Pre-contract / pre-purchase disclosure

Description

Pre-contract disclosure is the package of statutorily-mandated information that consumers see before committing to a purchase, and the way the regulators have structured it is to make the disclosure substantive rather than procedural. EU consumer-protection law (the Consumer Rights Directive and its 2022 modernization) requires 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. Japan's Specified Commercial Transactions Act adds the final-confirmation-screen rule that requires a dedicated screen recapitulating the order before the consumer commits. The order-button label is its own micro-rule across several regimes: it has to clearly acknowledge the payment obligation (the EU's order-with-obligation-to-pay text is the strict form, and a button labeled merely 'Continue' or 'Place order' has been held insufficient in member-state case law). The piece that consistently produces enforcement is drip-pricing: showing a base price on a product page and surfacing mandatory fees only at checkout. EU regulators and the FTC's junk-fees rulemaking have converged on the same answer, which is that the all-in price has to appear at the first place the consumer encounters the product, not at the final commit step.

Applicability

Applies when: customer segment is b2c or b2b2c.

How predicates are evaluated

Required by (13 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

• 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

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

• UCPD

  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

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.

ClearLaunch 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