My new sales platform doesn’t provide the ability to add a tick box to the order form so I can’t require people to agree to my terms and conditions of sale – what can I do?
In order for your terms of business to be incorporated into the contract between you and your customer, your terms of business need to be drawn to the attention of the customer.
They cannot merely be on a footer to your website where there is the possibility that the customer will not actually see the terms (or indeed sent to the customer after they have paid or such other point that the contract has been formed).
Best practice is to have a tick box at the point where the customer is placing their order that says that the customer agrees to your terms of business, where the customer cannot proceed with the order unless they tick the box.
However if it is not possible to add a tick box, then the next best step is to have a link to the terms of business directly at the point of order (just above the box to click to place the order) with wording such as “by proceeding to place this order, you agree to our terms of business” and then link to your terms of business on a separate webpage.
If you are selling to consumers, you need to email them a PDF copy of your terms of business upon confirmation of the sale. It isn't sufficient to send them a link to your webpage containing your terms of business, as this is not a durable medium and changes could be made to that webpage.
Even when dealing with businesses, it is good practice to print out your terms of business from your webpage and mark on the top of them the date from which they apply. Then when you make a change to your terms of business, you would add the end date to the previously printed out terms of business and repeat the process for the new terms of business.
This is obviously so that if there is ever any challenge from a customer, you know exactly which version of your terms of business applied at the point that they made the purchase.
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