If you’re doing business online in other countries, take the time to ensure that your website complies with e-commerce laws in those places. At a minimum, this includes making sure that your website has all of the requisite legal documentation.

For example, let’s say that you sell 70% of your products in the United States, 10% in Canada, 5% in the United Kingdom, and 5% in Australia.

You’re going to want to make sure that you’re not violating laws in these countries by the way you sell there. This means retaining a legal professional, such as an attorney or solicitor, who practices Internet law in each country that you sell to ensure that you’re not breaking the law.

If money is tight, you may want to start with the country where the largest amount of your sales comes from and then proceed to the next largest, etc. when doing the compliance checks. Although there are risks in this method, you’re minimizing them by going after the biggest potential problem markets first.

For a basic overview of website law in the United Kingdom, check out Website legal information: basic requirements. For a basic review of U.S. website requirements, there’s a 7-Step Website Legal Checklist. Of course, general information that you find on the Internet is not a substitute for professional legal advice.

If you’ve ever had legal problems doing business online in another country, feel free to leave a comment here about it.

About the Author

With an advanced international law degree from Georgetown University and more than 14 years of real world legal experience, Attorney Mike Young shows entrepreneurs how to protect and grow their businesses online. He's the author of Internet Marketing Legal Secrets Revealed. Not just a lawyer who focuses exclusively on Internet and marketing law, Mike’s been working with computers for more than 27 years (his first computer was an Atari 400 with 8 KiB RAM) and started representing Internet businesses back in 1996.