Eori Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Customer/seller onboarding gates: Enforce EORI capture and format validation before a B2B account, marketplace seller, or freight-forwarding customer can transact cross-border. Reduces downstream customs rejections and manual rework in ops.
• Checkout / shipping eligibility: Block or flag orders requiring an EORI when shipping outside the domestic customs area, and validate at the point of entry rather than at fulfilment.
• Form UX and data quality: Fail fast in the UI with clear validation messages instead of letting malformed identifiers flow into ERP, WMS, or customs-broker integrations where correction cycles are expensive.
• Roadmap input: If cross-border/B2B trade is a real segment, this becomes a checkbox item in a broader "customs data" epic (EORI, VAT ID, HS codes, Incoterms). Useful as a scoping signal that EORI handling is cheap to ship, not a differentiator.
• Build vs. buy: The core logic is a country-prefix plus format/checksum rule — small enough to implement in-house in an afternoon. Treat this package as a convenience, not a strategic dependency.
• Explicit non-goal to document: This validates format, not existence. It does not confirm the number is registered with EU customs authorities. Any "verified EORI" promise in a spec needs a separate registry lookup capability.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it when:

• You are on Laravel and want a drop-in validation rule for EORI fields with no integration work.
• Your requirement is limited to syntactic validation (country code + character structure) at form-submission time, with business verification handled elsewhere.
• You want a permissive license (MIT) and no runtime service dependency — no API keys, no outbound calls, no latency or availability risk.
• The validation is a low-stakes UX guardrail, so a low-maintenance dependency is acceptable.

Look elsewhere when:

• You need authoritative verification that an EORI exists, is active, and matches a legal entity. That requires a registry lookup (EU EORI database or a commercial validation API), which this does not appear to provide. The naming makes over-trust easy — guard against that in your spec.
• Your stack is not Laravel/PHP, or you want the rule reusable outside the framework.
• Dependency governance matters: 0 stars, 0 dependents, a single release, and one maintainer mean effectively no social proof, no community security review, and real abandonment risk. If your policy requires maintained or widely-adopted dependencies, this fails the bar — copy the rule into your own code and own it.
• You need locale-aware messaging, bulk/batch validation, or normalisation (uppercasing, whitespace trimming) as a first-class feature.

Assessment: low-risk to reimplement, moderate-risk to depend on. The cheapest durable path is often to vendor a 20-line rule and skip the supply-chain question entirely.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: This is a small, free, MIT-licensed PHP component that checks whether an EORI number — the EU customs ID required for cross-border trade — is correctly formatted before we accept it. It removes a class of avoidable data-entry errors in B2B and international flows at near-zero cost and no vendor lock-in. It is a hygiene item, not a competitive advantage, and it does not verify that a number is actually registered; if compliance or sales promises "verified EORI," that is a separate paid or built integration and should be scoped separately.

For engineering: Laravel package exposing an EORI validation rule; format/country-prefix checks only, no network calls. MIT, single maintainer, no dependents, last release July 2024 — treat as a code snippet to adopt, not a maintained dependency. Recommendation: implement or vendor the rule in-house (~1 day including tests), keep the validation isolated behind our own validator interface, and preserve a seam for swapping in a real registry-lookup provider if product later requires verified EORI. Do not let the package's naming imply verification in code comments or API contracts.