How to keep track of terms and policy changes
Suppliers, marketplaces, payment providers and regulators all change their terms. Usually nobody tells you, and the new rules apply anyway. This guide sets out a light system for noticing those changes in time to do something about them.
List the documents that affect you
Start with a short list. For most small businesses it looks something like:
- Terms and fee pages of the marketplaces you sell on
- Your payment provider's pricing and terms
- Key suppliers' terms of sale
- Government guidance pages for your industry
- Your own website's terms, if more than one person edits them
Watch the pages, not your inbox
Companies often announce changes by email, but those emails are easy to miss and don't always cover everything. Watching the page itself catches every edit, including quiet ones.
Make changes easy to read
Terms pages are long, so a list of highlighted lines isn't much help. A plain summary is: “New 1.5% processing fee on all orders from 1 March” tells you what you need. Keep the exact before-and-after wording too, for when the detail matters.
Decide who acts on what
An alert is only useful if someone does something with it. Agree who reads which alerts and what happens next, for example updating your prices when a fee changes, or asking your accountant when a tax guidance page is updated.
How often to check
Terms and guidance pages don't usually change daily. Checking once or twice a day is plenty, and it keeps alerts rare enough that you'll actually read them. Review your list of watched documents every few months: add new suppliers or platforms, and remove ones you no longer use.
What to do when something changes
- Read the summary and decide if it affects you.
- If it does, note what changes and from when.
- Update anything that depends on it, such as your prices, checkout wording or internal processes.
- If you're unsure what it means for you, ask your accountant or adviser.
Sharing the load
If several people need to know about different documents, send alerts where they already work. On Pro and Business, ChangeGist can post each change to a Slack or Discord channel, so fee changes reach whoever sets prices and supplier changes reach whoever places orders, without forwarding emails around.
Keep a dated record
A history of changes with dates is handy when someone asks “when did they change that?”. It isn't a legal archive, but it's a useful starting point.