E-Commerce

Home / Services / E-Commerce
All services
Internet

E-commerce law spans enforceable online contracts, consumer protection, payments, and marketplace liability — we help online businesses build operations that convert customers and survive legal scrutiny.

Selling online means every checkout is a contract, every product claim is a potential FTC issue, and every payment carries fraud and chargeback exposure. E-commerce law ties those threads together. We help online retailers and marketplaces build operations that close sales smoothly and still hold up when a regulator, a class-action lawyer, or a payment processor comes asking questions.

Enforceable Online Contracts

Courts regularly toss terms that buried agreement in a footer link nobody saw. We advise on clickwrap, sign-in-wrap, and browsewrap design and build checkout and signup flows that create binding contracts without adding friction that kills conversion. The fix is usually small: clear notice, a deliberate click, and a record of assent, structured the way recent decisions on enforceability actually require.

Consumer Protection Compliance

Online sellers operate under FTC rules and a patchwork of state consumer protection laws covering pricing, advertising, and disclosures. We help you substantiate product claims, present total prices and fees honestly, write return and cancellation policies that comply, and meet shipping and fulfillment obligations. Getting this right keeps you clear of deceptive-practices enforcement and the consumer suits that tend to follow it.

Payments and Fraud

Your payment processor agreement governs your reserves, your fees, and how quickly your account can be frozen. We negotiate processor terms, advise on PCI DSS obligations, and help you set up chargeback and fraud controls that limit losses without driving away good customers. We also flag the contract provisions, like unilateral reserve and termination rights, that can starve cash flow overnight if you do not see them coming.

Marketplace Operations

Running a platform where third parties sell adds a layer of liability for what those sellers do. We advise marketplaces on seller agreements, product-safety and counterfeit controls, intellectual property compliance, and the evolving rules on platform responsibility for third-party listings. The aim is a marketplace that scales sellers quickly while keeping the operator out of the line of fire for their conduct.

Frequently asked questions

It depends heavily on how you present them. Click-wrap terms, where the customer has to actively click to agree, are the strongest. Browse-wrap, where you merely post a link and assume consent, is the weakest and often unenforceable. If your terms matter, require an affirmative click rather than relying on a buried link.

At a minimum, disclose the price, shipping costs, return policy, and any material terms before the customer completes the purchase. The exact requirements depend on what you sell and the claims you make in your advertising. Surprise charges revealed only at checkout are a common source of consumer complaints and regulatory attention.

In most cases, yes. After the Supreme Court's Wayfair decision, most states require remote sellers to collect sales tax once they cross the state's sales or transaction thresholds. We help you figure out where you've crossed those thresholds and set up compliant collection. Ignoring it can leave you owing back taxes you never collected from customers.

Account for export controls, customs, VAT, and the consumer protection laws of each country you ship to. Not every product can be sold everywhere, some are restricted or banned outright in certain markets. Sort out which products you can lawfully sell where before you turn on international checkout.

Your exposure depends on how the platform is designed and how involved you are in the transactions, the more you control listings, fulfillment, or payment, the more risk you tend to carry. We help structure your operations and terms to manage that exposure. The goal is to enable the marketplace while keeping liability for sellers' conduct contained.

Likely several at once. The CCPA may apply, GDPR can reach you if you serve EU consumers, and a growing number of state privacy laws and industry-specific rules may also apply to the data you collect. Which ones bind you turns on where your customers are and what data you handle, so map that before building your data practices.

Our team

Attorneys who can help

Document products

Related document products

Order attorney-drafted documents related to this service.

Browse all products

Let's talk about your e-commerce needs.

Get in touch