What’s the Difference Between a Digital Product Passport and My Product Page?
Audience: Marketing manager or e-commerce sales manager, manufacturing company, Europe
The short answer is that, in many cases, the data itself is largely the same.
What changes is the governance framework surrounding that data: the level of detail required, who is allowed to create or update it, who is entitled to access it, and how long it must remain available.
Your product page is managed by your company. The Digital Product Passport is governed by regulation.
Four Differences You Cannot See by Looking at a Product Page
Level of Detail
Your product page typically applies to a product model: one page describing a thousand identical units.
A Digital Product Passport may need to operate at the batch level or even the individual item level, and this is not something the company chooses.
The required level of granularity will be defined by the European Commission in the delegated act for each product sector, following an assessment of the costs and benefits of different approaches. If a product falls under multiple EU regulations requiring different levels of detail, the finest level of granularity takes precedence.
Who Can Write the Data
On a product page, anyone with the appropriate credentials in your content management or ERP system can typically edit the information. No one usually asks who that person is.
A Digital Product Passport works differently. The right to create, modify, or update data is tied to specific roles. Who has those rights is defined by the relevant sector legislation, not by the company itself.
In addition, registering a passport in the European registry requires the operator to be verified, with identity validated through a qualified electronic signature or qualified electronic seal.
Who Can Read the Data
A product page generally has one audience: potential buyers. The Digital Product Passport has many.
The regulation identifies fourteen stakeholder groups that may access passport information:
- Customers
- Manufacturers
- Importers
- Distributors
- Retailers
- Professional repairers
- Independent operators
- Refurbishes
- Remanufacturers
- Recyclers
- Market surveillance authorities
- Customs authorities
- Civil society organizations
- Trade unions
Each stakeholder sees the information relevant to their role.
The inclusion of customs authorities fundamentally changes the nature of the data. The information stops being simple marketing communication the moment it can be reviewed by an authority with the power to stop a shipment at the border.
There is also a requirement that directly affects online sales.
The passport must be accessible to customers before they are bound by a purchase contract, including in distance-selling scenarios. Retailers must make the passport easy to find even for consumers who are simply browsing products without making a purchase.
How Long the Information Must Remain Available
A product page generally lives as long as the product remains in the catalogue. Once a product is discontinued, the page can disappear.
A Digital Product Passport must remain accessible for a period defined in the sector-specific legislation, and that period cannot be shorter than the product’s expected lifetime.
The passport must remain available even if the company becomes insolvent, is liquidated, or ceases operations within the European Union.
This is why the regulation requires a backup copy to be maintained by an independent third-party service provider. That obligation starts from the moment the product is placed on the market.
Europe Already Has a Product Information Registry, and It Shows the Difference
It is worth looking at EPREL, the European Product Registry for Energy Labelling.
Since 2019, EPREL has contained millions of product models and already requires a QR code on energy labels. At first glance, it may look very similar to a Digital Product Passport.
Two details show why it is not.
The first is granularity. The QR code links to information about the product model, not to the specific unit owned by the customer. Behind a thousand products there is still a single product record.
The second is access management. EPREL has only two access levels:
- A public section available to everyone
- A restricted section for market surveillance authorities
There is no dedicated access for repairers, recyclers, customs officials, or remanufacturers.
Two access points versus fourteen. This helps answer one of the most common misconceptions:
Putting a QR code on a product does not automatically create a Digital Product Passport.
The Point That Settles the Matter
There is one statement in the regulation that outweighs any comparison. When a Digital Product Passport exists for a product category, the mandatory product information belongs in the passport.
The regulation then lists additional places where the same information may also be repeated: on the product itself, on the packaging, on a label, in the user manual, and finally on a freely accessible website or application.
In the hierarchy established by the regulation, the product page becomes a complement, not the primary source. This does not mean the work already done on your website is wasted.
In fact, much of the underlying data already exists and often originates from ERP or product information management systems.
What is usually missing are the additional layers required by the Digital Product Passport:
- Regulatory granularity at batch or item level
- Role-based editing rights
- Verified identities for data contributors
- Independent third-party backup arrangements
- Data availability beyond the commercial life of the product
- Open-standard formats that allow portability and avoid vendor lock-in
The Digital Product Passport is essentially your product page plus the governance rules that make the information trustworthy when it is viewed not only by customers, but also by regulators, customs authorities, repairers, recyclers, and other stakeholders. If you want to understand how far your organization is from being ready, take any product page and ask yourself three questions: At what level of detail does this data exist? Who inside the company has the right to change it? And where will this information be when the product is still in use but has been out of the catalogue for years?
