Terms and conditions: what the page is for, and what it cannot do

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.

What the page normally covers

• Who you are: legal entity name, registration number where applicable, and a contact address. Several jurisdictions require this specifically.
• What is being supplied — goods, a service, a subscription — and what forms the contract, which for a shop is usually your acceptance rather than the customer's order.
• Price, taxes and payment terms, including what happens with a pricing error on the site.
• Delivery and performance expectations, cross-referenced to shipping policy rather than duplicated.
• Cancellation, returns and refunds, cross-referenced to returns policy — and consistent with it, which is the most common inconsistency.
• Acceptable use: what people may not do with your site or service.
• Intellectual property in your content, and what rights users grant you in anything they upload.
• Liability limits, warranties and disclaimers — the part that genuinely benefits from a professional eye.
• Governing law and how disputes are handled.
• How you will notify people of changes to the terms.

Making them binding

1. Present the terms before the commitment, not after. A link in the footer alone is weak; a link at the point of purchase or signup is much stronger.
2. For anything significant, require an active step — an unticked checkbox the person ticks — rather than relying on continued use implies acceptance.
3. Record when each customer accepted and which version. Terms change; without a record you cannot say what anyone agreed to.
4. Keep old versions. When a dispute concerns a purchase from last year, last year's terms are the ones that matter.
5. Notify people of material changes rather than editing quietly, particularly for a subscription.

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.

The limits of a template

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.

Where it lives

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.