Blanxer User Compliance Guideline Under Nepal's E-Commerce Act, 2081

Almost certainly yes. The Act reaches further than most sellers assume, and the boundary it draws is not about how big you are but about whether you take orders electronically.

What counts as e-commerce

The Act defines e-commerce as buying or selling goods or services through an electronic platform: a website, a mobile app, software, an internet or intranet system, or a social media marketplace. It applies throughout Nepal, and it applies to sellers based outside Nepal who supply goods or services to Nepali customers electronically.

You must be a registered business

Only a firm, company or organisation registered under prevailing law and permitted to trade may conduct e-commerce. Selling from an unregistered Instagram or TikTok page now sits outside the law rather than beside it. Goods banned from electronic sale by law or by Gazette notice cannot be sold online at all.

You must have an electronic platform, with one exception

Every e-commerce business must establish its own electronic platform. The Act carves out one group: micro-entrepreneurs and cottage-level businesses may sell through someone else's platform instead of building their own.

This is the legal pathway for small sellers, and it is why trading on an established platform works. Running your store on Blanxer means the requirement to have a platform is met without you building and maintaining that infrastructure. It does not move your other duties: product disclosures, delivery, returns, privacy and grievance handling all remain yours in full.

The Act assigns duties by role, so the first thing to settle is which role you occupy. You are the seller and the business. Blanxer is the ecommerce platform your store runs on. Your buyer carries duties too.

This is not a marketplace arrangement. Your products do not sit in a shared catalogue beside competitors, and the platform does not own your customer. Your store is your own domain and your own brand, which is exactly why the Act treats you as the business behind it. When you apply for your portal listing you name Blanxer as the electronic platform you trade on, covered in section 04.

Your duties as the business (Section 15)

These are yours. No platform can discharge them for you:

• Display the full product disclosures clearly and accessibly on your storefront
• Publish everything else prevailing law requires
• Keep transaction records for the retention period set by tax law
• Deliver no later than the time you committed to, force majeure excepted
• Post no reviews, ratings or feedback on your own products, whether yourself or through anyone else
• Run no advertising that misrepresents what a product is or does
• Honour warranty and guarantee conditions for the stated period
• Take back, cancel and refund anything not as displayed, delivered late, or defective
• Carry the liability if you publicly vouch for a product's authenticity

The first four are fines if breached. The last five sit in the upper penalty tier and can carry imprisonment, so treat fake reviews, misleading ads, warranty and refusing a lawful return as the serious ones. Full breakdown in section 10.

The buyer's duties (Section 17)

The Act is not one-directional, which matters when you are handling a difficult claim. A buyer must honour the contract, must not act with intent to harass anyone, must inspect what was delivered against the contract, and must raise any complaint promptly. A buyer who accepts delivery, waits weeks, then claims a mismatch stands on weaker ground than one who reports at once. It does not dilute your obligations, but good faith runs both ways.

Two rules that close the usual escape routes

You cannot point at the manufacturer: a business may not dodge a complaint about a product it sold by arguing it did not make, import or supply the item. And your staff are you, because anything your employees or representatives do in the course of e-commerce is deemed done by the business itself.

Section 4 requires every online store to publicly identify the legal entity behind it, completely, clearly, and where consumers can easily reach it. In Blanxer this is not something you build by hand. There is a dedicated panel that collects each required detail once and renders a compliant block across your whole storefront footer.

Field reference

Each field maps to a labelled entry in your footer. Fill every field marked required. A partially filled panel produces a footer that does not satisfy the Act.

What your customers see

Once saved with Show in website enabled, Blanxer renders the details as a structured block above your footer's copyright line, on every page of your store:

Illustration of the rendered footer block. Your own values replace the examples above.

One nuance worth knowing: the complaint officer block shows three values, but only the name comes from the Complaint Officer field. The phone and email beneath it are your compliance Contact Number and Email. If you want grievances routed to a dedicated person, put their direct line and address in those two fields rather than a general sales contact.

Every one of these must belong to your own legal entity. Trading under another business's registration or PAN, even a friend's or a family company's, is a separate offence and undoes the point of the disclosure.

Disclosures the panel does not collect

Section 4 asks for a few things beyond the panel's fields. Add these to your footer or an about page so the complete set is present:

Still configured separately

The compliance panel covers your business identity. These footer and header items live elsewhere in the dashboard and are equally mandatory:

Listing your business with the Department of Commerce, Supplies and Consumer Protection is mandatory from the day you start selling. The listing number it issues is what goes into the E-commerce Number field in section 01.

What your application must contain

• Business name and address, the registering body, and your registration certificate number
• Identity details of the proprietor, the partners, or the directors, depending on how you are registered
• A clear description of your business
• VAT number or PAN
• Phone, email, social media links and contact address
• The number and location of your branches or outlets, if you have any

A contract concluded electronically is a valid, binding contract under Nepali law. Your policy pages are where that contract lives, so four of them must exist on your website and be linked from your footer.

Beyond ordinary contract requirements, yours must spell out terms on delivery, cancellation, return, exchange, warranty or guarantee, and refunds. The four pages below are how you satisfy that in practice.

You do not need to write these from scratch. We publish a copy-paste pack of all eight pages, already written to this Act. Fill in the brackets and publish.

How to publish and link these

1. Create all four pages in Pages, then Add Page
2. Go to Appearance, Components, Footer, Customized Footer
3. Add each page under the Legals section

Section 6 sets out exactly what every listing must disclose. Trading without these is an offence in its own right, and missing fields are the most common reason for consumer complaints under the Act.

Two things to police continuously rather than once. Do not leave products listed that you cannot actually supply, and do not sell expired or near-expiry goods, which matters most in food, cosmetics and supplements. Both turn into a mismatch against your own listing, which is exactly what triggers a mandatory return.

Example listing

Returnability deserves particular care. You must state on every listing whether the item can be returned, and if so on what conditions and within what period. The return right in section 07 is triggered by a mismatch against these disclosures, so what you write here is the standard you will be measured against.

Sections 8, 9, 10 and 18 govern what happens after the customer clicks buy. This is where the Act is most specific, and where the consumer protections are strongest.

Payments

Foreign-currency transactions must comply with federal law. If you import goods bought from a foreign e-commerce business, or export to foreign buyers through a platform operated in Nepal, the export side requires payment to be assured through the banking system first.

Delivery

• Hand over the goods at the place, date and time, or within the period, that the contract specifies, to the buyer or their representative
• If the buyer wants to collect in person from one of your outlets, you must let them
• Before dispatch either side may propose changing the delivery place, person or time. If both agree, you deliver on the changed terms and any fee adjustment is by mutual consent

Section 18 places the duty to deliver on the business regardless of what other laws say, wherever the contract names a place, time or person. You may contract a courier, and carrier duties under consumer protection law apply to them too, but a failed delivery remains your liability toward the buyer.

Returns and refunds

This is the strongest consumer protection in the Act, and it is stricter than the seven-day goodwill policy most stores publish. The trigger is not the customer changing their mind. It is the delivered item not matching what you disclosed on the listing.

Because the right keys off a mismatch with your own disclosures, the cheapest way to limit returns is to describe products accurately in the first place.

Section 12 gives your customers rights over the data you hold about them, and gives you a duty of confidentiality that is enforceable under prevailing law.

The same duty covers anything a customer gives you that is not an order. Do not publish testimonials, photographs, reviews or private messages without their consent.

Treat these as requirements rather than features. A store with no way for a customer to edit their details or close their account is not compliant. Make sure customer accounts are enabled and that the edit and deletion paths actually work before you rely on them.

Section 33 requires more than a named officer in your footer. It requires a working complaint operation with a statutory clock, and an online mechanism to run it.

Penalties come in two tiers. The lower one is a fine an inspection officer can impose directly. The upper one is prosecuted by the state in the Consumer Court and can carry imprisonment.

How a Tier 2 case runs

• The inspection officer investigates, and the government attorney decides whether to prosecute
• Cases are filed in the Consumer Court, or the District Court where no Consumer Court exists
• The Government of Nepal is the plaintiff. These are state-prosecuted cases, not private disputes
• Cases follow summary procedure, which means faster trials
• Prosecution under this Act does not bar prosecution under any other law for the same conduct

If an inspection officer fines you and you disagree, you may appeal to the Director General within 7 days. They must decide within 35 days, and that decision is final.

Monitoring and complaints

• The Department monitors and inspects e-commerce. Where a sector regulator exists for your product category, its regime applies as well
• If an inspection finds deficiencies in your platform, the Department can issue directions you are obliged to follow
• Anyone who learns of a violation may complain with evidence to the Director General or an inspection officer, including electronically, and may request anonymity, which must be honoured
• Inspection officers must investigate within 6 months
• The Consumer Protection Act applies to everything this Act does not itself cover, including quality, labelling, pricing, dispute resolution and compensation

There are incentives as well

The Government may, by Gazette notice, grant exemptions, facilities or concessions to micro, cottage and small industries that sell Nepal-made products above a set threshold through electronic platforms. If you manufacture locally and sell online, this is worth watching.

The duties in this Act are yours, but meeting them is mostly a systems problem. Here is what any ecommerce platform has to give you to make each one practical, and where to find it in Blanxer.

Most obligations in this Act are not one-off tasks. They are records you must produce, disclosures that must stay current, and clocks you must prove you met. Use this as a checklist against any platform you evaluate:

Where the line sits

A platform can carry the infrastructure. It cannot carry your legal position. Registering your business, listing on the portal, describing products truthfully, delivering when you said you would and never gaming your own reviews are yours alone, and no software substitutes for them.

What good tooling does is remove the excuse. If your records, invoices, tracking and complaint history are byproducts of running the store properly, then meeting this Act stops being a project and becomes a consequence of normal operations.

Work through these once and your store is compliant. Revisit whenever your business details change, and remember the 48-hour and 7-day clocks when they do.