendor decides to give you, on the vendor's timetable, and Irish-language duplication of nutritional data is not a feature anyone is queuing to ship for a market this size. On full WordPress you add the fields yourself, or your developer does it once, and the template does the rest. It is the same reason selling online from your own WordPress site tends to age better than selling from a rented storefront.

It is also an argument for hosting that does not bill you per change. A platform where design, hosting, backups and support all sit inside €60 a year turns a regulatory change into an afternoon rather than a quote, and that is worth pricing against whatever your current arrangement charges for an hour of somebody's attention.

What an alcohol advertisement would be allowed to say

Section 13 has not commenced, and given the deferral of section 12, the legal commentary does not expect it soon. Worth knowing anyway, because it is already written down.

Section 13(7) turns advertising on its head. Instead of listing what an alcohol advert may not contain, it lists what it may contain, and everything outside that list is out.

The permitted items run to images of the product in a container or a glass, the country and region of origin, the method of production, the premises where it was made, the price, the brand name and emblem, an objective description of flavour, colour and smell, the manufacturer's name and address, the strength by volume, the grams of alcohol and the energy value. Plus the three health warnings and the HSE website.

Read that list again and notice what is absent. No people. No sunset over a harbour. No serving suggestion with food. No "perfect for a summer evening". Section 13(2) would also require the health warnings inside the advertisement itself.

If commencement ever comes, a lot of Irish drinks websites become illegal on a Tuesday morning, and the fix is a photography reshoot and a content rewrite rather than a plugin. The producers who will handle that calmly are the ones who can already swap out their own imagery and copy without raising a ticket.

The age gate, and the honest limit of it

The licensing side is where the ground gets soft. As the solicitors at Addleshaw Goddard set out in their briefing on online alcohol sales, the existing licensing regime simply does not address online sales, and the foundational legislation dates from a century before e-commerce existed. Their reading is that the sale takes place where the licence is held, with age verification at the point of sale and again at delivery, deliveries confined to licensed hours, and delivery only to the identified purchaser. That is professional interpretation of an unsettled area, not settled statute, and it deserves to be treated as such.

The Sale of Alcohol Bill has been sitting in general scheme form since 2022, proposing a specific regime for remote sales including an offence for selling without an age check. It has not been enacted. Meanwhile the underlying rule is unambiguous: you must be 18 to buy alcohol in Ireland, and supplying it to a child is an offence, wherever the transaction happens.

Now the honest limit. A date-of-birth gate on a website verifies nothing. A fifteen year old can type 1994. What the gate actually gives you is a deterrent, a record that you asked, and a defensible position that your checkout was not built to be trivially bypassed. Real verification happens when a person hands over a package and looks at an ID card. If your delivery model is a courier who leaves parcels in a porch, no plugin closes that gap. That is worth knowing before you build the workflow, not after a test purchase goes wrong.

One more piece of good news, since the rules mostly run the other way. The in-store separation requirements in section 22, the ones that force mixed retailers into barriers and screened storage units, are written for physical premises. They do not follow you online.

Sequence matters more than spend: licence first, legal advice second, build third.

Build the shop in this order

Most of the pain in this area comes from doing these in the wrong order. Consider a Wexford orchard that has been selling apples for two generations and starts bottling its own cider: the temptation is to commission the website first, because that is the exciting part.

Confirm the licence position. Establish which licence covers your sales and where the sale is deemed to take place before a single product page exists.
Get the promotional rules in writing. Ask your solicitor specifically about discount codes, loyalty points, bundles and delivery offers, so the answer arrives before the shop is built around them.
Verify every displayed price against the floor. Check each product, each case, each bundle against 10c per gram, and re-verify whenever you change pricing.
Build the product template for 2028, not for today. Leave room for six extra fields in two languages, even if they sit empty for two years.
Deploy the age check and the delivery process together. The gate on the site and the ID check at the door are one control, not two.

None of this is exotic. It is ordinary operator discipline applied to a product that happens to carry a regulator.

Where a simpler platform genuinely wins

If you are a distillery whose entire online presence is a brand page, a story, a stockist list and a contact form, with all your actual sales going through distributors and the trade, then a hosted builder like Squarespace will serve you perfectly well. You have no product pages, no prices, no checkout, and none of the section 12(5) exposure that comes with selling direct. Paying for flexibility you will not use is its own kind of waste.

The moment you take a payment for a bottle on your own site, the calculation changes. Then you own a regulated shopfront, and you need to be able to change it.

Conclusion

The drinks rules in Ireland are unusual in one specific way: the hardest parts are already drafted and published, with dates attached. Section 12(5) is not a rumour, it is a commencement order signed on 3 September 2025. Section 13's permitted content list is sitting in the statute book waiting for a Minister's signature.

That is genuinely useful, because it means you can build for it. Two years is enough time to choose a platform you can edit yourself, get the promotional questions answered in writing, and put the fields in the template while it is cheap. The producers who struggle in 2028 will be the ones who find out in August of that year that their product template is somebody else's property.

You know your product better than any agency ever will. Building the shop yourself, on something you control, is now the straightforward option rather than the brave one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a licence to sell alcohol from my website in Ireland?

Yes. Only licensed businesses may sell alcohol in Ireland, and that does not change because the order arrives through a browser. The complication is that the licensing regime was written long before online retail and does not address it directly, so the practical reading among licensing solicitors is that the sale takes place where the licence is held. Get that confirmed for your own setup before you start selling.

Can I run a discount code or a loyalty scheme on alcohol?

Treat it as a legal question, not a marketing one. Citizens Information sets out that happy hours, loyalty rewards tied to alcohol purchases, discounts triggered by buying another product, and price promotions lasting under three days are all illegal in Ireland. Section 23 of the Public Health (Alcohol) Act 2018 names bonus points and loyalty card points explicitly. Standard e-commerce promotional features need clearance before you switch them on.

What health warnings will my website have to display, and when?

Section 12(5) requires an online seller to display three health warnings, the grams of alcohol and the energy value of each product, and details of the HSE alcohol information website, prominently and in both English and Irish, in a prescribed form. It was due to apply from 22 May 2026 but was deferred by S.I. 422 of 2025 and now comes into operation on 3 September 2028.

Does my online shop need an age verification gate?

There is no current statutory requirement dictating a specific website mechanism, though the general scheme of the Sale of Alcohol Bill proposes an offence for selling without an age check. Selling to anyone under 18 is already an offence. A date-of-birth gate is a deterrent and a record rather than genuine verification, so the meaningful control is the ID check at delivery or collection.

Do the in-store separation rules apply to my online shop?

No. The barriers, screened storage units and height requirements in section 22 apply to physical premises holding an off-licence. Your website is governed by the pricing, advertising and, from 2028, the labelling provisions instead.

Can my website take an alcohol order at 2am?

This is unsettled and worth specific advice. Off-licence hours run from 10:30am to 10:00pm Monday to Saturday and from 12:30pm on Sunday, and the cautious position taken in licensing commentary is that deliveries and sales should stay within licensed hours. Many operators handle it by accepting orders continuously but only processing and dispatching within permitted hours. Ask your solicitor which approach fits your licence.