Telling a buyer certain things is an obligation, not a courtesy

The sale begins before the transaction does

Most people think of a purchase as a moment: money moves, goods change hands, and whatever was said beforehand belongs to the category of chat. Legal systems increasingly disagree with that picture. A body of rules has grown up around the period before a consumer contract is concluded, on the theory that the imbalance between a business that sells something every day and a person who buys one every few years is at its widest precisely then.

These rules are not about honesty in the ordinary sense. Honesty is dealt with elsewhere, and misleading a buyer is a wrong in nearly every system. Pre-contract information duties do something narrower and stranger. They specify a list of things the seller has to say whether or not the buyer asks, and whether or not the seller has any reason to think the buyer cares.

What the required information usually covers

The lists differ, but their shape recurs. Who is actually selling, and how they can be reached in a way that produces a reply. What the goods or services are, in enough detail that the buyer knows what has been agreed. The total price, including anything that will be added, and what recurring payments will be taken and when. How long the arrangement lasts and how it ends.

Where a right to cancel exists, systems tend to insist that the buyer is told about it, told how to use it, and often told in a specific form. Delivery arrangements, complaint routes and the existence of any dispute scheme frequently appear as well. For services bought at distance or away from business premises the lists are usually longer, because the buyer cannot inspect anything before agreeing.

How it is given matters as much as whether

A common feature of these regimes is that the information has to be provided in a durable form the buyer can keep, rather than displayed briefly on a screen or spoken over a telephone. That requirement exists because a duty to inform is worthless if the informing cannot afterwards be proved, and because a term the buyer cannot retrieve is a term the buyer cannot rely on.

Clarity is generally part of the obligation too. Burying a material fact in dense conditions, or expressing a price in a way that makes the real total hard to work out, may fail the duty even though every word was technically present somewhere. Regulators in several regions have taken a firm line on this, and the drafting of consumer-facing documents has changed noticeably as a result.

Saying nothing and saying half of it are treated differently

There is a longstanding general principle in many common law systems that a party negotiating a contract is not obliged to volunteer information, however useful it would have been. Consumer regimes cut across that principle deliberately, and civil law systems have often reached similar ground through duties of good faith in negotiation. The two traditions arrive at comparable places by very different routes.

A half-truth sits in a different category again. A statement that is literally accurate but creates a false overall impression is treated in most places as a misstatement rather than as silence, which usually opens more doors for the buyer. That distinction is worth holding on to, because a great many disputes described as non-disclosure are really about something that was said and was incomplete.

The consequences attach to the contract

This is the part that surprises people. In several systems the omitted information is treated as though it had been supplied in the buyer’s favour, so a charge never mentioned simply is not payable. In others the period during which the buyer may withdraw is extended, sometimes substantially, and it does not begin to run until the missing information is finally given.

Regulatory consequences run alongside. Authorities may act against a business for a practice rather than for a single sale, and that action does not necessarily produce anything for the individual who complained. The two tracks are separate, and a buyer who reports a trader to a regulator has not thereby made a claim of their own.

Where this stops being general description

Which information must be given, in what form, to which buyers, and with what consequence for a failure, are all matters of local law that differ between countries and sometimes between regions inside one country. They are also amended fairly often. Nothing here is advice about a particular purchase, and the answer in any real dispute depends on facts and documents that a general article cannot see.

One thing does travel. Where a right depends on time, the time usually runs whether or not anyone is arguing, and an internal complaints process at the seller generally does not stop the clock. If a purchase has gone wrong and the sums involved matter, take the paperwork to a qualified lawyer or a local consumer advice service early rather than waiting for the trader to come back to you.