Age checks through a third-party verification service ensure online alcohol sales are compliant with the law.

Even though sales for direct-to-consumer shipments are often conducted remotely, making it harder to verify age, no shipper should sell alcohol to minors, even accidentally. Using third-party age verification services at the time of purchase is a great best practice to help prevent sales to minors.

In a few states, the purchaser of direct-to-consumer shipments of alcohol must have their age verified by an approved third-party provider before the shipment is considered compliant. Even when not required, you're able to set up these checks for all states where you do business. ShipCompliant partners with approved age check vendors (LexisNexis and IDology) to automatically check the age of the purchaser, based on the order information you provide.

Age checks use five pieces of customer data to verify age: date of birth, name, street address, email, and phone number. When at least three out of five fields match, ShipCompliant considers the data representative of a person.

Commonly, data may not match if the purchaser recently moved, changed their name, or is not part of the age verification provider's database.

If the customer data doesn't match, the purchaser's age won't be validated. In this case, you can manually override the age check validation.