Website terms and conditions template

About this document

These T&C are for a website that allows retailers to sell goods to registered members of your site. You might insist on registration for a number of reasons, including

• you have negotiated special deals with your sellers, and your buyers must subscribe to your site to take advantage

• you sell a high value product and you wish to present an image of a seller of quality brands

• you wish to restrict sales to some particular market segment

This document sets out the subscription process and the relationship between your business and buyers. It can be used for the sale of any type of goods ordered through your website by any means. We include provisions for the sellers and buyers to be businesses or consumers.

So far as the Consumer Contracts (ICAC) Regulations are concerned, we have provided as far as possible for your suppliers to be responsible for compliance with the regulations, so as to minimise the weight on you. If you sell only to business, you can easily remove the provisions relating to the regulations.

Is this template suitable for your website?

This template is suitable for sites that:

• are hosted in the UK - although visitors could be located anywhere in the world

• provide payment facilities, collect taxes, fees, payment and reimburse the seller the net sales value

• use a commission or a transaction fee revenue model

• either allow sellers to upload their own product pages or product advertisements or instruct you to do that for them

• have either regular sellers (for example, ones that operate their business from your site), or allow one-off sales

• require buyers to join a membership programme (paid or free)

• provide functionality that allows buyers to interact with sellers or with other site visitors

Similar templates

This is one of the two T&C documents you'll need if you operate a website that provides a marketplace. You will also need a corresponding one for your sellers.

Note that the requirement for a buyer to register does not change the relationship you have with sellers. So you do not need T&C that deal with subscription for your sellers. The template most likely to be suitable is marketplace for goods: seller side.

If your site creates a marketplace for services, not for products, see marketplace for services: buyer side.

If there are no restrictions on membership before purchase, then use marketplace for goods: buyer side.

If you are in any doubt as to which T&C template you should choose, please contact us.

The law in this document

The law relating to T&C is largely common law that deals with the basics of contracts: offer, acceptance, price and payment, provision of service, liabilities and risk, allowing you to set the terms you want, particularly the commercial ones.

We include provisions to comply with The Sale of Goods Acts (1979 and 1994) and The Consumer Contracts (ICAC) Regulations 2013.

Contents

Because buyers are likely to contribute content to your site (such as product reviews, forum posts and comments) we have included a large menu of optional provisions relating to user contributed content that form an acceptable use policy.

Terms include:

• Definitions
• Basis of contract between your business and the buyer
• Responsibility of the buyer to provide accurate personal information to you
• The buying and payment procedure
• Membership requirements and provision
• Optional guarantee by you
• Extensive options for re-assurance to customers that you will take care of data
• Option for consumer rights information
• Defects and returns
• Handling buyer's personal data, credit card and content uploaded or posted
• Extensive options as to what a buyer may or may not do on your website.
• Removal of offensive content
• Protection of copyright and other intellectual property rights
• Termination of membership
• Interruption to service
• Disclaimers and limitation of liability
• Miscellaneous legal matters to protect your business

We also include more than 3,500 words of drafting notes to help you.