Goals:
Please click the [ Mark Complete ] button at the bottom of this page when you’ve achieved these goals:.
- Appreciate how important it is to customise your website and business processes to reduce risk to both your business and to you personally.
- Understand that you are the Seller in your business and that International Barcodes is not. The legal risk and implications are therefore yours, not International Barcodes’.
- Understand that your website is a template that we set up, based on a New Zealand Limited Liability Company, and that the business structure, web content and legal implications of the content may not be suitable (in terms of risk and liability) for your business in your country, and that simply using your website without editing it for your circumstances could be legally dangerous for you.
- Appreciate that you may need to get local legal advice in your country if you don’t understand the legalities around running your business.
- Appreciate that all of the following pages/sections of your website need to be reviewed, changed or added for your legal safety in your country: About Us, Terms and Conditions, Impressum, Footer, Guarantee, Amazon information, GS1 information, Why Buy From us.
- Appreciate how important it is for all of your Communications and your staff Communications to be careful and considerate of possible legal implications.
Please watch this video with the above Goals in mind:
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Business structure, communication and reducing risk. This is VERY important as mistakes in these areas can be troublesome and expensive.
Any business has risk, and we want to help you to minimise it as much as possible while remaining successful, communicating clearly with customers, and maintaining integrity and honesty |
1. The Structure | YOU are the seller, not International Barcodes Network – this hasn’t been very clear in the About Us pages of many websites – the About Us must refer to your own business | Different rules or requirements per country, and this varies between easy and difficult – NZ is unusually easy, but you need to customise your own appropriate structure rather than use our “easygoing” Limited Liability company template – you need to somehow establish this legally | Using some other existing company or structure – Advantages – but barcodes could add risk | Note that you can start a structure and then change it – get local legal and tax advice | Your business structure should be shown on your website in the Terms and Conditions, About Us, and Impressum |
2. The Website | Terms and Conditions should be VERY clear – you need to check YOURS as they don’t relate to us, and may be too wordy for your business and you may need legal advice that we did not need | Important points to note in our example, especially Section 8 on reducing your liability… example of a barcode business closing after being sued – you must state that you are not responsible for other damages – we state it in multiple places | Example of clauses that you should have, based on our experience | Your About Us page, Footer, Guarantee, Amazon page, visitors must be clear on what you claim and don’t claim, Comparison pages, Why buy from us | It can be dangerous to mention GS1 (we’ve had legal letters from them)… a licensee example |
3. Communication | Communicate like a politician to be safe, never make guarantees, always assume that your statements will reach the wrong people, assume phonecalls will be recorded, always be consistent in what you say | Emails – ours have a Disclaimer Link | Be careful on phone and Live Chat | We avoid doing registration work for customers in case we get it wrong, always advise testing | Label printing |