Do I need terms and conditions on my website?

If you sell anything, yes — and you need two documents, not one. Terms of service govern using the website; terms of business govern buying from you. Conflating them leaves the commercial relationship undefined, which is where most disputes start.

Do I need a privacy policy for a small website?

Yes, if the site collects any personal data at all — and a contact form counts, as do server logs and most analytics. Under UK and EU data protection law a privacy notice is mandatory whenever personal data is processed, regardless of how small the business is.

Do I need a refund policy if I only sell services?

Yes. Even where a deposit is genuinely non-refundable, the policy has to say so, and it has to say what happens if you cannot deliver. Silence is the position that produces disputes, because both parties then argue from what they each assumed.

Legal

What legal pages does an online shop need?

At minimum: a privacy policy, website terms, terms of sale, a refund and returns policy, delivery information, and a cookie notice if you set non-essential cookies. Payment processors and advertising platforms check for several of these before approving an account.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 197 words 3 sections

The full set, and what each does

Privacy policy: What data you collect, why, and who receives it.
Terms of service: Rules for using the website itself.
Terms of sale: The contract for buying — price, delivery, cancellation.
Refunds and returns: Window, condition, who pays postage, how long refunds take.
Delivery information: Costs, timescales and destinations, findable before checkout.
Cookie notice: Only needed if you set non-essential cookies.

Where they must be reachable from

The footer of every page, and — for delivery and returns — from the product page and the checkout as well. Distance selling rules require key information before the contract is concluded, and burying it in a footer link does not reliably satisfy that.

Keep them indexable

There is no benefit to hiding legal pages from search, and real benefit in their presence: they are trust signals for both buyers and automated review by advertising platforms. Let them be crawled and indexed normally.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, E-commerce conversion: find the step that loses your orders covers it in about 4 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.