The online seller's guide

Legal notice and T&Cs: the mandatory pages of your shop

Last reviewed on July 22, 2026

The mandatory legal notice

Article 5 of the e-Commerce Directive 2000/31/EC, transposed across the EU, requires every publisher of a publicly accessible site (so every online shop) to state a number of details that make it possible to identify and contact them.

• •Your identity. For an individual: your surname and first name. For a legal entity (company): the corporate name, the legal form, the amount of share capital and the registered office address.
• •Your contact details. An address, an email address and a telephone number that make it possible to contact you.
• •Your registration numbers. Your company register number and, where applicable, your intra-EU VAT number.
• •The person responsible for the content. The person accountable for the content published on the site.
• •Your host's details. Its name or corporate name, its address and its telephone number.

The T&Cs: what they must contain

For a distance sale to consumers, the terms and conditions of sale formalise and restate the mandatory pre-contractual information (Directive 2011/83/EU, art. 6). In particular they must specify:

For sales between businesses (B2B), the regime is different: the T&Cs are not displayed in the same way, but where national law so requires they must be provided to any business buyer who requests them. A shop that sells to both consumers and businesses must therefore take account of both regimes.

Accepting the T&Cs before the order

Drafting compliant T&Cs is not enough: the customer must also be able to read them and accept them before confirming their order. In practice, this rests on two complementary mechanisms.

• •A dedicated tick box. The customer ticks a box declaring that they have read and accepted the T&Cs, with a link that genuinely gives access to them. This box must not be pre-ticked.
• •The double click. The customer confirms their order after seeing the summary (products, total price): a first click validates the basket, a second confirms the order and commits them to payment.

Without this prior, explicit acceptance, your T&Cs may be unenforceable against you: in the event of a dispute, you will not be able to rely on them against the customer.

The risk if you fail to comply

A missing or inaccurate legal notice as required by the e-Commerce Directive, like a lack of information in the T&Cs, may give rise to an administrative fine imposed by the national regulator (in Ireland, the CCPC). Beyond the penalty, incomplete legal pages or unaccepted T&Cs expose you to disputes and to clauses that are unenforceable against your customers. Bringing your legal notice and your T&Cs into compliance is therefore, above all, a preventive measure.