Are Your Terms and Conditions Helping or Hurting?

I sat down to write a blog for one of our sites, KidMotive.com, about encouraging parents to motivate their kids to spend more time active and outdoors by getting them involved with gardening. In a lot of the blogs I write, I'll often link to relevant and/or helpful websites. In this case, I wanted to link to a very popular garden supply website. However, when I read the T&C's (Terms and Conditions) on the site, it was so heavily laden with legal language, conditions and warnings, that I decided to skip our gift of free advertising for this particular garden supplier.

Don't Fret, There's Always Another Company That's Ready To Step Up!

As I mentioned, when I write a blog about a particular product or recommend a service, I will link to either a company that I really like (but get no financial benefit from) or an affiliate, which we do get a financial benefit from. In this case, I really wanted to recommend to our readers a full service garden supplier, so I decided to login to one of our affiliate accounts, LinkShare.com to see if I could find a reputable garden supply company, -and sure enough, there there were, ready, willing, eager and waiting for our business: LandscapeUSA.com (click their logo below to check them out).

I'm not by any means saying that Terms & Conditions aren't necessary, because they are, but there's a fine line between being legally protected and completely discouraging commerce with T&C's that are akin to a flat-out legal threat.