Imprint, privacy policy, cancellation policy or terms and conditions: As a retailer, you must ensure that all legally relevant information about you and your company is communicated transparently and is accessible from every page of your online shop. The design of these documents is subject to clear regulations that can pose a high risk of warnings, especially for laypersons.
To give you an overview of which legal texts should not be missing in your online shop under any circumstances, we provide you with an overview of the most important texts and their essential components. You will also find out where you should best place legal texts in your online shop and how integration with Shopify and Shopify Plus works.
Table of contents
Do you need support with your Shopify shop? As Shopify Plus experts, we are happy to assist you and help you customise your shop to your requirements. Get in touch with us.
5 legal texts that no online shop should be without
General Terms and Conditions (GTC)
While the General Terms and Conditions (GTC) are not mandatory for websites with a purely informational character, online shops must provide them. The background to this is that the GTCs are part of the purchase contract that is concluded when customers buy from you. They contain, for example, information on limitations of liability, regulations on liability for defects, cancellation formalities and the transfer of ownership.
Imprint
Visitors to a website or online shop must always be able to see who is responsible for the content there. This information can be found in the legal notice. In addition to some mandatory information such as the name, legal form, address and contact information (e.g. telephone and email) of the site owner, the legal notice can also include a legal representative for dispute resolution.
Reading tip: We explain step by step what belongs in your legal notice!
Privacy policy
With the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the legislator has obliged website and online shop operators to issue a privacy policy. This should provide information about how personal data is processed. The content of the privacy policy may vary depending on the type and purpose of the tools you use. In general, the privacy policy contains information about the processing of IP addresses, the storage of cookies and the use of third-party software such as marketing and analysis tools.
Reading tip: Cookie banners are now mandatory in online shops! We explain how to implement them in the linked article.
Cancellation policy
An example of a revocation instruction page could be set up as for our customer HUNTER.
In the case of distance selling contracts, which also include online transactions, the legislator provides for a fourteen-day right of cancellation for the buyer. Online retailers must refer to this right in their cancellation policy and explain the cancellation procedures. The instructions usually also contain a sample cancellation form that visitors can download and use for their cancellation.
Terms of dispatch and payment
The image shows how our customer Neuland has set up the page for shipping and payment terms.
The shipping and payment terms are probably self-explanatory. In this section, you record your delivery and payment terms. This includes, for example, delivery costs to various destination countries, as well as available shipping and payment service providers.
Create legal texts: These options are available
Unless your company has an internal legal department, we advise against creating legal texts for your online shop yourself. The potential for errors is simply too great. Instead, you should opt for one of three alternatives.
Use sample templates: There are numerous sample texts online that you can adapt and use for your company. However, you should at least have them checked by a lawyer specialising in IT law to rule out the risk of a warning.
Have legal texts created by a lawyer: Alternatively, you could also commission the law firm to create legally compliant texts. If you actually have all legal texts created in this way, you will probably have to budget a four-figure sum for the lawyer's fee.
Use online services: There are now a number of service providers that specialise in providing legal texts. One example is the Händlerbund: Its legal texts can be easily added to Shopify via an app. There is a monthly basic fee of EUR 9.90 for using the app, which should be more affordable than a lawyer's fee. In addition, the texts are stored directly in the backend and automatically updated when changes are made.
Special features for marketplace sales, AI and stock photos
When it comes to legal texts, there are some special cases that are probably already relevant for your company. We have summarised the most important ones below.
Online marketplaces
When selling on online marketplaces, you do not need most legal texts such as the legal notice, privacy policy and cancellation policy. This is because you are not responsible for the content on the platforms yourself. Instead, the platform operators are responsible themselves.
However, every marketplace trader is obliged to provide their general terms and conditions. These should not be a 1:1 copy of your online shop T&Cs, as in the event of a sale you enter into a business relationship not only with your customer, but also with the marketplace operator.
AI-generated content and analyses
AI in e-commerce has long since become a defining topic in the industry. Currently, purely AI-generated content is neither protected by copyright nor subject to labelling. The former is due to the fact that AI content is not preceded by any intellectual creation. However, this is a prerequisite for the fulfilment of copyright protection.
In future, the labelling obligation will be defined by the European Regulation laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (AI Regulation). This will come into full force in mid-2026 and will entail labelling obligations for website operators and online retailers.
If you use AI to record and evaluate the user behaviour of your customers, you must indicate this in your privacy policy and explain how the data is processed.
Due to liability issues, it may also make sense to refer to the use of AI in the terms and conditions. This is especially true if the AI can deliver incorrect results that lead to a negative user experience for your customers.
Reading tip: Do you want to use AI in a legally compliant way and find out more about this topic? Then we recommend this blog post.
Stock images
In contrast to AI content, stock images are copyright-protected works. Whether the author must be named near the image and/or in legal texts such as the legal notice depends on the licence conditions. For example, images with the so-called Creative Commons licence (CC0) can be used freely in non-commercial and commercial projects. The author does not have to be named. However, many image platforms, especially those that charge a fee, such as Adobe Stock or Getty Images, require the author to be named. For information purposes, you can inform your visitors about the use of stock images and their authors in the legal notice or on a separate subpage on image credits.
Entering legal texts in Shopify: where and how?
At the beginning, we already talked about an important requirement for legal texts in online shops. However, as this was rather incidental, here is a reminder: legal texts must be accessible from every subpage of a domain with just a few clicks.
To ensure this, it has become established practice to place the texts in the footer, as they are automatically displayed on every domain and are directly linked.
Step-by-step instructions for the integration of legal texts
In this section, we will look at how to store legal texts in the Shopify backend. If you are using an app such as the Händlerbund app, you do not need to follow these instructions. This is only the case if you want to integrate texts manually. In these instructions, we assume that you have already created your legal texts using one of the methods we have presented.
How to store your legal texts in the backend:
Log into the backend of your Shopify shop.
Navigate to ‘Settings’.
There, click on the ‘Legal’ section.
A new window opens with fields for the individual legal texts. Copy the legal notice, terms and conditions, privacy policy, cancellation policy and payment and delivery information one after the other.
Note: Online services often also offer their legal texts in the form of HTML files. If you want to copy these into the backend instead of the text form, you must first select ‘Show HTML’, which will open the HTML editor.
After you have inserted your legal texts, you must display them via the navigation in the frontend of your shop, more precisely in the footer.
To do this, proceed as follows:
Click on ‘Online shop’ in the admin area.
Navigate to the ‘Navigation’ menu item.
Select the footer menu of your online shop.
Link a legal text, e.g. your legal notice, in the footer menu.
Repeat this process for all other legal texts.
Conclusion
Legal texts are indispensable for online shops and pose a certain risk of warnings for retailers. For this reason, you should not blindly rely on sample templates from the internet and consult professional legal advice. Alternatively, you can use a service provider that specialises in the creation of legal texts. This will provide you with constantly updated versions of your online shop texts. This is an advantage that should not be underestimated, as the legal landscape is changing, not least due to new technologies such as artificial intelligence - and with it the design of your legal texts. With Shopify, it is easy to enter legal texts manually or integrate the texts of a service provider via an app.
As Shopify Plus experts, we at Latori are happy to help you optimise your Shopify shop. Get in touch with us.
