News & Views

Is your business website compliant?

Your business website is likely to be your shop window for the world. As such, much time and effort can go into how you present your branding and messaging on your website, and it can be difficult to keep on top of important new legal requirements. Most recently, the Digital Markets, Competition, and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCC) has introduced new requirements affecting how business websites should operate, in addition to existing online safety and data protection obligations. So, here is a brief round-up of some recent changes.

Fake reviews

One of the more publicised changes introduced by the DMCC is the ban on fake reviews on business sites. Effective from April 2025, businesses are prohibited from publishing fake reviews or offering incentives in exchange for a positive review. There is a further requirement on the business to make reasonable efforts to ensure that reviews are genuine.

The intention here is to protect consumers from biased, deceptive, or outright false information when making their purchasing decisions. If you have ever written your own reviews or paid others to do so, then a review of what is live on your site is needed.

Drip pricing

Another key element of consumer protection afforded under the DMCC is transparency over pricing. We have all experienced the addition of costs when trying to buy something online, before finally completing a purchase. This concept is called ‘drip pricing’ i.e. having additional costs slowly added (or drip fed) into your online purchasing journey so that the final cost is higher than the initial price that hooked you into the website.

Since 6 April 2025, consumers must be given an accurate cost of a product upfront i.e. not just the base price but any unavoidable costs such as shipping costs, booking fees, and transaction fees.

Online safety

The Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA) introduced a general obligation for website operators to ensure that their services are designed and operated to protect users, with higher protection afforded to children, particularly around protections from harmful and illegal content. There must also be methods made available to report inappropriate content and/or a more general complaints procedure put in place.

Scraping

Despite the meteoric rise of Generative AI tools, many have expressed concern about the vast quantities of websites being scraped for the tools’ source data. Whilst there are obvious copyright implications of data scraping, you can actually use your own site’s terms of use section to expressly prohibit scraping of your site and give yourself some immediate options to address your concerns.

With the risk of your website content potentially being exploited or misused, careful consideration needs to be given to how your data is presented and qualified.

Online terms of use

It is often the case that a website’s terms of use are created at the launch of website (if used at all) and never updated. As laws and business practices change, it is important to ensure that your online terms of use for the site are reviewed and regularly updated.

It is also important to review your privacy policies and/or cookie policies to address the evolving data protection requirements relating to cookies, consent, and data storage.

What lies ahead

Parliament is currently drafting and debating a series of Bills targeted at technology and ecommerce, as well as the UK’s biggest update to data protection practices since the implementation of the UK GDPR.

Whilst new laws are being implemented, there are also existing laws with future deadlines in place. For example, 2026 will also see another wave of DMCC measures being imposed on business’ operation of subscription services, requiring them to embed new functionality and fail-safes to ensure consumer protection.        

Specialist commercial lawyers will be keeping a close eye on all of these and other developments so should be able to keep you and your website compliant now and into the future.

The views above provide an overview of the current legal landscape and do not constitute legal advice. For further information, please email Mark Hughes or call 0151 906 1000.