Your Website Terms & Conditions Probably Won't Hold Up. Here's Why.

Most small business websites have a Terms & Conditions page. Very few business owners could tell you what's actually in it.

That's usually because it was copied from a template site, adapted from a competitor, or generated by a "free T&Cs generator" three years ago and never looked at again. It sits quietly in the footer, doing its job right up until the moment you actually need it, at which point you find out it doesn't cover the situation you're in.

Here's what we see most often, and what's worth checking.

1. It doesn't match your business

Generic templates are written to cover everything, which usually means they cover nothing well. A T&Cs page built for an online store won't properly address a services business, and a template written for a US company won't reference Australian Consumer Law at all. If your terms don't mention your actual business name, ABN, and what you actually sell or do, they're not doing much for you.

2. It promises things Australian Consumer Law doesn't let you promise

"No refunds under any circumstances" is a common line in copied templates, and it's not enforceable in Australia. Consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law apply regardless of what your T&Cs say, and a clause that tries to exclude them can expose you to a bigger problem than the one it was meant to prevent. The fix isn't complicated: your terms need to work with the ACL, not pretend it doesn't exist.

3. The liability clause is doing nothing

A lot of templates include a broad "we accept no liability for anything" clause and call it done. Courts don't read it that generously, and an unfair or overly broad limitation clause can be found unenforceable altogether, particularly in a small business-to-small business contract where unfair contract terms protections may apply. A properly scoped liability clause, tailored to what your business actually does, holds up a lot better than a blanket disclaimer that tries to cover everything and ends up covering nothing.

4. There's no privacy policy, or it's tangled up with the T&Cs

Terms and conditions and a privacy policy do different jobs and, in most cases, should be separate documents. If you collect names, emails, payment details, or any personal information through your site (which nearly every business does), you likely need a compliant privacy policy under the Privacy Act, addressing what you collect, why, and how people can access or correct it. Burying a few lines about data inside your T&Cs isn't the same thing.

5. Nobody's looked at it since the website was built

Laws change. So does your business. A T&Cs page written when you had one product, one service, or one way of taking payment often hasn't kept pace with what your business does now. If you can't remember the last time someone actually read your terms page, that's usually the clearest sign it needs a review.

What good terms actually do

Properly drafted terms aren't there to intimidate customers or bury them in legal language. They exist to set clear expectations up front, reduce the chance of a dispute, and give you something solid to point to if one happens anyway. Done well, they're short enough that a customer might actually read them, and specific enough that they hold up if it ever matters.

If your website terms haven't been looked at since launch, it's worth thirty minutes to find out where you stand. Book a free Discovery Call and we'll talk through what's covered, what's missing, and what it would take to fix it.

This article is general information only, not legal advice, and doesn't take into account your specific circumstances. Jessica Pradella is a solicitor admitted in NSW.