Sold to Rotterdam, scanned in another country: the DPP sees grey-market diversion.
Grey-market diversion has always been visible only after the damage: a distributor complains, prices collapse in a market you never shipped to, an investigator sends photos. The Digital Product Passport changes the physics of the problem. The QR code the EU obliges you to print on every unit reports, with each scan, roughly where that unit now is. Aggregate those scans per SKU and diversion stops being a rumour and becomes a map.
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In one line: the mandated DPP QR code turns every unit into a distribution data point — when a SKU's scan geography doesn't match where you sold it, you are watching grey-market diversion happen, without surveilling a single individual.
The signal: sold-to region versus actual scan region
The logic is simple enough to explain to a board in one sentence: products should be scanned roughly where they were sold. A pallet sold to a distributor in Rotterdam should produce scans concentrated in and around its intended market. When the passports on that pallet instead resolve, week after week, from a different country entirely, the goods have moved through a channel you didn't authorise. Because every unit carries its own passport, the signal arrives at unit granularity and continuously — not as an annual investigation, but as a standing view of where your products actually live.
What PassPer surfaces today — and what is coming
Straight answers, because this page would be worthless without them:
Live today: per-SKU scan geography at coarse regional resolution, item-level scan counts, distinct-device estimates, and a grey-market concentration signal that flags SKUs whose scans cluster somewhere anomalous.
Coming: an expected-market reference — recording the market each batch or shipment was sold into — so the platform can compare sold-to against scanned-in automatically and score diversion per SKU and per batch. Until that ships, the comparison is one you draw from the map using your own shipment records.
Even in today's form, this is more grey-market visibility than most brands have ever had, at zero marginal cost per unit.
Distribution insight, not surveillance
This must be said plainly: grey-market detection with PassPer watches products, not people. ESPR prohibits tracking the consumers who scan the mandated passport data, and PassPer's architecture enforces that — the regulated data is served first, tracking-free, no cookies, no consent wall, and the analytics beneath it are aggregate and pseudonymous with coarse location only. No identities, no precise positions, no profiles. That is what makes the capability durable: it produces evidence about your distribution chain that you can act on commercially, built on a data flow a regulator can inspect without finding anything to object to.
From map to action
A concentration flag is the start of a process, not the end: pull the affected SKUs' shipment records, compare intended markets against the scan map, and take the picture into distributor agreements, audits or enforcement. The prerequisite for any of it is passports on products — which ESPR is phasing in per product group anyway. If yours aren't live yet, run the free readiness check to see where your products stand, and read DPP scan analytics for the full picture of what each scan tells you.
Frequently asked questions
How does a Digital Product Passport detect grey-market diversion?
Every scan of the mandated QR code resolves through your passport with a coarse regional location. Aggregated per SKU, that produces a map of where products are actually being handled. When that map diverges from where you sold the goods — a line shipped to one market scanning heavily in another — you are looking at diversion, visible for the first time without investigators or test purchases.
Is this tracking my customers?
No. The system never identifies who scans, never records precise locations, and never builds individual profiles — ESPR prohibits tracking consumers on the mandated data, and PassPer's analytics are aggregate and pseudonymous by construction. What you monitor is the geographic distribution of your own products, not the people holding them.
How precise is the detection today?
Today PassPer surfaces geographic concentration: per-SKU scan maps and a concentration signal that flags lines whose scan geography looks anomalous. Turning that into a precise diversion verdict requires a reference — the market each batch was sold into — and that expected-market comparison is coming. Honest answer: today you get the strong signal; the automated sold-to-versus-scanned comparison is roadmap.
We already suspect diversion. What would this give us that we don't have?
Continuous, unit-level evidence at zero marginal cost. Traditional grey-market investigation is episodic and expensive; the DPP QR ships on every unit anyway, so every scan is a free data point. A pallet's worth of passports lighting up in the wrong region is the kind of concrete, ongoing picture that investigations and distributor conversations can be built on.