Dictates of the host

For the last couple of days, I've been working on the first draft of the Terms & Conditions for the web based store, which is obviously of significant import to the customer and to the day-to-day practices of J&S. The technical limitations of the website imposed by our web host and online credit card company will, to an extent, dictate how we must operate, and therefore how we must set out our terms and conditions.

Our web shop host dictates that credit card payments are taken at the point the customer completes an order at checkout, rather than when the goods are dispatched. This means that we need to indemnify J&S from problems associated with taking payment for goods that aren't held in stock such as "special orders", and also establish limitations to the contract that is formed at the point of payment. This is all fairly common practice amongst e-commerce sites across the web, but I'm sure that J&S would prefer to carry their store's straight forward retail approach, with straight forward T&Cs, over to their new web business.

We do have the option to offer offline payment for web orders, which could alleviate customer concerns, and is ideal for gun purchases where the customer must collect from the store anyway. Unfortunately though, there is no way to force customers with special orders or gun orders to select this option at checkout, so limitations must be put into place.

My efforts so far can be seen on the Terms & Conditions page.