Introduction
This guide is designed to
give entrepreneurs and existing businesses an
overview of European e-commerce legislation. It
addresses key areas of legislation, how they
affect business and ways that business might
react to this legislation. In addition, this
volume includes a number of "suggestions" which
are generally based on a combination of
legislation, best practice and the authors'
experience.
E-commerce covers a wide
range of activities, from selling books to
consumers to selling container loads of supplies
to factories across the globe. Companies are
selling everything from physical goods, to
services, to digital products delivered over the
Internet. Clearly it would be impossible to
cover every piece of legislation that might
affect every e-commerce enterprise. However,
this book does cover the legislation that
affects most e-commerce activities and focuses
on business to consumer (more trendily known as
"B2C").
For the entrepreneur who is
planning to launch a dot-com company or the
existing business who is planning to go from
bricks-and-mortar to clicks-and-mortar (i.e.
from selling out of a shop to selling both from
a shop and via the web), it is essential to view
their venture holistically. E-commerce is not
just a matter of cutting edge technology.
Rather, it is a combination of technology,
marketing, legal circumstances and social
impact. Those vendors who plan their venture and
strategy taking into account the above will best
succeed in business.
This guide, of course, only
touches upon the legal aspects of e-commerce and
is meant to initiate entrepreneurs and small
business owners to the basics of e-commerce
legislation. Suggestions for further reading can
be found in the appendix.
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