Updated 1 November 2026
Identium’s NFC Digital Passport gives every serial number a page of its own. Tap the tag or scan the label and that unit’s record opens in the phone’s browser — what it is, who owns it, how long the warranty runs, what has happened to it, and a form to report a problem. Behind it sits one console where your team mints the passports, binds the tags and works the tickets.
The tag carries one thing: the address of that unit’s passport. Everything below is served from your own record, so the page is current every time it is opened — years after the sale, and in the hands of whoever owns the piece then.
The page opens on the status you set for that unit — active, suspended, recalled, transferred or expired — with an “Authentic & Active” mark when the unit is in good standing. Nothing is inferred; it reads back what your team recorded.
Passport code and serial number, category, brand and model, manufacture date, warranty expiry and country of origin — the fields that belong to the individual item, not to the catalogue entry it came from.
Where an owner has been recorded against the unit, the page names them. That is what turns a warranty claim from a hunt through invoices into a single lookup.
When an NFC chip has been bound, the page shows that the unit carries a registered chip. A chip is unique to one passport, so a copied label and a bound tag are not the same object.
The published lifecycle events, oldest to newest, each with its own date, the person or station that logged it and, where recorded, the place. Events are added, never rewritten.
A service request form on the page itself — name, contact, issue type, subject, description — with no login and no account. It arrives already attached to the unit it is about.
Four steps from factory to customer’s phone — and every tap comes back to you as data.
One web console for the whole programme: the catalogue the units hang from, the units themselves, the tags on them, and everything customers send back afterwards.
Each line gets a product record — code, name, category, brand, model number, description, image and specifications. Passports hang off it, so a hundred units of one model share one description and keep a hundred separate histories.
Issue a passport against a serial number with its batch, owner contact, manufacture date, warranty expiry, country and notes. Each one gets its own passport code and its own public address.
The NFC manager reads a tag, binds its chip to the passport and refuses a chip already bound elsewhere. Writing puts the passport URL on the tag as a plain NDEF record — so the tag stays readable by any NFC phone, and can be re-read on the bench to confirm what is on it.
Every passport also renders as a QR label, printable one at a time or as a batch for a production run, and as a printed certificate of authenticity for units that ship with paperwork in the box.
Requests arrive typed as defect, warranty, service, counterfeit, lost or other. Your team sets priority and status, keeps internal notes the customer never sees, and closes the loop with a lifecycle event on the unit.
Search by passport code, serial, chip UID or owner; filter by status, whether a tag is bound and whose warranty expires in thirty days. Dashboards show passport status mix, top products by scans, scan methods and service requests by type and priority. Import units by CSV, export the list the same way.
A passport is not a form that gets edited — it is a list of things that happened, each stamped with its date and its author. You decide which of them the public page shows and which stay inside the business.
| Stage | Events available | What it answers for the holder |
|---|---|---|
| Made | Manufactured · Quality check · Packaged | Where and when this exact piece was produced and passed inspection. |
| Moved | Dispatched · Shipped · In transit · Received | Which route the unit took and when it reached the market it is in. |
| Put to work | Installed · Activated · Inspected | When the clock on warranty and service intervals actually started. |
| Serviced | Serviced · Repaired · Warranty claim · Service request | What has already been done to it, by whom, and under whose warranty. |
| Changed hands | Transferred · Authenticated | Who holds it now, and when its identity was last checked. |
| Withdrawn | Recalled · Deactivated · Expired · Custom | Whether this unit is still one you stand behind — recorded per unit, not per batch. |
No data lives on the tag, so there is nothing on the product to go stale, nothing to re-encode when a warranty is extended, and nothing a cloned chip can carry over. The carrier is a packaging decision; the record stays yours.
An NDEF URL on the tag opens the passport natively on any NFC phone — no app, no camera, no instructions on the box. Best where the product is handled: jewellery, instruments, appliances, premium packaging.
The same URL as a printed label, generated per passport and printed in batches. Cheapest to apply at volume and readable by any phone camera; pair it with NFC on the same unit when both audiences matter.
Chips and labels are hardware, not software: see the HF and NFC buying guide for choosing a form factor, then order from India RFID Store. The passport software is agnostic to which NDEF tag you settle on.
Per-unit identity earns its cost when the individual piece carries value, history or a warranty obligation that the SKU alone cannot describe.
A piece that is resold several times keeps one record across every owner. Pairs naturally with RFID jewellery inventory management on the showroom side.
Warranty expiry, installation date and every repair sit on the unit itself, so a claim starts from the product instead of a receipt the customer has lost.
Service intervals, inspections and part replacements logged against the machine in the field, readable by whoever is standing next to it.
A buyer abroad can open a unit’s record without access to your systems. For what the European rules themselves require, start with the digital product passport explainer.
A pilot is deliberately small: one line, one tag type, one month of real tickets.
That unit’s own page in the phone browser, with no app installed. It shows the passport code and serial number, the product’s category, brand and model, manufacture date, warranty expiry and country, the registered owner’s name if one has been recorded, the status the brand set for that unit, the lifecycle events published against it, a QR code to share the page, and a button to raise a service request.
From the console’s NFC manager. You scan the tag, the console reads its chip UID and binds it to that passport; a chip already bound to another unit is refused. Writing is a separate step that puts the passport URL on the tag as a plain NDEF record. Binding and writing run in Chrome on Android, which the app states on screen — the consumer side is unaffected, because an NDEF URL opens natively on any NFC phone, iPhone included.
Either, and both on the same unit. The tag and the label carry nothing but the passport URL, so the carrier is a packaging decision rather than a software one. The console generates a QR label per passport and prints selected passports as a batch, and it prints a certificate of authenticity for a unit when one is wanted in the box.
Yes. A customer submits a request from the public page without logging in, choosing an issue type — defect, warranty, service, counterfeit, lost or other — with a subject and description. It lands in your queue against that exact unit, with its full history beside it, and your team sets priority and status, adds internal comments, and logs the work back onto the passport as a lifecycle event.
Treat it as a traceability and after-sales record rather than a compliance filing. It gives each unit a serialised identity, a published history and a ticket trail, which is the operating habit any passport programme needs. The European rules, the data carriers EN 18220 allows and the delegated-act timeline are covered separately in our digital product passport explainer, and the carrier and identifier scheme your buyer specifies should be agreed with them.
Anything where authenticity, provenance or after-sales history matters for the individual item rather than the catalogue entry: jewellery and luxury goods, electronics and appliances under warranty, industrial equipment with a service interval, and exported goods whose buyer wants a record attached to the piece. The lower the unit count and the higher the value, the sooner it pays.
Mint the batch, bind the tags and hand the first customers a page that answers for the unit in their hands.