Legal notice and terms of sale on a landing page: what's actually required

Between the headline that hooks, the CTA that converts and the social proof that reassures, the legal notice usually comes last — if it comes at all. The result: landing pages published with zero required disclosures, or the opposite, sales pages stacking a wall of terms of sale copied from an unrelated e-commerce site, with clauses that describe nothing about what's actually being sold. Both mistakes carry a real cost. The first exposes the publisher to a criminal penalty that's not well known but very real. The second has no legal value if it doesn't describe the actual offer, and it adds a negative trust signal on top: a visitor who clicks "Terms" and lands on furniture-delivery clauses doesn't trust the page more — they trust it less. This guide sorts out what a landing page must legally display, what depends on what it sells, and a 2026 update worth knowing if you sell online to individual consumers in France.

Legal notice: required for every website, no exceptions

Unlike terms of sale, the legal notice doesn't depend on what the page sells. France's law for confidence in the digital economy (LCEN, law n° 2004-575 of June 21, 2004, now codified at article 1-1 of that text) requires every website publisher — brochure site, capture page or sales funnel — to display a set of identifying information, easily accessible from any page. A one-page landing page with no navigation menu isn't exempt: a discreet footer link is enough, but it has to exist.

• Publisher identity — full name for a sole trader, or company name, legal form and share capital for a registered company.
• Address and contact method — the registered postal address plus a working email or phone number.
• Registration number — SIRET, plus RCS or trade register number depending on the activity.
• Intra-community VAT number, if the business is liable for it.
• Publication director — usually the founder or the person running the project.
• Hosting provider identity — the hosting company's name, address and phone number (this information is published in the terms of the hosting provider you use, Vercel or otherwise).

Missing a legal notice isn't a minor compliance footnote: it's a criminal offense, punishable for an individual by up to one year in prison and a €75,000 fine, and up to €375,000 for a company. Actual prosecutions of a small landing page are rare, but the exposure exists from the moment the page goes live — and fixing it takes minutes once you know the required format.

Terms of sale: required only if you sell to individual consumers

This one hinges entirely on what the landing page actually does. A pure capture page (waitlist, free ebook, webinar signup) doesn't sell anything: no terms of sale needed, just a privacy policy if it collects data — see our guide on GDPR-compliant capture forms. A page selling a service to other businesses (pure B2B) isn't subject to French consumer-law's terms-of-sale requirement either, even though drafting them is still good contractual practice. But the moment an individual consumer can buy directly online — an ebook, a course, a template like the ones LanderKit sells, a SaaS subscription — terms of sale become mandatory under the French consumer code, with specific required content: total price, payment and delivery terms, legal warranties (conformity, hidden defects), and the terms of the right of withdrawal.

Digital products: the exception to the right of withdrawal

The standard 14-day right of withdrawal (article L221-18 of the French consumer code) creates an obvious problem for a digital product delivered instantly: a buyer could download a template's source code, use it, then withdraw from the purchase. Article L221-28 (13°) of the same code provides a specific exception: the right of withdrawal doesn't apply to the "supply of digital content not provided on a physical medium," provided that fulfillment has started after the consumer's express prior agreement, and that they've explicitly acknowledged losing their right of withdrawal when confirming the purchase. In practice, that means a dedicated checkbox — separate from the GDPR checkbox — at checkout, worded without ambiguity. Without that explicit checkbox, the 14-day period still applies despite the instant download.

New since June 2026: the online withdrawal function

As of June 19, 2026, ordinance n° 2026-2 (transposing EU directive 2023/2673) added a requirement to article L221-21 of the French consumer code: any business that concludes distance contracts with consumers through an online interface must provide a dedicated, free withdrawal function, accessible for the full length of the legal period — not just an email address to write to. The French transposition covers all distance contracts across every sector, not only the financial services the original EU text targeted. Non-compliance carries a fine of up to €75,000 and extends the customer's withdrawal period to 12 months and 14 days. That button only matters, though, for sales where a right of withdrawal actually exists: a digital-content seller who has validly made buyers waive that right through the article L221-28 checkbox has, by construction, nothing to build — but the waiver clause has to be unambiguous for that exemption to hold.

Privacy policy: how it differs from GDPR compliance

Our guide on GDPR and capture forms covers the consent checkbox, consent itself and data minimization at the form level. The privacy policy is the reference document, linked from the footer, that explains in one place who processes the data, why, for how long and how to exercise your rights — the long version the checkbox merely summarizes at the point of collection. It has a measurable effect beyond compliance alone: an experimental study by Solon Magrizos, Martina Campora, Grigorios Lamprinakos, Apostolos N. Giovanis and Michael Christofi, "Transparency by design: the effect of privacy policies visualisation on brand trust and perceived intrusion" (Behaviour & Information Technology, 2025), found across 286 participants that a privacy policy made more readable and visual — rather than a dense block of legal text — increases brand trust and lowers the sense of intrusion visitors feel. A clear link and understandable wording beat an unreadable copy-paste, for conversion as much as compliance.

Where to place these links without cluttering a one-page layout

• Three footer links are enough: Legal Notice, Terms of Sale, Privacy Policy — no submenu, no extra banner sitting above the CTA.
• Dedicated pages, not an accordion on the sales page: each disclosure lives on its own URL (/legal-notice, /terms), so the landing page itself stays short and focused on converting.
• A short line under the buy button instead of a full block — something like "Secure payment · Delivered instantly, see our terms" links to it without breaking the page's rhythm.
• The right-of-withdrawal waiver checkbox, where it applies, belongs at the checkout step itself, never buried inside the terms of sale where no one will see it in time.

Common mistakes that cost more than they look

• Copying terms of sale from an unrelated industry: physical-delivery clauses on a page selling a downloadable file have no legal value and are obvious to any reader at first glance.
• Forgetting the hosting provider: a mention that's often missing even though it's part of the mandatory LCEN baseline alongside the publisher's own identity.
• A wall of legal text above the CTA — see our article on the legal risk of copying a competitor's landing page for a related, mirror-image risk: copying an entire page rather than just its disclosures.
• Confusing a commercial guarantee with the legal right of withdrawal: a 30-day money-back guarantee is a marketing promise you set yourself; the legal right of withdrawal, when it applies, is a statutory 14-day window that exists independently of any guarantee you advertise.

A concrete case with LanderKit's templates

All 10 LanderKit templates already ship with a footer that has Legal Notice / Privacy Policy links ready to receive your own destinations — it's on the buyer to fill them in with their own identity and hosting provider, not to invent one. For a digital product like the ebook template, delivered as an instant download, the right-of-withdrawal waiver checkbox deserves real attention at Stripe checkout; for a service like the coach template, what you need are service-based terms of sale, not terms written for a digital-goods sale. Either way, starting from a structure already built to receive these disclosures — rather than redesigning the whole page — removes the trade-off between compliance and shipping fast: the 10 LanderKit templates (€89 each, €229 for the full bundle) ship with open source code so you can wire in your own legal pages in a few minutes.