Search for a memorial QR plaque on Etsy, Amazon or eBay and you will find hundreds. At the time of writing they run from £3.59 to £161, with most sitting between £30 and £90. The photographs look nearly identical. A small metal square with a code on it.
We sell one of these things, so we have an interest here. But the useful part of this article is not the part where we argue for our own product. It is the part that tells you what you are actually looking at, because three completely different products are being sold under the same heading and the listing very often does not say which one it is.
The three things being sold
1. A tag with a code on it, and nothing behind it
Around £3.59 to £15. Usually a 50mm anodised aluminium square. What you get is the metal. The code points at whatever web address you supply, and the page is your problem: a photo album you set up, a free memorial site, a folder on a cloud drive.
Nothing is wrong with this. It is honest metalwork sold at an honest price. But you are buying a signpost, not a destination, and the destination is the part that has to survive.
2. A tag with a page hosted by the seller
Around £30 to £90, and this is the bulk of the market. The listing mentions an online tribute page or memorial webpage included.
This is where the care is needed, because the listing frequently does not say who hosts that page, for how long, whether anything is payable later, or what happens to it if the shop closes. On a marketplace you are usually buying from a seller account rather than from a company, and there may be no website, no company number and no support address beyond the marketplace's own messaging.
3. A tag and page from a proper business, sold through a marketplace
Some established suppliers list on Amazon and eBay alongside their own site. These are the same product you would buy direct, at much the same price. Perfectly sensible, and if you recognise the brand name you are on firm ground.
The trouble is that all three look the same in the search results.
Three traps in marketplace listings
The delivery charge. Marketplace prices are quoted before postage and some of the postage is remarkable. We have seen a £30.42 plaque with £78.14 delivery and a £23.53 plaque with £41.53 delivery. Read the total, not the headline, and check where it dispatches from. A great many of these ship from outside the UK, which means weeks of waiting and sometimes a customs charge on top.
The word included. A page included in the price is not the same as a page paid for. Included usually means included now. Ask, in a message, before you buy: is there any recurring charge, and what happens to the page if it is not paid? If the seller cannot answer that in a sentence, that is your answer.
A printed code rather than an engraved one. At the bottom of the price range the code is often printed or applied as vinyl rather than marked into the metal. Ink fades in British weather within a few years, and a faded code does not scan. There is more on which finishes survive in the durability guide.
The question underneath all of it
A marketplace seller is not a bad thing to be. Some are excellent, and some of the small UK makers on Etsy do better work than large companies do.
The problem is specific to memorials. Most shops do not last thirty years. Most businesses do not. That is not a slur on anybody, it is arithmetic. And when a memorial page vanishes, nobody is told. There is no letter. The failure is silent until somebody stands at a graveside, scans a code and gets an error.
So the question worth asking is not whether the seller is trustworthy today. It is what your family is left holding if the seller is gone.
Two things decide that answer, and both can be checked before you buy.
Can you download everything, as ordinary files? If yes, the photographs are yours whatever happens to anyone's business. If the only copy lives on somebody else's server, you have a problem waiting.
Is the code static or dynamic? A static code has a fixed web address burned into it and can never be pointed anywhere else. If that address dies, the plaque is decoration. A dynamic code can be redirected. This is the single most important technical question in the whole trade and it is explained properly in how memorial QR codes work.
When the cheap one is the right buy
We would rather say this than have you find out afterwards that you overpaid us.
A £10 or £20 marketplace plaque is genuinely the right purchase if you want a QR code on the order of service, a donation sign for the table at a wake, a temporary marker while a headstone is being made, something for indoors on a shelf or a frame, or if you simply want to try the idea before committing to it.
For any of those, spending £70 would be wasteful and we would tell you so.
The case for spending more is narrower than the marketing in this trade suggests. It is a memorial standing outdoors, meant to outlast the person who bought it, and holding the only copy of things that exist nowhere else.
What we do differently
Our memorial plaque with memory page is £70, which puts it in the upper half of the marketplace range. Free UK delivery, dispatched within one working day, arriving in three to five. What that buys that a £30 listing generally does not:
- The code engraved into the metal, not printed on top of it. There is no ink to fade.
- A weatherproof backing, on an 80mm plaque built for something that has to stay outdoors.
- The memory page included, for as long as The Life Behind is trading. No subscription, no renewal fee, nothing further to pay at any point.
- Published limits. 1,000 photographs, 30 minutes of video, 30 minutes of voice. Real figures rather than the word unlimited.
- Everything downloadable at any time, as ordinary photograph and video files.
- A written answer to what happens if we stop trading, set out in our terms of service: at least 90 days' notice by email and a full download of everything on the page before anything goes offline. Almost no supplier in this trade will tell you that, on a marketplace or off it.
- A page that can be private, so visitors see only a name, dates and a portrait until you let them in, and where nothing anyone adds appears until you have seen it.
- No adverts, ever.
- A free replacement if it fades, rusts, corrodes or lifts off in normal outdoor use, for as long as we are trading, on nothing more than an order number.
- A full refund if the cemetery says no, which is worth knowing before you ask them.
- Sixty days to send it back if the backing is still sealed and the plaque unfitted, on top of your legal right to cancel within fourteen.
If you buy from a marketplace anyway
Four things to do, and they cost nothing.
- Message the seller before you buy and ask whether there is any recurring charge and what happens to the page if it is not paid. Keep the reply.
- Ask whether the code is engraved or printed.
- Check the total including delivery, and where it ships from.
- Once the page is built, download everything onto your own computer, and do it again once a year. This single habit protects you from every supplier in this trade, ours included.
For prices and terms across the named UK suppliers side by side, see memorial QR code companies compared. For what all of this costs over the life of a memorial, see how much a QR code memorial costs in the UK.
Marketplace prices quoted above were observed on Etsy, Amazon and eBay UK on 27 August 2026 and change constantly. They are given to show the range, not to describe any particular seller.