When your online store is ready to go live you need to make sure that you have all the necessary legal information available to protect your business and inform your customers. What we cover in the following article are all the issues related to necessary legal information. Above all other reasons having the correct contact and legal information will help instill trust for your business when customers find you online.
Most modern websites use cookies which are a small piece of code that is stored in the customers computer and lets the website know some information about the customer. This might relate to information in the hsopping basket, where you have visited while on the website, tracking and analytics information and much more. You customers can disable cookies in their browser and that diables the use of the cookie information. So now it is good practice to tell your customers if you are using cookies and why. Generally that is in the Privacy Policy. But you might also see on some websites a pop-up that warns about cookies and asks for approval to capture some information.
We always recommend contact details containing a real address and phone number (maybe fax) are clearly shown on the website. ePages has a special content page just for this information. A Post Office box might be OK if it is in Australia and you do not have a business address. But I prefer a real location.
When I see a mobile phone as a contact number my immediate reaction is negative. It is just too easy to go get a pre-paid mobile these days. 1800 numbers are relatively inexpensive and can be directed to different phones at different times.
If the website does not have a set of Terms and Conditions that I can find and read easily then I generally do not trust that website. The Terms and Conditions are never going to be simple but if they stretch to 20 or 30 pages then there is an issue. So you need to cover yourself without going too legally verbose. You should always seek legal advice on the legal terms and aspects of your business. Do not just go and copy the T&Cs from some other website. This may cause you to be in breach of the Intellectual Property Copyright protection of that website. If you are directly targeting a competitor’s website they will probably figure it out quickly. You can find some very useful information.
If the person who runs the site does not have their name and Australian Business Number or Australian Company Number (ABN or ACN), if applicable, clearly on the site then I am immediately suspicious. You should not use a personal email address but you should have contact email details using your domain name which can be used as a contact point. You sometimes see websites with a hotmail address as the contact point this to me translates to “go to another website”.
These may be part of the Terms and Conditions but if you are selling commodity products then make the Shipping and Return Policy easy to find and understand, we provide a special page just for that purpose. For some items like food and clothes you may not have to accept returns, however it is an area that you have to understand. In Australia all sales (including online sales) fall under the Trade Practices Act. This says that what you are selling must be fit for the purpose that you describe. So you need to make sure that your product descriptions are not so vague as to open a potential problem for you. Returns can create the need for a refund to a buyer. There are a number of ways that can be done but you need to have the process clearly documented so it cannot be disputed.
Always make sure that the footer on every page of your website carries a copyright notice. It will be something like “Copyright ©2016 My Business Name”. If you have images that you want to protect you might consider using an image watermark and there are a number of software products available that will let you add watermarks.
