How to read and write your terms and conditions (2023)

We all know terms and conditions when we see them. They’re lengthy, they stop us from using or purchasing something until we agree to them, and they contain a lot of important information we’ll probably never read. But how seriously should we be taking the contents of a terms and conditions document?

If you’re merely a consumer, you don’t need to read every T&C you come across line by line. It’s important to understand the general contents and read over the important things, but you can infer most of the rest. If you’re a business owner or you plan to be, you might need to draft up your own T&C document, so it’s worth looking a little deeper.

In this blog post, we’re going to discuss terms and conditions: what they are, who needs to include them, and what both business owners and consumers need to pay attention to.

When we see ‘Terms and Conditions’, we’re looking at a contractual agreement between you the consumer and the provider of the service or product you are about to purchase. Agreeing to the contents of the document means you are accepting the terms laid out by the provider, and the conditions inherent in your becoming a user or owner of that service or product.

Terms and Conditions can also appear under the names Terms of Use, Terms of Service, EULA (End-User License Agreement), General Conditions, or Legal Notes. Under these names, the document is still legally the same as a Terms and Conditions document.

The point of a terms and conditions document is to pre-emptively solve any problems that might arise with the product or service being bought, after the transaction is completed. If the consumer has an issue with what they have paid for, they may already have agreed to it in the document. The supplier can then simply refer back to the document and is legally absolved of any responsibility.

There are limits to what can be included in the terms and conditions, but this is why it is important for consumers to at least have a general understanding of what they are agreeing to.

Right before purchasing or downloading something on a website, you will be prompted to accept the terms and conditions laid out by the supplier. Some suppliers will require you to scroll to the bottom of the page before continuing on with your purchase.

Business owners may include a separate page for their terms and conditions. This is often the case if they aren’t explicitly selling anything, but still want to clarify any legal context to what they offer.

Including terms and conditions on your website or in your business literature is either mandatory or simply advisable. To clarify whether you’ll need to include one as a business owner, let’s go over who does and doesn’t need one by law.

It’s required by law to have a terms and conditions page if you sell products or services as a business. Your terms and conditions as a seller should include the following:

• A statement of compliance with the regulations in your region of business
• The process to request refunds, repairs, or replacements
• Consumer guarantee details
• Details of warranty

The specificities of your terms and conditions will ultimately depend on your individual website, but including these elements will cover you for the basics.

Your terms and conditions section as a freelancer is less about the consumer and more about the clients you take on. It’s not a legal requirement like it is for e-commerce businesses, but it’s imperative that your clients know what to expect when requesting work from you. A terms and conditions section is the best way to handle this.

Here are some of the main components of a freelancer terms and conditions:

Regional laws

The laws in your region of business governing the terms of your agreement.

Agreement date

The date from which the terms and conditions become effective.

Privacy practices

A clause which dictates your privacy practices when collecting personal information.

Liability limitation

The limitation on which you are liable for damages and how much you can be held responsible by a client.

Intellectual property rights

A clause detailing ownership over the work you do.

Advertising

Disclosure for your terms on any advertising used on the work you produce.

Payment

A clause detailing your payment term, including service cancellation for nonpayment.

Deadlines

Information detailing the beginning and end of the project working time.

Cancellation fee

What the client is required to do if they cancel a project once you have begun work on it.

Agreement termination

A clause allowing you to ban clients, place restrictions, and terminate users of your website.

Changes to agreement

The conditions under which you will make changes to an agreement, if needed.

Contact information

Everything you wish to supply so that the client can contact you.

Should you read terms and conditions thoroughly as a consumer? The short answer to this is yes, if you are handing over money (especially on a subscription basis). Beyond this, there is the question of how your data is being used, what kind of surveillance the company conducts on its users, among many other things.

So you can better understand how to read terms and conditions as a consumer, let’s go over the inclusions that affect consumers most.

If you’re signing up for a subscription service which requires you to pay a monthly fee—increasingly common in today’s subscription economy—you should pay close attention to the cancellation clause.

Some services will charge for cancellations or require a month’s extra payment—all of this will be outlined in the terms and conditions.

When reading through terms and conditions of a subscription service, use the ‘Find’ function to search for ‘cancellation’ or related terms and read everything that comes up.

Since the advent of social media, web users have been putting more personal information online than ever. Where cancellation terms are a concern for paid services, your personal information is currency for free services like Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms.

Companies can pass your data along to advertisers, scan your private messages for predictive text purposes, and influence the kind of information fed to you via that platform. All of this is going to be laid out, sometimes in obtuse terms, in the terms and conditions.

Find the privacy section and read through it carefully. If there are certain clauses or phrasing you find unclear, copy and paste the section into your search bar and you’ll probably find some clarification.

Alternatively, you can download and install Terms of Service; Didn't Read. This is a browser extension which can read the sections for you and will alert you with notifications if anything untoward comes up.

A particularly crucial section to read for ethical concerns, companies often also reveal information about how they process complaints and deal with customer feedback.

Often, the company information revealed in the terms and conditions is a more straightforward, less self-congratulatory company rundown than the ‘About Us’ section. It could be the deciding factor determining whether you want to be involved with this company any further.

When writing your own T&C document as a business owner, there are two things you should aim for: 1) to do right by the customer, and 2) to protect yourself within legal parameters from liability.

See the above section for a rundown of things to include in your terms and conditions as a freelancer. Here, we’ll discuss a few more general points about composing the document legally and comprehensively.

If your terms and conditions are relatively simplistic, you can probably get away with using one of the many available templates online. This likely goes for freelancers who aren’t selling products, small businesses, and anyone who doesn’t deal with customers in a particularly complex way.

However, the majority of businesses should avoid templates. They are simplistic, generic, and don’t allow for the necessary specificity and complexity a terms and conditions document requires. It’s important to think about the myriad ways in which your needs and offerings differ from other businesses.

For example, consider the following requirements for customers on a typical e-commerce store:

• Sign up processes and account types (allowances for members vs guests)
• Website user roles (whether users can review items, comment, report users)
• Different payment options (credit cards, Paypal, bitcoin, etc.)
• Shipping and returns policies (allowances, damages, etc.)

Even just these aspects create a complexly specific document that needs to address all concerns individually.

Writing style is key when putting together your terms and conditions document. It’s a demonstration of the quality of your business to have an accurate, grammatically correct, clearly expressed terms of conditions page.

In addition, unclear language, especially for a small business, can result in confusion from the customer who may push back when they fail to meet the requirements in your terms and conditions. They are likely to win in legal proceedings if your terms and conditions are plainly unclear.

Read the terms and conditions pages of successful, professional companies to get a handle on the style. There will be certain phrases and terms you can lift directly from other pages, because they are commonly used across all companies and business owners’ T&Cs.

In Germany, it’s necessary for any business owner’s ‘General Terms and Conditions’ to adhere to the German civil code (BGB). Developed in 1881, the BGB has provided the template for civil jurisdictions in other countries. It details the laws of persons, property, family, and inheritance.

Adhering to the BGB ensures that no terms and conditions document is ‘unfair’, ‘unreasonable’, or ‘unclear’. If a customer argues this point about your T&Cs page, it will be held up for scrutiny and judged according to BGB standards.