Do you have online shop policies? That’s a great first step to establishing expectations with your customers.

But…when something goes wrong, your shop policies likely won’t help. (Because they aren’t enforceable.)

In this week’s Ask Kiff episode I share why you need both online shop policies and terms of service. (And don’t forget to leave your email below so you can grab my Mad Libs templates to quickly and easily create them!)

Watch the video | Read the show notes | Read the transcript

Show notes

• Grab a copy of my Mad Libs templates so you can quickly and easily get online shop policies on your website
• Learn why having an “I agree to terms” checkbox is a critical step in making your terms enforceable.
• Reverse engineer your customer process so you can create shop policies that touch on all the important steps.
• Leave a question or sign up to vote on future episodes here

Transcript

Woohoo! You’ve made your first sale on your website or Etsy shop!

Making your first sale can be really exciting. It also can be a little nerve-wracking, because now all of a sudden things get real.

You’ve got to deliver the product. And living in the Amazon Prime worlds that we do, your customers, the people who purchase from you, are going to have very high expectations of what you’re getting them, when.

So how do you manage those expectations?

That’s what we are going to talk about in this week’s episode of Ask Kiff.

Hi, I’m Kiffanie Stahle, founder of the artists J.D. A place designed to add ease to the legalese of running your creative business.

This week I’m gonna answer a question submitted from Martha in Illinois. She asks,

I have shop policies, but do I need terms of service?

Great question.

Short version, yep. You probably need both. But why?

Why do I think you need both shop policies and terms of service? Well, that’s because your shop policies aren’t enforceable, unfortunately.

Your shop policies are great to help manage expectations about:

• what you’re going to be able to do
• when you’re gonna be able to do it
• what kind of notification your customers can have as you go through the process

But when you’ve got that unreasonable customer. When you’ve got maybe something goes wrong and your customer is upset with you. And they’re threatening to sue you.

Without terms of service, without some sort of contract with your customer, those shop policies really mean nothing.

So how can you take your shop policies and turn them into something that becomes a contract? That becomes a promise that you’re making to your customers so that you can help manage those expectations?

All you need to do is add a little checkbox to your checkout process. That says, “I agree to this company’s Terms of Service.” or “I agree to these policies.”

If you include that checkmark as part of your checkout process, you’ve formed a contract.

We’ve all opened accounts with Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, everywhere else where we checked that “I agree to terms” box and never even read it.

Guess what? You’re going to be held to those terms if you ever complain to Facebook about how your ad spend goes. You create ads on Facebook, you don’t like how it turns out, guess what you’re stuck with those terms of service because you agreed to that checkbox.

Your customers are the same exact way. If you’ve got shop policies, all you need to do is incorporate that into your terms of service. And all of a sudden, you have something that you can enforce against that customer. Against a customer who scans and doesn’t bother to read that it takes two weeks for you to create a custom product and they expected to be at their house in two days for grandma’s birthday.

It allows you to help manage those expectations in a little bit better way.

How are you going to do this quickly and easily? I’ve got a resource for you!

And that resource is a Mad Libs template that I created that will help you not only get your terms of service quickly on your website but your privacy policy as well. And yes for those of you who need to comply with GDPR, which pretty much everybody does, these templates were updated in May of 2018 to cover all of those requirements. So you’ll be good to go there as well.

I’m also going to give you a link to a blog post I wrote about how you can reverse engineer your process starting at the unboxing experience and ending at the customer finding out that you have the product even for sale. So you can think through some of these things around how you’re going to create these shop policies and then turn that into your terms of service.

Next week I’m gonna be answering a great question. About if you can just put a blanket copyright by putting a little notice at the bottom of your website to cover everything on your website. You’re not going to want to miss that episode.

Thanks so much for tuning in. I’ll talk to you soon.