FRONTIER GOODS LTD Listing duties

What a listing must state before it goes live

A listing offered at a distance has to carry a defined body of information before the contract is concluded. The requirements below are the regulations’ own, set out as requirements; they are not undertakings given by this company, which has not traded.

Where the duty comes from

The governing instrument for a distance contract with a consumer is the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. It lists information that must be given to the consumer in a clear and comprehensible manner before the contract is concluded, and it treats a failure to give it as a breach rather than as a presentational shortcoming. Two others bear on the same copy.

The three that govern a listing

Each one reaches the same draft from a different direction, and a sentence can satisfy one while failing another.

  1. Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013

    Sets out the pre-contract information for a distance contract, the cancellation right and the model form that goes with it.

  2. Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading 2008

    Omitting material information a consumer needs to make a decision can itself be a misleading omission, whatever else the listing says.

  3. Consumer Rights Act 2015

    What the listing says the goods are becomes part of what the consumer is entitled to receive, which is why copy is written from the sheet.

The six the checker holds

Not the full schedule — the six that cannot be written at all from an unfinished record, which is the reason this site treats the record as the first piece of work rather than the last. Tick what a draft already carries.

Carried by the draft

Nothing is ticked, so all six stand outstanding. Each is named in full, with what it has to state, as soon as ticking begins.

The model cancellation form

The regulations set out a model form of words for cancelling, and require it to be supplied as well as the information about the right itself. Supplying the form does not restrict the consumer to it: notice may be given in any other clear statement, and a notice that does not use the form is still a notice. Where the consumer is to bear the cost of returning the goods, the regulations require that to be stated before the contract is concluded, and the consequence of not stating it is that the trader bears the cost.

Confirmation afterwards

The information does not stop at the listing. The regulations also require confirmation of the contract on a durable medium within a defined period after it is concluded, including the cancellation information, which is why the record carries the cancellation clock rather than treating it as a matter of policy.

The snapshot

A copy of the listing exactly as published, with its date and time, is taken when it goes live and again at every change. The reason is evidential: a dispute about a listing is a dispute about what it said on a given day, and a live page cannot answer that. The snapshot is filed against the line reference and kept with the sheet it was drawn from.

What a sheet cannot support

Copy that no field on the sheet supports is struck out at draft. A claim about composition needs field 02, a claim about size or weight needs fields 04 and 05, a claim about where the item is from needs field 03, and a statement that an item is unrestricted needs field 08 to read NONE rather than to be blank. Where no field supports a sentence, the sentence goes, not the field.