The legal obligations of your website (Quebec)

Do you know the legal obligations that you have towards your customers on your website?

There are not many of them, but they still exist.

A customer who buys on your website is linked to your company or to yourself, if you are self-employed, by a distance sales contract.

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What does a wind contract e have to contain to comply with provincial laws and regulations?

1. Contact details for your business or yourself if you are self-employed;
   
   
2. The contact details of the consumer (when filling out the delivery form);
   
   
3. Description of the product (s);
   
   
4. The price of the product or your service;
   
   
5. Your company's exchange, warranty and refund policy.

The laws to respect:

1. Company laws, in particular, your company must be registered if you do not use your full name;
   
   
2. The laws and obligations relating to the tax of your province and country;
   
   
3. Consumer protection laws;
   
   
4. Laws relating to import and export;
   
   
5. The Canadian Consumer Product Safety Act;
   
   
6. The criminal code, national trade agreements, intellectual property rights and civil liability obligations.

What you should also know

Except if you receive payments by credit card or via a payment application such as Paypal , you cannot collect a payment BEFORE you have delivered the good or service .

In addition, if you do not meet your obligations, a customer who has paid by credit card or through a payment application, can request a refund of invoices.

Delivery of the good or service

Did you know that you must also respect the agreement between your client and you concerning the delivery date of a good or a service?

The agreed delivery date must also be mentioned on your website and / or in your remote service agreement. By the same token, when your client pays his invoice, he must also approve your clauses . (A small checkbox that he acknowledges and has read your terms and conditions is perfect for that)

In addition, if no clause is mentioned on your website and you have not established a distance selling contract, despite the fact that you could mention the delivery times in the description of your product, if the customer does not certify that he agrees with your distance selling contract before making the payment, the delivery of the product or service must be made within 30 days of the date of conclusion of the contract. A date must therefore be explicitly written on your sales contract. It would be better for you anyway!

It should also be noted that if you tried to deliver the good on the date mentioned in your distance sales contract and that the delivery was not possible due to the behavior of your customer , the good will be considered as delivered.

You can therefore retry a delivery attempt, at your customer's expense if there are additional costs, at a later date, according to the arrangements that suit you.

My little warnings:

1. It is important to know that in case of doubt, according to the law, if a dispute is reported in progress, the court will interpret the clauses of the sales contract in favor of the consumer It is therefore better to have a concrete sales contract available on your website in order to overcome any eventuality.
   
   
2. Your online contract and all related documents must be written in French unless the consumer wishes to obtain it in another language. In case where the translation is incorrect, the interpretation that is most favorable to the consumer will be retained.
   
   
3. The holding of a guarantee must be specified extremely clearly on your website including the date, name and address of the person granting the guarantee, the description of the good or service which concerns the guarantee, the reasons for which the guarantee could not be validated, the responsibilities of the person granting the guarantee, the way of proceeding to obtain it and the duration of the guarantee.
   < br> By the way, you don't have to offer one either, you just have to mention it just as clearly.

What to remember?

In order to write these lines and to be as well informed as possible about the laws that govern websites, I have done a lot of research. Even more than I had actually expected.

I was extremely disappointed to find that there really are not many laws that protect the merchant from impossible customers or from abuse by them . So you have to make sure that you protect your business yourself in a colossal way in order to be prepared for any eventuality

Even more than I expected by the way ... Like what, we learn every day!

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Source 1: http://legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/fr/showdoc/cs/P-40.1

Source 2: https://www2.gouv.qc.ca/portail/quebec/marketing?g=marketing&sg=&t=s&e=3303590196