Mistakes That Can Land You in Court - and Out of Business
by Leeia Ladipoh on February 14th, 2008
When you are selling items online, you have to balance your desire to make the sale with the importance of not making an offer your items can’t live up to.
When you look over your product descriptions, are they as honest and accurate as they could be? Even if you think they’re pretty close, the details you omit, or allow to be assumed could be an opening for a lawsuit.
In this article, we’ll take a look at how having accurate product descriptions could keep you - and your business - off the docket.
Mistakes Happen….Right?
Once upon a time a mistake in a description would have been something that may have been worked out in a discussion between a business owner and a customer. These days, there is just as much of a chance that you could be the recipient of legal paperwork.
Many small businesses believe since they are small, they won’t be a target for someone that wants to sue for a slip-up; and even if they are, that it won’t cost that much. Think again. While a disgruntled customer may not get a lot of money out of you in a lawsuit, you will still end up paying fees to your attorney and theirs - and you stand to lose a great deal of money that can put you out of business.
Additionally, while a large company is used to legal proceedings and has money set aside for lawsuits and other legal incidents, small businesses usually use their money to operate and handle day-to-day expenses, without much of a cushion to handle a lawsuit.
Instead of having to deal with the threat of lawsuits, why not just make sure you are not likely to be served with one?
Back Up Your Claims
While it’s tempting to talk up your items so you can get more people to be interested in them and hand over their money for a purchase, make sure the product you are selling can stand up to the ‘talking up’ you do.
If you claim your product will give particular results to users, and you are not positive it will give those exact results to everyone, make sure you mention that those results are "possible" or "reported in many users" but not guaranteed, unless you can offer a guarantee of the product.
While this may seem like common sense for someone selling their own product, what if you are a reseller? You are working off of the information that was given to you by the company that created the product.
You may not be able to vouch for the product personally. This means you need to be careful about the claims you make relating to it.
Protect Yourself
You should mention in your description that the claims made for the product are coming from the main company and not from you.
Finally, have someone do a "read test" for you. Find the most critical person you know and ask them to read over your descriptions. Ask them to look for anything that may seem inaccurate or that promises more than you can back up. If you have a friend who works in the legal field, they will be even better in this role.
Once you get through a few descriptions, and learn what’s safe and not so safe to put in, writing descriptions you can stand behind will start to become second nature, and your threat of being sued because of your product descriptions will shrink as well.