The regulatory environment for online marketplaces is more dynamic than ever. New laws are emerging across Southeast Asia, the UK’s product safety framework is under review, and the EU’s Digital Services Act continues to reshape how platforms think about seller accountability. For trust and safety teams, keeping up is both necessary and a growth strategy.
LegitScript recently joined Marketplace Risk for a webinar exploring exactly this challenge. Ted James, Global Risk Management Counsel at LegitScript, and Daryl Jopling, Head of Risk at OnBuy, shared their firsthand perspectives on what’s working, what’s difficult, and what’s coming next. Read the key takeaways and then watch the webinar on demand.
Know What You Don’t Know
OnBuy launched into 20 new European markets over the course of 2025, bringing its total footprint to 21 countries. The first question Daryl's team asked wasn't, “What are the regulations?” Instead, it was, “What don't we know?”
That distinction matters. Regulatory knowledge can be researched. Gaps in knowledge are harder to see. OnBuy invested in internal hires, external expertise, and third-party partners to build a rounded understanding of the EU’s highly varied risk landscape — different languages, currencies, cultures, and legal expectations — before stepping in.
The lesson: expansion without that kind of deliberate preparation is where risk compounds quietly.
Regulations Are Reshaping Global Commerce
Sweeping laws like the DSA may have gotten most of the attention recently, but it’s just one part of a broader picture of regulations reshaping how online marketplaces do business.
For example, countries in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, Laos, and Vietnam, have all recently passed or are implementing seller registration requirements, compelling platforms to verify that sellers are who they claim to be. Thailand has gone further with a high-risk product list, requiring not just seller verification but license verification for certain product categories.
These regulations share a common thread: governments want to know who is moving money on marketplace platforms, and what those sellers are actually selling. Ted noted that LegitScript has expanded its own verification capabilities in response to this trend.
Interpretation and Enforcement Matter as Much as the Law Itself
Understanding what a regulation says is table stakes. What trust and safety teams actually need to understand is how a law is being interpreted and enforced. Ted outlined four key signals LegitScript tracks for every regulatory development:
- Regulatory agencies: How are government bodies actually applying the rules?
- Private litigation: Are companies suing over IP infringement, counterfeit products, or brand-damaging sales?
- Civil litigation and reputational harm: Who is being hurt? When consumers are injured by products sold or advertised on a platform, it immediately puts that platform under scrutiny.
- Card brands and payment processors: What are the card brands’ priorities? Fines from card networks are a real and underappreciated enforcement mechanism for marketplaces.
Gray-area products require this kind of multi-signal analysis. When a product isn't clearly regulated — like certain peptide formulations showing up in unexpected formats, or fat-dissolving injectables that don't fit neatly into existing categories — platforms need to assess risk holistically, not just look for a bright legal line.
Miscategorization Is a Trust and Safety Problem, Not Just a Catalog Problem
Getting products into the right categories is commercially valuable. It also directly affects a platform’s ability to manage risk.
Deliberate miscategorization — such as hiding a pharmaceutical in the books category or tucking firearm silencer components into automotive parts — is one of the primary evasion tactics bad actors use. OnBuy has addressed this by building an AI-powered categorization tool that compares products against established category inventories and flags anomalies, using a combination of barcodes, titles, descriptions, and images.
The tool isn't static. It requires continuous retraining as sellers adapt their tactics. But it means the team can focus scrutiny on the complex or nuanced edge cases rather than searching the entire catalog blindly.
Images Are Becoming More Valuable Than Keywords
Both Ted and Daryl pointed to the same shift: keyword screening is reaching its limits.
Sellers are sophisticated. They drop problematic terms, use synonyms, or swap in alternate lingo. Keywords can be gamed. Images are harder to hide from.
Sophisticated tools are moving toward an embeddings-based approach — applying vector analysis across product text and images to measure similarity, not just match strings. LegitScript has been building out its image-matching capabilities for the same reason: When a regulatory agency issues a safety recall, the product information they provide is often incomplete. Matching on images fills the gap.
The broader principle: relationships between words, and visual similarity across listings, carry more signal than keyword lists alone.
Risk Consciousness, Not Risk Aversion
Daryl closed with a framing that cuts to the heart of what effective trust and safety looks like inside a growing company.
Risk consciousness means understanding the risks in full: not to block action, but to enable it. The goal is to give leadership a clear view of which risks are worth taking, with the right controls in place to monitor and manage them. It’s the difference between being the department that says no and being the function that helps the business grow more safely.
Stay Ahead of Risk With LegitScript
The regulatory landscape will keep moving. Seller and product verification requirements are spreading globally. Digital product passports will require detailed provenance and safety information attached to products throughout their lifecycle. And, amid this change, bad actors will always look for ways to circumvent the rules.
LegitScript helps marketplaces, payment companies, and platforms manage risk through monitoring, policy consultation, and intelligence reporting:
- Ad and Product Monitoring: Detect violative ads and/or product listings on your platform to safeguard buyers and your brand.
- Risk Landscape Reports: Our policy experts dig deep into specific topics to help you understand the regulatory framework around complex issues. Then, they scrutinize your platform to give you an overview of the threat’s penetration.
- Risk & Policy Advisory Services: An annual retainer that provides a flexible reserve of expert research and advisory hours to support policy, compliance, and risk decision making across regulated and high‑risk areas.
Contact us to learn more about any of our platform risk solutions.
The full webinar recording is available on-demand.
