Online Memberships and Subscriptions in Australia - The Top 5 Things You Must Include
In this article, I am sharing the top 5 things that you must include in your membership or subscription terms and conditions. This will help you minimise the risk of not getting paid, protect your intellectual property and ensure you can create some enforceable rules about how your resources can be used by members of your membership or subscription community.
Offer online memberships or subscriptions? Our legal templates you can use for your Terms and Conditions are linked below:
Terms and conditions for subscription websites
1. Clear Client Communication
When setting up the terms and conditions of online membership and subscription services, you need to ensure you have a clear explanation about how you are to be paid. Having clear communication with your clients about the payment options, including when an annual renewal is coming up, can help you avoid issues with your clients and make sure you keep them happy. .
If you wish to increase your membership or subscription fees at any time, some lead time to educate people is important and your ability to do that should be included in your Terms of Use. If people feel as though they haven’t been warned about an impending price increase, this can cause issues for you, sometimes resulting in people removing themselves entirely from your membership community.
From my work with my clients there have been examples of times where their members did not realise that an annual renewal was due and immediately requested a refund when the annual fee was automatically withdrawn from their bank account. We all know that feeling where a lump sum is removed from our bank account for something we had forgotten about and even though we’ve signed up for it, it’s a bit of a shock to see it on the credit card statement.
For this reason I recommend that in addition to this information being included in your terms, you warn a client when an annual payment is due to come up. Reaching out ahead of time is a great chance for you to revisit the benefits of the membership and create some energy about what you have for them in the near future. This serves two purposes - it gives them a heads up that the funds are due to come out of their bank account or credit card soon and encourages them to stay on instead of dropping out.
A great example of educating their subscribers that a price rise is on the way, is Netflix. They provide notifications that appear as you are browsing the catalogue, ahead of time, and provide you the option to accept the new agreement in the weeks leading up to the price change.
2. How to terminate a membership
You must have a clause in your terms that details the process and time frame your members have to follow when they wish to terminate their membership.
As part of this, you should think about whether you want a member’s subscription to roll over after the initial period or have your members opt-in every year. In the event of an ongoing membership, it must be clear in your membership terms and conditions that the contract can potentially keep going indefinitely until they take steps to terminate it. I also recommend that in addition to it being clearly stated in your Terms of Use, when people first sign up and you send a Welcome Email, to mention the terms and time frame in the event they wish to opt out.
3. Membership site or platform
Most people use one or more third party platforms to operate their membership. While many third party platforms are excellent and most are highly dependable, there are some important elements you need to include in your Terms of Use in the event there is an issue that affects your ability to deliver your offering. While you may not believe these platforms are susceptible to risk, recent history tells us that these providers do have downtime and security breaches do occur. These companies know that these risks need to be covered in their own Terms of Use, so I always recommend you do as well.
When you use these platforms to store resources, member information and to facilitate the delivery of what you offer as part of your subscription, you must have clauses in your Terms of Use that protect you. In the event one of these platforms fails in some and your members cannot access what they could usually as part of their subscription, without these terms being adequately covered, you are open to being at risk because you are not delivering what is expected.
If these terms are not worded correctly, then your members may legally be able to seek to be refunded.
I also recommend you consider housing all of your materials on a platform that you host or keep backups of the content in a second location elsewhere.That way in the event your content was to be lost, you will be able to get up and running again quickly.
4. Ownership of Intellectual Property within the membership
Typically, you own the intellectual property of all the resources found on your platform. But with members having access to these resources, you need to protect that intellectual property.
Consider the example where you host an online membership on Kajabi but you have a Facebook group associated with the membership. Members of your online community may start to share what they have created using your membership (whether it be recipes, crafts, online courses, you name it). This will have a flow on effect when members have ideas in addition to your membership resources.
When a member shares something and another member implements it in their life or business, that may go one of two ways - either it is effective or it is not. You can set a disclaimer in your terms that states that you are not responsible for the negative impact of the advice given by another member. You can also have a clause that details that you own the content being shared in the platform and you also own the right to any improvements made as a result of the membership.
Additionally, you can include detail in the terms that you are not liable if group members copy each other, since members of groups often have competing businesses.
5. Clause that there are no guarantees of certain outcomes
Having a clause that covers that there are no guarantees of certain benefits when a member joins the group will help protect yourself and your business. While members have access to the group and the resources within, they may not get the same result that other members have achieved. It should be clear in your terms that the membership is about providing resources, information and education, and members should understand that implementing all these is a personal responsibility.
The terms and conditions for subscription services you put in place can help you protect you and your business and establish reasonable expectations about the use of your materials. Without solid membership terms and conditions in place, it can lead to you being open to risk, so ensure you consider seeking specialist support from someone like me who understands the nature of subscription and membership businesses and has the depth of legal understanding to review them effectively. That way you can move forward with confidence and peace of mind as well.
Related article: Collaboration and partnership in business: 7 things to do to avoid a messy ending
If you have a subscription or membership (or are thinking about setting one up) take a look at our online membership terms and conditions template. A low-cost solution to provide you with all you need to have enforceable Terms of Use .
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