Table of Contents
In Short
- Understand and implement essential legal documents like privacy policies and terms and conditions to protect your e-commerce site.
- Ensure your website is compliant with data protection laws to responsibly manage customer information.
- Optimise your site’s design for a better user experience, focusing on navigation and speed.
Tips for Businesses
Prioritise creating a comprehensive privacy policy to clearly inform customers about data collection and usage. Regularly update your website’s terms and conditions to reflect any business or legal changes. Ensure your site is responsive and mobile-friendly to meet consumer expectations and enhance their shopping experience.
As a business owner, it is essential to have a presence online, and this usually occurs through a business website. A website gives you a global presence and means you have potential access to more customers to enable your business to grow and prosper. However, you must be aware of the legal requirements you must comply with when creating a business website. As such, this article will explain some of the legal issues to consider before creating a UK e-commerce website.
Design
Before creating a website in the UK, you must consider the design of your website and any accompanying intellectual property (IP) issues. If your business does not already have a logo, you must ensure that you do not infringe on a trade mark when you include this on your website. Similarly, you must consider IP when using keywords in the underlying code on your website. You also need to consider the use of third-party content on your website. Generally, you may only use this if the other third party allows you to through a licence.
Suppose you engage a web designer to create your website design. If so, it is critical to draft a written agreement that explicitly assigns ownership in the website IP to you.
Audience
Your audience is a critical consideration when creating a website. Once your website is live, it can be accessed globally. Therefore, you must consider the laws in other countries. Firstly, determine whether your website content is legal in the countries from which it is accessible. From here, you must check whether the terms and conditions on your website are valid and able to protect your business in that country. For example, determine how effectively your terms will limit your liability when a website user suffers a loss. If it does not, your business may suffer a legal claim.
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Advertising Rules
Your website will likely advertise the goods or services your business provides. As such, it is imperative your content complies with advertising standards and laws. At a bare minimum, your content must be:
- decent;
- honest;
- legal; and
- truthful.
If you plan to sell products or services on your website, you must include certain information. This includes:
- the name and address of your business;
- for limited companies, the place the company is registered, the registered address and your company number;
- making it clear if your prices on your website include VAT or delivery;
- explaining to customers their cancellation rights; and
- providing written confirmation once a customer places an order.
Disclaimers are a crucial consideration before creating a website. These limit the damage you could be liable for when someone relies on information on your website as advice. Therefore, you may want to include a disclaimer in your terms and conditions on your website.
This Website Privacy Notice states how a business will deal with the personal information of its users.
Hosting
You may use an internet service provider (ISP) to host or store your website. This means you must negotiate a legal document with them, which is the service level agreement (SLA). This SLA should include the following:
- standard of website ‘availability’;
- standard of ‘uptime’; and
- how the provider will deal with any problems that arise.
Key Takeaways
When creating a website for your business, you must consider several important legal points. These include intellectual property and patent rights in your website design. Furthermore, you must consider how the information available on your website creates legal obligations in terms of their legality in the user’s country and whether they comply with advertising rules and privacy policy requirements. In addition, you must consider the legal document for the hosting of your website with an ISP.
If you need help understanding legal points to consider before creating a website in the UK, LegalVision’s 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
When launching an e-commerce website, it is crucial to draft privacy policies, terms and conditions and data protection statements to ensure compliance with legal standards and protect your business.
Privacy laws require e-commerce businesses to handle customer data responsibly, provide clear data usage information and obtain consent, impacting how businesses collect and manage personal information online.
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