How to stop your ecommerce startup from landing in legal hot soup in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia is a booming economic region, and is fast becoming a great place for ecommerce businesses to set up shop. However, with growth comes regulation, and ecommerce businesses in Southeast Asia need to be aware of the legal requirements throughout the region before they leap into trade.

We’ll take a look at five key tips for staying in line with the law for your Southeast Asia ecommerce business.

Protect your intellectual property

Image: A green registered trademark (®) logo, Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Your ecommerce business will have numerous pieces of intellectual property, even though you might not know it. Trademarks cover things like your logo and store name, or a combination of the two. Copyright can protect your marketing text on your website, or the content of marketing emails and mailers. You may even have products that are patentable, if you’ve developed something new and unique.

Intellectual property is important to protect, because even though it might be little more than words on a page, you don’t want other people copying and using your content. If someone copies your store logo and uses it to sell poor-quality goods, your business could take the reputation hit.

For unique and original inventions, patenting is even more important – patents last a long time, so if you don’t get in quick and patent your invention, someone else may sneak in before you and have a monopoly on producing and selling that invention.

Trademark is probably the most likely thing you’ll want to protect, as having a clear trademark ensures that your store identity is protected, which can help form the basis for growing brand recognition. The trademark system in Southeast Asia generally follows the first-to-file rule, which means that it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been using a mark if someone registers it first. It’s best to file a registration for your logo and store name as soon as you get started (or even beforehand).

Most Southeast Asian countries have implemented an international intellectual property treaty called the Madrid Protocol, which means that you can register your trademarks with the World Intellectual Property Office and they will be protected in other countries that also agreed to the Madrid Protocol.

You can also register your trademark in your own individual country, though processing and registration timelines vary significantly – in some Southeast Asian countries the process will take less than a year, while in others such as Indonesia it could be up to three years. Look up your individual country’s requirements for trademark registration and get going!

Include an unsubscribe link in emails

Sending out marketing emails for your ecommerce business is an excellent way to encourage new customers or long-term customers to engage and purchase more product. When up to 57 percent of email subscribers spend 10 to 60 minutes reading marketing emails each week, getting your emails correct is an opportunity that should not be missed. And it’s not just reading the emails either: you are six times more likely to get a click-through from an email campaign than you are from a tweet.

In the past, anti-spam legislation in Southeast Asia has been sparse, if implemented at all. However, in more recent times, the Southeast Asian region has been facing a shift towards comprehensive anti-spam legislation being established.

China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea already have appropriate legislation in place, while other countries have partially-established laws (like Malaysia and the Philippines). All of the countries that have either spartan or comprehensive laws in place require a functional unsubscribe link to be in place in all marketing emails sent to customers.

Here’s an example of the type of unsubscribe link you should include in your marketing emails, from Book Depository:

Set up a privacy policy

Don’t buy-in to bribery

Conclusion