Adding Terms & Conditions to your ecommerce site

Website terms and conditions (T&C), also referred to as "terms of service" or "terms of use," represent a legal pact between your business and the users of your site. They enable you to exclude users who abuse your site, maintain your legal rights against potential site abusers and more.

Although not compulsory, it is highly recommended to add terms and conditions to the legal information on your website in order to protect you, your business, and your customers in case of a legal dispute.

Writing T&C

When drafting a T&C agreement for your site, consider including information related to the following areas:

• Ownership of the site
• Copyright for the material offered on the website and store pages
• Liabilities and responsibilities of your business
• Requirements to use the store, e.g. whether registration is required

Below are sample templates of T&C to use on your website:

• English Terms and Conditions template
• German Terms and Conditions template
• Privacy Policy / Terms Of Service Generator

Publishing T&C

After drafting your T&C content, you should publish the terms on your website so that they are available to your site visitors. Usually, a link to the T&C page is placed in the site’s footer menu. The exact instructions depend on the sitebuilder or content management system you use for your site. For example, you can read how to add Terms & Conditions to your site's footer in Wix.

If you are using Ecwid Instant Site, you can add a T&C page that will be automatically linked to the site bottom:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → Legal.
2. Scroll down to the Legal pages and policies section.
3. Click Add Page next to Terms & Conditions.
4. Add the content of your page.
5. (optional) Change page title.
6. (optional) Enter the external URL. You may use this setting if you also run your Ecwid store on a custom built website and have already created a separate T&C page within your site editor.
   
   If you enter an external URL, all links to the T&C page in your store will use this URL as a reference. The contents of the legal page that you’ve entered before in your Ecwid admin will be ignored.
7. Save the changes.

Additionally, you can require your customers to accept the T&C on your site by adding a checkbox to your store’s checkout with a link that sends your customers to the T&C text.

If you run your Ecwid store on a custom built website you might want to link the same T&C page to different places there (e.g. at checkout in your store and in your site menu). You can do it while managing the T&C content from one place, your Ecwid admin. Just add T&C content for your store following the steps above, then form a link to the T&C document and place this link to the preferred place on your site.

Requiring customers to agree to T&C before checkout

Due to your local laws or the type of business, you may need to ask for explicit consent with your website T&C before buyers make online purchases.

To require your customers to accept your website’s terms before checkout in your Ecwid store:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → Legal.
2. Scroll down to the Customers’ consent.
3. Enable Require consent to terms and conditions at checkout.
4. Save the changes.

Once you do so, customers will need to check a box agreeing to T&C before purchasing anything in your online store:

Editing "I agree with T&C" text at checkout

When you require customers to agree to your T&C before checkout, customers see a checkbox on the cart page that says "I agree with..." – and then goes the list of links to the legal pages in your store. You can change both parts of this text in your Ecwid admin:

The names of legal pages: You can change the names of the legal pages in Settings → Legal, Legal pages and policies section.

Just click Edit next to the legal page, then click Change page title at the bottom of the page and enter new page title:

"I agree with" text: You can edit the "I agree with" text and add your custom message using the Store Label Editor. See the instructions in the article: Changing the wording in your Ecwid store.

Sample T&C templates

Below you can find sample Terms & Conditions texts. You should seek professional legal advice to customize the texts in order to reflect your local laws and unique business needs.