4.3. Contracts concluded by telephone

Article 8(5) contains a special rule for contracts concluded by telephone requiring that the trader’s identity and the commercial purpose of the call are made clear at the beginning of the conversation. Since this rule is ‘without prejudice to paragraph 4’, traders may limit the information provided during the telephone call in accordance with Article 8(4). Article 8(6) contains another regulatory choice available to Member States. Some Member States have used this regulatory choice in a more limited way, i.e., they applied the respective additional requirements only to contracts concluded by telephone call initiated by the trader. ‘Durable medium’ in this provision refers to paper and other durable media as explained in Recital 23: ‘Durable media should enable the consumer to store the information for as long as it is necessary for him to protect his interests stemming from his relationship with the trader. Such media should include in particular paper, USB sticks, CD-ROMs, DVDs, memory cards or the hard disks of computers as well as e-mails.’ Therefore, Member States may require that both the trader’s confirmation of the offer and the consumer’s consent be on a durable medium, which is not necessarily on paper and may be, for example, in an email exchange.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-09-25 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.