If you’ve reached this page, you have probably heard that it’s important to have good legal policies for your website or sales funnel. But you might not be sure which policies to get, or the best place to get them. You’ve come to the right place!
Let’s start with which policies you’ll need –
Privacy Policy – You’ll need this if you are collecting any customer data that could be considered sensitive – including just email addresses for your mailing list.
Terms & Conditions (or Terms of Service) – You’ll need this if you are selling products or services. You’ll ALSO need this if you have any links from your website to an external site (like your Facebook or Instagram profiles).
Cookie Policy – If you use any cookies or tracking pixels on your website, you’ll need a Cookie Policy. You’ll also need a mechanism to let the site visitor “agree or disagree” to be cookied with marketing cookies, and if they don’t agree to cookies you should disable all nonessential cookies.
Affiliate Disclosure – If you sell or promote any products through your site that you receive affiliate commissions for, you’ll need an affiliate disclosure policy to keep you out of trouble with the FTC.
EULA – This is an End User License Agreement – you’ll only need this policy if you are selling software or access to software.
Now that you’ve determined which policies you need for your website/sales funnel, here are my recommendations of places to acquire these policies (all of these options are written/created by privacy lawyers):
TermsFeed – This is probably your least expensive option (other than finding free and likely questionable legal policy templates online). This is an online generator that takes you through a questionnaire and builds the policy based on your answers. The policy itself is free, but depending on your business type you will likely require some of their “premium” clauses which have an associated cost. Once you go through the entire questionnaire, the generator builds your policy and that is when you find out how much it costs. Most of the time, you’ll end up paying about $35-$50 per policy. However, these policies aren’t updated when privacy laws change.
Termageddon – This is my recommended option for most clients, and the one I use myself. Termageddon is also an online generator that takes your answers to their questionnaire and builds your policy around it. The big difference is that your policies are updated as privacy laws change, so you don’t have to worry about keeping up with whether you need additional verbiage added to your policies when privacy policies in another state/country change. Termageddon works by embedding the policies (which are hosted on their servers) on your website pages. This allows the company to update policies on the back end whenever their are changes in the law that necessitate a new clause being added. Termageddon runs $10/m or $99/yr.
The Contract Shop – This is the only option of the 3 that I’ve not used myself, but it comes highly recommended by many in the online space and I do think it might be a good fit for some. The Contract Shop offers allllll kinds of contract templates, including those you need for your website. They are quite a bit pricier than the alternative I mentioned above, but they do have policy bundles that are less expensive than a la carte. They also occasionally run sales that bring down the price quite a bit. These policies also come with a couple additional items – like guides that explain what all the main clauses actually mean. Also, if The Contract Shop updates the template, you get access to that updated version. However, unlike Termageddon, you would need to implement those policy changes yourself, since the customer-facing policies aren’t auto-updated. Still, this might be a good option for those that want to actually understand the nuances of their legal policies and keep up with them themselves.
Whichever direction you decide to take, make sure you have solid, lawyer-vetted legal policies on your site. And, make sure they are easily found by including links to them in your footers.
Need help with this? Feel free to contact me!