When you are setting up your business and developing your e-commerce website, there’s so much to think about. It can often be exciting and overwhelming at the very same time.
There’s the design to consider, the content and the functionality, but what about legal requirements? Is your lovely new website compliant with the law?
Whilst it is very easy these days to set up online you may not realise that the moment you do so, you have legal obligations and if you fail to comply, you could be fined thousands of pounds and possibly have your business shut down!
Experience tells me the ‘legal stuff’ is never top of the list of priorities, unless of course the business owner is a lawyer like me! But it’s sometimes so far down the list, it’s forgotten about all-together.
Your legal requirements will change as your business grows, but here are the basics you need to cover when you’re starting out:
Is your website legal?
Firstly, make sure you have a proper contract in place with your website developer
It’s important to agree what’s actually included in the cost, such as how many rounds of changes, who is responsible for web hosting and back-ups, and who owns the IP (which must be you!). Is your website developer responsible for ongoing maintenance and support or will this fall to someone else? I’ve heard of disagreements and disputes that have ended up with the website developer locking a client out of their own website, so it really does make sense to have the right agreement in place from the outset.
Then there are four main areas to consider:
Legally required information that MUST be on your website
In the UK and most of the EU, under the E-Commerce and Distance Selling Regulations, you need to provide certain information to your visitors about who you are, your address, what it is you are selling, delivery charges, to name but a few. Most importantly, when dealing with consumers (as opposed to business customers), you need to tell them that they have a right to change their mind!
These are the so-called “cooling-off” rights whereby customers have 14 days after receiving the goods or committing to receiving services, to change their mind . In the case of goods, they can return them to you and get their money back. If its services, they can simply cancel the order.You need to factor this in when thinking about cash flow and add the potential cost of lost postage as you will need to refund the initial postage charges too. There are exceptions for certain products and services, but the bottom line is to check with a lawyer before you sell.
If you are selling goods or digital products, you can get a template Terms of Sale right away from our document shop.
Protecting your website content and liability
You can protect your content and limit your liability for what you publish on your website by having ‘Terms of Use’ on your website. You will usually set these out as a link on every page. Terms of Use will prevent visitors from making unauthorised use of your content or indeed copying it or sharing it. You can add to them depending on the needs of your business and whether you allow users to upload content or not.
You can also use your Terms of Use to limit your liability for the content and any advice that you give on your website. If you need a template set of terms, we have a handy one in our document shop.
Data protection compliance
If you plan to collect the names and addresses (even just email addresses) of your customers in order to process orders or simply send out a newsletter, you will be processing and controlling ‘personal data’ in the eyes of the law. As the law makers want to be sure who is doing this and why, in the UK you need to comply with the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. This means registering with the Information Commissioner’s Office and having a Privacy Notice displayed on your website which tells your customers what exactly you are doing with their personal data. Do not be tempted to simply copy someone else’s as they may not have got it right and the penalties are severe (in the millions!).
Cookies (small files hidden in your website code) also collect data. If you have any on your website, you need to warn people and have a separate Cookie Policy.
Protecting your website IP
Ideas and designs, such as your website content and logo, are known legally as ‘intellectual property’. As they are not tangible unlike a car that you can lock up inside garage, there are various ways of protecting them depending on the type of idea involved.
You will automatically own the copyright in the content of your website and any logos. There is no need to register. To highlight who owns the copyright to readers, just use the © symbol and year of creation e.g. © 2014 Joe Bloggs in the footer of your website.
For any logos or trading names, it is a good idea to consider registering them as trademarks. There is an initial cost to do so, but the advantage is that registration is proof of ownership whereas with copyright, you need to prove that you own the marks in question which is not easy and can take up your valuable time. You can register a trademark just for the UK or EU wide or even worldwide! There is of course a cost associated with each.
The Intellectual Property Office has lots of free information to guide you further: www.ipo.gov.uk
