Is your website legal?

Setting up a site is relatively straightforward, but making sure you are legal is more complex. Especially with an ecommerce site, you need to make sure you cover yourself and make your terms and conditions clear to your customers.

You will need to make sure you understand the Distance Selling Regulations (DSR) and display all the necessary business information such as address, company name and your VAT/company numbers if you are VAT registered or a limited company.

As well as ticking the legal box, it’s also a great idea to understand your terms and make things really clear to your customers to build trust and avoid any arguments down the line. Returns and refunds can cause arguments if it’s not clear to people up front how these processes work.

We have recently created some Zen Cart eCommerce sites for clients who needed to obtain some legal documents. While we recommend having your terms professionally written specifically for your business and explained to you, sometimes there isn’t there budget for those services. If you really want to save money on this part of the project you can use boilerplate documents and we found these two sites during our research:

http://www.website-law.co.uk
http://www.website-contracts.co.uk/