Pre-contract / pre-purchase disclosure

Description

Pre-contract disclosure is the package of statutorily-mandated information that consumers see before committing to a purchase. The structural feature across modern consumer-protection regimes is that the disclosure is substantive rather than procedural: it is not enough to have the information available somewhere in a privacy policy or a terms-of-service document; it has to appear at the point of decision, in a form the consumer can engage with, and (for several elements) in a durable form the consumer can retain after the purchase. The procedural reading is what most older e-commerce flows defaulted to, and it is what most modern enforcement actions reject. EU consumer-protection law sets the baseline that the rest of the world has converged toward. The Consumer Rights Directive at Articles 6 to 8 and the 2022 modernization under the Omnibus Directive (Directive (EU) 2019/2161) together require the total price including all mandatory fees, the seller's identity and contact information, key product or service characteristics, country of origin where required, a withdrawal-right summary for distance contracts, and a durable post-purchase confirmation that captures the same disclosure set in a form the consumer can retain. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (Directive 2005/29/EC) layers on top of CRD a more general prohibition on misleading omissions, which catches disclosure failures that fall between the specific CRD requirements. Japan's Specified Commercial Transactions Act under Act No. 57 of 2000 adds the final-confirmation-screen rule that requires a dedicated screen recapitulating the order before the consumer commits. Korea's Act on Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce requires pre-contract product and seller information in Korean with clear total pricing. India's E-Commerce Rules 2020 require complete product information, country-of-origin display, and seller details before purchase. Brazil's CDC requires transparent pricing under Article 31 and e-commerce seller identity and contact under Article 33. The Australian Consumer Law requires total-price display under the ACL pricing-display rules. The order-button label is its own micro-rule across several regimes. The button has to clearly acknowledge the payment obligation. The EU's strict form ("order with obligation to pay," or the translated equivalent in the local language) is the safest harbor; a button labeled merely "Continue" or "Place order" has been held insufficient in member-state case law, with the consequence that the contract was not validly formed and the consumer was entitled to a full refund without invoking the withdrawal right. The same logic appears in the US through ROSCA's negative-option disclosure rules and through California's ARL free-trial-conversion rules, where the click-through has to capture the specific commitment being made rather than gesture at it abstractly. The piece that consistently produces enforcement is drip-pricing: showing a base price on a product page and surfacing mandatory fees only at checkout. The EU's CPC network and several member-state regulators (the French DGCCRF, the Italian AGCM, the UK CMA in pre-Brexit cases and now CMA-only post-Brexit) have spent the past four years bringing structurally similar cases against airlines, hotel platforms, ticket marketplaces, and subscription services. The FTC's 2023 junk-fees rulemaking and the converging state-level action have arrived at the same answer from the US side. The convergent rule is that the all-in price has to appear at the first place the consumer encounters the product, not at the final commit step; mandatory fees that are unavoidable for any consumer (delivery fees in jurisdictions where the seller does not offer free delivery, service fees in ticketing, environmental surcharges, mandatory taxes that the seller and not the consumer must remit) are part of the all-in price and cannot be deferred to the checkout. The operational decomposition is four pieces. The disclosure-content matrix captures what has to appear, at what surface, in which jurisdiction. The checkout-flow rendering enforces the appearance at the relevant surfaces, with conditional rendering by geography where regimes diverge. The durable-confirmation step produces the post-purchase artifact (typically an email with the same disclosure set) that the consumer can retain. And the legal-review sign-off on the disclosure copy itself catches the jurisdictions where translation, terminology, or specific phrasing requirements have substantive bite (the Korean-language requirement under the Korean act, the Hindi-and-English requirement under Indian rules, the official-language requirements in several other regimes).

Applicability

Applies when: customer segment is b2c or b2b2c.

How predicates are evaluated

Required by (14 regulations)

• ACL

  Total price including mandatory fees (acl-pricing-display); product-characteristic disclosure that isn't misleading.

  Competition and Consumer Act 2010, Schedule 2

• CDC

  CDC Article 31 transparent pricing + Article 33 e-commerce seller identity / contact disclosure.

  Lei nº 8.078, de 11 de setembro de 1990 (Código de Defesa do Consumidor), regulated by Decreto nº 7.962, de 15 de março de 2013 (e-commerce provisions)

• CA ARL

  Free-trial conversion-term + auto-renewal disclosure before charging the first time.

  Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§17600-17606

• EU CRD

  CRD Articles 6-8: pre-contract information set + button-label clarity ("order with obligation to pay") + durable confirmation after purchase.

  Directive 2011/83/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council

• Omnibus

  Directive (EU) 2019/2161 Articles 6a-7 enhance pre-contractual transparency for distance contracts: ranking-parameter disclosure for marketplaces (Article 6a), price-reduction reference-price methodology (Article 6a), trader-or-not status disclosure (Article 6a), individualized-pricing notification (Article 6a). Member State transposition 2022-05-28.

  Directive (EU) 2019/2161

• E-Commerce Rules

  Rule 5(3): complete product information + country-of-origin display + seller details before purchase.

  Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, issued under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 (Act No. 35 of 2019), as amended through 2023

• ASCT

  Specified Commercial Transactions Act final-confirmation-screen + price disclosure rules.

  Act on Specified Commercial Transactions (Act No. 57 of 2000, as amended by Act No. 70 of 2021, effective June 1, 2022)

• Korea E-Commerce Act

  Korean Act on the Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce: pre-contract product + seller info in Korean + clear total pricing.

  Act on the Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce, etc. (Act No. 6687)

• ROSCA

  ROSCA negative-option disclosure of all material terms before charging.

  15 U.S.C. §§8401-8405

• E-Commerce Law

  Saudi E-Commerce Law (Royal Decree M/126 of 2019) Article 5 requires online service providers to disclose: provider identity and contact information, complete product/service description, total price including taxes and fees, payment and delivery terms, return policy. Pre-contract disclosure must be in Arabic and machine-readable.

  Royal Decree M/126, Electronic Commerce Law, issued 7/11/1440 AH (July 10, 2019), effective 19/2/1441 AH (October 19, 2019)

• UCPD

  EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005/29/EC + 2024 Omnibus amendments prohibit misleading commercial practices including misleading omissions (Article 7). Annex I enumerates 31 per-se unfair practices including hidden subscription terms and disguised commercial communications.

  Directive 2005/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council

• UK CCR

  Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 pre-contract information for distance contracts.

  SI 2013/3134 (Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013)

• EU P2B

  Article 3(1)(a) — terms easily available at all stages including pre-contract; Article 9 — data-access regime disclosed; Article 10 — restrictions on offering different conditions through other means disclosed with grounds.

  Regulation (EU) 2019/1150

  Source →

• EU Empowering Consumers

  Implements the amended Consumer Rights Directive duties to disclose durability and reparability information.

  Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive

  Source →

Fulfilled by (4)

• shopify · partial · low effort · $$
  Shopify checkout exposes regional pre-purchase disclosure modules (EU, UK, Brazil) with built-in total-price calculation; merchant still owns disclosure copy quality.
• stripe-checkout · partial · low effort · $
  Stripe Checkout enforces total-price + button-label rules for EU markets; merchant supplies seller identity + product info.
• iubenda · partial · low effort · $
  Iubenda's terms-and-conditions generator covers EU CRD pre-contract disclosure templates.
• In-house build · medium effort
  Custom checkout flows require in-house disclosure-content authoring + per-jurisdiction conditional rendering.

Magist does not accept payment from vendors. Methodology.

Evidence formats

• checkout flow screenshots covering the disclosure surfaces
• documented disclosure-content matrix per jurisdiction
• post-purchase confirmation email / receipt template
• internal audit log of pre-contract disclosure deployments
• legal review sign-off on disclosure copy