Online Terms and Conditions
Pigs must be flying somewhere because TBIP is talking about the Supreme Court!
This week, the Supreme Court is considering cases interpreting the federal law that protects internet companies like Google, Facebook and YouTube, from lawsuits concerning the platforms’ posting of content from others.
Before you start sweating, the case simply reminded me of how online terms and conditions—which generally do not apply to our expertise-based businesses—may come into play as we scale by adding leveraged revenue models to our businesses. (For more about the difference between revenue models and business models, see here.)
One revenue model that I don’t talk about a lot are productized services.
For our custom services, there are a number of excellent tools that eliminate the need to exchange hard copies of proposals and services agreements. For example, I’ve worked with a number of service providers who use Honey Book. On the legal side of my business, DocuSign and Adobe are staples.
But when making true, non-consultative, online sales of productized services, we typically use standardized terms and conditions on our websites. Maybe there is a link to the terms, maybe there is a detailed FAQs, maybe there is nothing but the buy button under the description.
Of course, all legal issues are fact specific, so I speak only in generalizations. But here is legal opinion that you may want to consider, as will I, an avowed non-online business: If you want to be able enforce the terms of your productized service, make sure that your clients have knowingly agreed to the terms.
Don’t leave anything to chance regarding terms that are the difference between a profitable and an unprofitable productized service, such as scope of work, number of revisions, ownership of deliverables, refunds, and deadlines. Have a very clear statement about what pressing the buy button means.
Don’t worry if it isn’t as pretty as you’d like it to be. In this part of your sales process, your goal is to create a binding contract, not showing off your creativity.