E-commerce Act

When people first started sending money to a shop they had never seen, everything the buyer had to go on was the text on the screen and a bank account number. A receipt from a physical store gets you back through the door. A store behind a screen could close overnight and leave nowhere to walk into.

The problem kept showing up as the same scene. Someone would post "I paid two weeks ago and nobody has answered me," and ten replies underneath would say the same thing. No phone number listed, email bouncing, and the checkout screen hadn't even carried the company name. The buyer had nothing to work with when deciding whether the money was recoverable at all.

The act exists to pull that lopsided information back toward the middle. Rather than leaving the seller knowing far more than the buyer, it puts a duty on the seller to put the basic facts on the table before the money moves. Unlike a telecom business report, which you file once when you open the doors, this one applies every day you keep selling, so it comes back up each time a new feature touches money.

The act cuts a transaction into three moments in time and assigns the seller a job at each one: before the money moves, the moment it moves, and after it has moved.

1. Before — disclose. Who is selling (business name, representative, address, contact, registration number), what is being sold and for how much, when the charge lands, and how to cancel all have to be visible before purchase. For a subscription that bills on a cycle, the next billing date and amount belong there too. If a plan priced at $8 a month is charged a year up front, the screen has to say $96; showing $8 in large type and burying the annual commitment in fine print is what gets flagged.
2. During — confirm. The order has to be shown back to the buyer, payment happens only after they confirm, and the order has to be acknowledged in a form they can look at later, such as an email. A flow that goes straight from one button to a completed charge isn't fast, it's missing this step.
3. After — leave a way out. The buyer can withdraw the contract within a set window, and the seller has to take that request through to a refund. Products usable the instant they're paid for, like software, have exceptions, but an exception only holds if it was disclosed before the sale.

One question runs through all three: were the facts needed to decide visible before the money left? Pointing at clause twelve of the terms of service is not an answer. Terms are a document meant to be read; what this asks for is a disclosure visible on the screen where the decision happens.

The statute lands in four places on the product, not in a legal folder. Any company selling online gets caught on the same four.

1. The business information block in the site footer — business name, representative, address, registration number, telecom business report number. The payment gateway that routes card payments checks this area during review, and an empty one stops the integration right there.
2. The pricing page and the screen just before checkout — total, billing cycle, next charge date, and whether tax is included all on one screen. Comparison tables that show a monthly figure and then bill annually draw the most complaints.
3. The cancellation flow — canceling has to be as easy to find as signing up was. Signup as one button while cancellation requires emailing support is the shape people call a dark pattern, and it's what this law aims at most directly.
4. Order confirmation email and transaction records — send a durable record of what was bought, when, and for how much, and keep that record for a set period. In a dispute it's the only artifact that reconciles two different memories. Teams that keep it as a searchable log rather than a sent-mail folder spend minutes on those cases instead of days.

All four come up at once on the day a free product adds paid plans. Until then no money moves and most of the clauses stay dormant; the moment a screen asks for a card number, all four switch on together.

"The annual total isn't visible above the pay button. That's an E-commerce Act issue, not a design preference."

The item is a required disclosure, so it shouldn't be handled as a layout question.

"Putting cancellation three screens deep in settings will cause problems later."

A warning that easy-in, hard-out structures are exactly what gets regulated.

"The report number still isn't in the footer, right? It has to go in before we connect payments."

Missing business information is blocking the payment provider's review.

All three came up in one week at Pagedeck, while the team was adding paid conversion to its free plan. Grace pulled up the checkout screen and went through it line by line, and Noa reworked the pricing card, which had given the monthly-equivalent figure the largest type, so the total reads first. Theo added the order number and next billing date to the confirmation email.

One rule Mia set that week has stuck since: when changing a screen where money moves, settle the required disclosures before the design review. Reverse the order and you tear apart a finished screen.

The most common reading is that the law only applies to companies shipping physical goods. Commerce is in the name and it pulls returns and delivery along with it, so software sellers assume it's someone else's problem. The actual test isn't what you sell but that you take money from an individual online. A service charging a monthly subscription to a card falls squarely inside. Miss this and you're trading out of compliance from the day payments go live, and one complaint sends the team scrambling to fill in disclosures while the release schedule slides.

Believing the terms of service can waive it comes from the same root. Writing something into a contract feels like agreement, which is an instinct carried over from offline deals, but these duties aren't the kind two parties can negotiate downward. "No refunds" in the terms doesn't remove a withdrawal request inside the window, and that clause is treated as absent once a dispute starts. Leave it and you accumulate a record of denied refunds that gets paid back all at once.