Terms and conditions are the contract between you and whoever uses your site. Copied from another business, they describe somebody else's arrangements — which is how most small sites end up with terms that contradict their own product.
Terms and conditions set out the rules under which people may use your site, buy from you, or subscribe to your service. They are a contract, which means two things worth being clear about: they only bind someone who was genuinely given the chance to read them, and they only work if they describe what your business actually does.
That second point is where small sites go wrong. The page is nearly always copied — from a competitor, a template, or a previous employer — and then never reconciled with reality. The result is a document promising a refund process you do not operate, referencing a jurisdiction you have never traded in, and naming a company that is not yours. It provides less protection than having no page at all, because it demonstrates that nobody read it.
Terms and conditions, privacy policy and cookie notice are three different documents doing three different jobs, and merging them is a common shortcut that weakens all three. The terms are a contract; the privacy policy is a legally mandated disclosure about personal data; the cookie notice concerns consent for storage and tracking, covered in cookie notice. A regulator looking for one of them will not accept a heading inside another.
A template is a reasonable starting point for a simple shop and a poor one for anything with unusual mechanics — a marketplace with two sides, a subscription with usage limits, anything holding customer data on their behalf, anything sold across borders. The clauses that matter most in a dispute are precisely the ones templates handle worst: liability, indemnity, and what happens when the service is unavailable. If the business has real exposure, the few hours of a solicitor who read your actual product is the cheapest part of it.
Ettex Sites hosts the page and the version of it people accepted at signup, linked from the footer and from the point where the commitment is made. The company details on it usually belong alongside what is described in company description.
Being direct: we do not supply legal templates, do not review your terms and cannot tell you whether they are enforceable in your jurisdiction. Nothing here is legal advice — it is a description of what the document normally contains and how it is normally presented.
The document itself usually is not, though specific disclosures within it often are — trader identity, contact details, cancellation rights. Without terms you fall back on default consumer law, which is generally less favourable to you.
It is common and a bad idea. Copied terms describe another business, frequently contradict your own policies, and may infringe copyright. They also signal that nobody has read them.
For anything significant, an active step is far stronger evidence of agreement than a footer link. Record who accepted, when, and which version.
No. They are three documents with three legal purposes, and merging them weakens each one. Link them to each other instead.
A returns policy is read before the purchase far more often than after it. Written as a defence against fraud it costs you sales; written as a promise it becomes one of the strongest reasons to order.
Most complaints about delivery are not about speed. They are about a date that was implied and then missed — which makes the shipping policy a page about honesty rather than logistics.
Alt text is the shortest writing task on a website and the one most consistently done badly — either skipped entirely or stuffed with keywords for a search engine that stopped rewarding it years ago.