Key Mistakes to Avoid About Terms and Conditions for Ecommerce Businesses 

When you run an eCommerce business, there are many legal requirements you need to be mindful of and ensure you comply with. Paramount to this, you must draft a thorough terms and conditions document. Your terms and conditions allow you to discharge your legal obligations and ensure website users adhere to the requirements you impose. They can help protect your intellectual property, clarify payment terms and methods and allow an avenue for dispute resolution. This article will explore several key issues you must avoid when drafting your terms and conditions to ensure they are robust and adequately protect your business. 

Terms and Conditions 

Your eCommerce terms and conditions provide you with legal protection. They put others on notice of the rules and regulations that govern the use of your website. By having terms and conditions, your users understand how they should behave and promise to follow your rules. 

Issues to Avoid

Whilst you may have an idea of the terms and conditions the eCommerce website should include, it is also essential you know which to avoid. Let us explore a few below.

1. Copying Terms and Conditions From Another Website

It may be tempting to copy another website’s terms and conditions. However, you should avoid doing so. Even though the other eCommerce business may seem very similar to yours, your business is unique. Accordingly, it needs custom terms and conditions tailored to your business processes, intellectual property and content. Your terms and conditions are there to protect you. Therefore, should you face legal action, a copy of another business’s terms and conditions is unlikely to protect you sufficiently.

Furthermore, you may face a copyright infringement claim if you copy the terms and conditions of any other eCommerce website. Therefore, copying terms and conditions could be a legal offence.

2. Legally Binding

When creating your terms and conditions, you must ensure that they are legally binding. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs discover too late their terms and conditions are not legally binding, and they cannot seek legal recourse for breach of the terms. Unless your terms and conditions are lawfully binding on your website users, they can leave your business exposed. There are three essential characteristics to ensure your terms and conditions are legally binding:

• website users can easily find your terms and conditions;
• website users can ‘accept’ your terms and conditions; and
• the terms and conditions comply with the law in the country which they are in.

3. Disregarding Changes

Your business requirements and surrounding laws may evolve. Ensure your terms and conditions reflect any changes in your business and the law. Furthermore, ensure you inform your users of the changes to the terms and conditions. As these will differ from the terms they initially agreed to, informing users of the updated terms notifies them of any new expectations. 

You may need to make changes in your terms and conditions to reflect:

• when you use new software;
• when you start selling specific goods and services;
• legal amendments compel you to make changes to comply with the law;
• when you see a problem with the clarity of your current terms and conditions; and
• where your website changes in terms of how it functions and you need to let users know. 

4. Having Poor-Quality Terms and Conditions  

A key mistake you should avoid about terms and conditions for your online business is to create poor quality terms and conditions. Your terms and conditions are in place as a legal and social contract for many significant reasons. These include limiting your legal liability for mistakes your eCommerce business may make. They also ensure that your customers comply with essential rules such as intellectual property laws and the law on defamation. It is, therefore, important that the quality of your terms and conditions is sufficient for them to be robust to do their job. 

To avoid poor quality terms and conditions, you must avoid copying and pasting them from other websites. Also, if you take a basic template to create your own individual terms and conditions, you must consider precisely what your business may need and include this in them. Ideally, to avoid the mistake of poor quality terms and conditions for your online businesses, you should use an eCommerce lawyer to write them. 

Key Takeaways

When you create your terms and conditions for your eCommerce website, there are three key issues you must avoid. Firstly, avoid copying terms and conditions from other eCommerce businesses, even if these businesses are similar to yours. Furthermore, ensure your terms are legally binding. Neglecting this can result in unenforceable terms. Finally, ensure you update your terms and conditions as required. 

If you need help understanding terms and conditions issues to avoid for eCommerce businesses in the UK, our experienced eCommerce lawyers can assist as part of our LegalVision membership. For a low monthly fee, you will have unlimited access to lawyers to answer your questions and draft and review your documents for a low monthly fee. So call us today on 0808 196 8584 or visit our membership page.