Clean Up Your Website

By the time you read this most likely you will be well over Christmas and into 2008. January is the time of post-Christmas sales, school vacations, taking it easy and less traffic around the cities. It affords us an opportunity to make some New Year’s resolutions that generally won’t be kept.

For those of us with e-commerce websites it is a great time to regroup and take a long look at the content on our websites; time for some freshening up and house cleaning. You may even want to consider selling the left over Christmas stock on eBay.

If you are dealing in commodities like toys, electronics and gadgets then you might start seeing a few products being returned during January. Now you have to consider refunds or shipping an alternative product.

From the consumer’s viewpoint this is always frustrating but there are some people out there that take advantage in these situations. This is when you have to rely on the various terms of service that exist on your website. If you handle this well it will instil confidence and you may win a return customer.

What I would like to focus on are some of the often missed legal aspects of your website and also how they affect buyer comfort.

I recently answered a question on Linkedin, which was asking why owners of e-commerce sites did not put their details on the site in the ‘About Us’ page. It is a pretty good question.

So what are the legal components that you should think about for your website and how do they affect the success of the site?

Physical address and contact details

I always recommend contact details containing a real address and phone number (and maybe fax) are clearly shown on the website. 

A PO Box might be okay if it is in Australia and you do not have a business address. But I prefer a real location. When I see a mobile phone as a contact number my immediate reaction is negative. It is just too easy to go get a pre-paid mobile these days. 1800 numbers are relatively inexpensive and can be directed to different phones at different times.

If the website does not have a physical address then I am concerned that it might not take products back or, even worse, not deliver them in the first place. If you are a website owner and do not want your address on the site then get a PO Box and perhaps offer Australia Post COD as a shipment and payment method.

If the person who runs the site does not have their name and ABN (if applicable) clearly on the site then I am immediately suspicious. You should not use a personal email address but you should have contact email details, such as This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it or This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it or This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it , which can be used as a contact point. You sometimes see websites with a hotmail address as the contact point—this to me translates to “go to another website”.

Terms and conditions

If the website does not have a set of T&Cs that I can find and read easily then I generally do not trust that website. The T&Cs are never going to be simple but if they stretch to 20 or 30 pages then there is an issue. So you need to cover yourself without going too legally verbose. You should always seek legal advice on the legal terms and aspects of your business.

Do not just go and copy the T&Cs from another website. This may cause you to be in breach of the intellectual property copyright protection of that website. If you are directly targeting a competitor’s website they will probably figure it out quickly. You can find some very useful information at www.e-businessguide.gov.au

Copyright notice

Always make sure that the footer on every page of your website carries a copyright notice. It will be something like “Copyright ©2007 My Business Name”. If you have images that you want to protect you might consider using an image watermark and there are a number of software products available that will let you add watermarks.