Your website exists to help your clients and customers find and interact with you. You may include e-commerce capabilities, or you may primarily seek to inform people about your company and your products and services. Whatever your goals are, though, you must be on guard; people naturally seek to rely on what they see online. This can be a good thing, but you need to create parameters around what they can and cannot rely on your site to do.
The means you have to protect yourself in this regard are your terms and conditions. When you give your customers a clear description of what they can and cannot expect to receive and depend on, you provide yourself with another layer of protection from potential liability.
Visibility
For terms and conditions to help you, your customers must be able to find them. This can be a display on your homepage or a link to the page that provides them. Sometimes you may also seek to require the persons using your website to positively confirm their acceptance of your terms and conditions.
Clarity
Similarly, you must use language your customers can understand. If you use vague or complicated language, you will not receive any benefit of doubt from a court. In clear, concise verbiage, your terms and conditions must lay out what your site viewers need to know.
Compliance
Finally, you need to ensure your terms and conditions do not run afoul of any laws or regulations in your industry and in the applicable jurisdictions. This can be complicated; people can access websites from all over the world, and different countries have different laws that pertain both to your industry and to online communications and privacy rights.
With all of the concerns you face in drafting terms and conditions, you are likely not prepared to craft effective and compliant terms without legal assistance. Barnea can assist you in identifying the laws and regulations that apply to the terms and conditions on your website, and in adapting those according to the purposes your website serve. Contact our professionals today to give your site and your business the liability protection you need.
Source: barlaw.co.il