Why should your business have terms and conditions?
Whether you are selling goods, services, digital content or a mixture, it’s important to have a properly written set of suitable terms and conditions. to protect your legal position and business interests. Terms and Conditions essentially set out terms on which and how business is to be transacted and provide a means to clarify issues, minimise likelihood of disputes, and resolve problems. Terms and Conditions should be written so as to favour your business, subject to statutory limitations that exist on doing so in the case of consumer customers. It is important to ensure that your customers are actually aware of all the terms of a sale in order for them to be legally effective.
The content of your Terms and Conditions will be largely dependent on the type of business you run. A software developer will have a significantly different set of considerations compared to a plumber. So it’s important that you identify any industry-specific scenarios and cater for these, as far as possible, in your terms. However, aspects of business which are universal and need to be covered include details of the product you are selling, what has to be paid by the customer when they must pay, when and how the product is to be delivered, any guarantees or warranties that you are giving, any limitation or exclusion of your liability to the customer if something goes wrong, cancellation of an order or termination of a service. There are also certain terms which are required to be included by law, specifically with regard to businesses engaging in e-commerce.
A variety of sets of standard Terms and Conditions can be downloaded from our Business Documents Folder. The following pages list or contain links to Ts and Cs relevant to that page.