The Research On The Validity Of The Standard Contract Clauses For On-line Shopping

Standard clause is a form of clause created for repetitive usage. It is drawn up in advance by a party involved, and the other party is not able to negotiate about it. Standard clause dates back to the early stage of last century when it first emerged in some certain industries. It has changed traditional pattern of contract making which is based on equality and being at the own accord of both parties.With the rapid development of e-commerce, a brand new shopping model, which is online shopping, has kept growing. Most standard clauses for online shopping take the form of data message. While remaining the features of traditional standard clause, the standard clause for online shopping has also brought some new problems due to the particularities of network environment, such as the inconsistency of effectiveness and the controversy on the effectiveness of the privacy protection clauses. Therefore, the author chose how to determine the effectiveness of standard clause for online shopping contract as the research subject and conducted deeper analysis on the subject in this article.The article consists of four chapters. The first chapter introduces the effectiveness determination of standard clause for online shopping contract in juridical practice and also the current problems. By analyzing several cases concerning effectiveness of contract making clauses and privacy protection clauses, the common points in court judgment were found out; that is, in cases concerning with effectiveness determination of standard clause for online shopping contract, a court always makes a judgment by determining whether the online transactor fulfilled the rational responsibility of reminding consumers about the standard clause, whether the transactor limited consumers from exerting their right and whether the transactor was attempting to exempt itself from responsibility in the effectiveness of standard clause. However, the way of determining the effectiveness ofstandard clause in the website environment and the influencing factors for the effectiveness weren't given clearly by the courts in these cases. The second chapter is about the cause analysis of the difficulty in effectiveness determination of standard clause for online shopping. In this chapter, the analysis of relevant legislation and the application of interpretation rules by judges were conducted. The third chapter is the core chapter of this article.By the analysis of the influencing factors for judging the effectiveness of general standard clause, the influencing factors for judging the effectiveness of standard clause for online shopping was summarized. The fourth chapter is about the effectiveness determination of five typical format clauses for online shopping, including contract making clauses, privacy protection clauses and clauses about contract amending, etc.