If you, from time to time, link to other websites (who doesn’t, right?), you may wish to include a clause that covers it.

Lets your users know that this does not imply endorsement of the third party’s website and that you are not responsible for whatever happens when your users choose to follow a link and leave your website.

They should be considering the respective terms and privacy policies of these external websites.

If you sell products online, you may wish to state that while you do your best to ensure that descriptions are accurate and colors adequately represented.

For example, you cannot be held responsible should there be discrepancies in size, shape, or color with the products received by the customer as their computers may simply have been showing them differently.

The same goes for product availability. You could state that while you aim to ensure that a product for sale is in stock, you won’t be held liable if there was a mistake and a product is sold out, in which case you reserve the right to cancel their order.

Similarly, you should recognize that errors do happen and you could, for example, give yourself the right to correct wrong information, such as prices, and to cancel or refuse to process an order that was made based on that information.

Including a link to your privacy policy in your terms and conditions can help protect you legally given that it’s required almost everywhere.

If there’s ever a dispute or issue related to privacy or data protection, you can point to your terms and conditions as evidence that you took appropriate steps to inform your users about your privacy practices.

By linking to your privacy policy in your terms and conditions, you’re making it clear that you take privacy seriously and that you’re committed to being transparent with your customers and protecting their data.

The limitation of liability clause is one of the main reasons why business owners take the time to include terms and conditions on their websites. When reasonable and drafted adequately, such clauses can help protect your business against claims and lawsuits and limit the amount of money that you would have to pay in damages.

While you cannot exclude your liability for just anything and everything, you could, for example, state that you will not be held liable should your users not be able to use your website or your product.

This is important, especially if you offer a service or platform on which businesses rely in order to operate.

While having an intellectual property clause won’t guarantee that someone won’t copy your work, it can certainly act as a good deterrent.

It also helps to have a copyright notice that confirms and warns your users that the content on your website is yours and is not to be reproduced or re-used without your express permission.

It re-affirms that you hold trademarks and ownership over certain elements of the website itself and over the products that you sell and should be a no-brainer.

It is your website, therefore you can decide how it should be used. It is common to see terms and conditions which include a list of prohibitions or general guidelines to be followed by customers.

These can be broad, such as stating that your services are not to be used for illegal or unlawful purposes or that users must not try to breach or test the vulnerability of your network or circumvent security measures.

If your platform is collaborative, meaning users are invited to share such as on a social media network, you could have a separate page with community guidelines, which you could link to in that clause.

You can reserve the right to terminate the contract or disable user accounts should there be a violation of any of your terms, guidelines, and conditions by including a termination clause – this is very common in the case of websites and SaaS applications.

If you sell products or services online, you may wish to specify the methods of payment that you accept, including your use of third-party payment providers if any (PayPal, Stripe, etc), and your payment terms.

Similarly, if you operate based on a subscription method, you should set out when payment will be taken and at what frequency.

Your customers should be able to refer to your terms to understand how they will be charged if they choose to cancel their subscription and when they will stop being able to access your website or services i.e. will it be immediately upon cancellation or will they have access until the end of the month.

If you offer a free trial period, you need to be clear with your users as to what happens at the end of that timeframe.

Will their credit card automatically be charged unless they cancel prior to the end date, and will it continue to be charged monthly unless they terminate their subscription? Will they still have access to what they have created during the trial period if they choose not to subscribe to your product or will their data be erased?

Writing this down in black and white can prevent bad surprises and, in the event that a customer is unhappy, you will be able to refer them to the terms and conditions that they accepted (provided of course that you diligently made sure that they were aware of them).

If you allow your users to share comments or photos on your website or leave reviews of the products that you sell, you will want to have a section in your terms that governs their conduct and sets out what is acceptable and what isn’t.

In this clause, you could reserve the right to monitor the user-generated content shared on your website and remove anything that goes against your guidelines.

You could expressly ask your users not to post anything that contains obscene language or any material that could be considered harmful or violent or infringes on someone else’s copyright.

You could also make it clear that you reserve the right to suspend or delete the accounts of repeat infringers. This will help you make your website a safe space where people can feel comfortable sharing their opinions, which is especially important if you operate a news site, blog, or forum.

From a business point of view, you could reserve the right to use the submitted content for marketing purposes which a lot of big box stores and eCommerce retailers do in order to promote products that get rave reviews.