Senegal's Consumer Protection and Pricing Law: What Changes for B2C Sellers (Law No. 2021-25)
Law No. 2021-25 of 12 April 2021 replaced Senegal's 1994 pricing and consumer framework with a far more detailed regime — mandatory invoicing content, a list of unfair contract terms, a statutory cooling-off right for distance and doorstep sales, and rules that reach foreign sellers whose activity affects the Senegalese market. Here is what a business selling to consumers in Senegal needs to check in its contracts and sales process.
Direct answer. Yes — since Law No. 2021-25 of 12 April 2021 took effect, any business selling goods or services to consumers with an effect on the Senegalese market must comply with a materially stricter regime than before: standardised, mandatory invoice content for every professional sale, a statutory list of contract clauses that are automatically void as unfair, and a seven-day right of withdrawal for distance sales and doorstep solicitation. The law does not only bind businesses established in Senegal — it expressly extends to any operator, wherever based, whose operations have a direct or indirect effect on the Senegalese market or a substantial part of it. For a foreign or regional group selling into Senegal online, this is not a formality: it means the group's standard-form terms of sale, drafted for other OHADA markets, cannot simply be reused there without a Senegal-specific review.
Legal basis
Law No. 2021-25 of 12 April 2021 on Prices and Consumer Protection (Journal Officiel de la République du Sénégal No. 7438, 10 July 2021) repealed the relevant parts of the 1994 pricing law and consolidated consumer protection into a single, eight-title text. Its territorial reach is set at Article 2: the law applies to any production, distribution or service activity carried out in Senegal, and to any person, wherever established, whose operations or conduct have a direct or indirect effect on the Senegalese market. Articles 12 and 13 make an invoice compulsory for every sale of goods or provision of services between a professional and a consumer, and fix its mandatory content — the parties' exact names and addresses, commercial-register and national business-identification numbers, unit and total prices net and gross of tax, and any price reduction applied. Articles 15 to 20 govern unfair terms: a clause creating a significant imbalance between the parties to the detriment of the consumer is void, Article 18 lists eighteen categories of clauses presumed unfair — including a unilateral right for the professional to modify the goods or service, to change price after the contract is concluded without a corresponding right for the consumer to walk away, or to limit the professional's liability for serious harm — and Article 20 makes this entire section a matter of public policy (d'ordre public), meaning the parties cannot contract around it. Articles 21 to 34 regulate distance selling and doorstep solicitation (démarchage): Article 31 gives the consumer seven days to withdraw without penalty, Article 23 bars the seller from taking payment before the goods are received or the service accepted (absent contrary agreement), and Article 24 again makes these rules of public policy. Articles 66 to 68 separately prohibit tied sales, unjustified refusal to sell, and making one sale conditional on another.
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Analysis
Three consequences follow for a business operating in or selling into Senegal. First, the extraterritorial scope at Article 2 means an e-commerce platform or a regional distributor headquartered elsewhere in the OHADA zone cannot treat Senegal as covered by a single set of pan-regional terms and conditions: if the activity reaches Senegalese consumers, Senegalese law on unfair terms and distance selling applies regardless of where the seller is incorporated or where its servers sit. Second, because Articles 20, 24 and 34 declare the core protections to be of public policy, a choice-of-law or choice-of-forum clause pointing to another jurisdiction will not, by itself, displace them for a Senegalese consumer — a point regional groups often miss when they assume a group-wide governing-law clause settles the question. Third, the invoicing requirements at Articles 12 and 13 are broader than what many businesses already issue for domestic OHADA sales: an invoice lacking the buyer's registre du commerce number or failing to itemise a price reduction is not merely an accounting gap, it is a compliance failure under a specific consumer-protection statute, distinct from — and additional to — general commercial and tax invoicing rules.
Recommendation
We recommend that any client selling goods or services to consumers in Senegal — directly, through a subsidiary, or through an e-commerce channel reaching Senegalese buyers — run its standard consumer-facing terms of sale against the Article 18 list of presumptively unfair clauses, with particular attention to unilateral price-variation, unilateral modification and limitation-of-liability clauses common in regional templates. Distance-selling and doorstep-sales processes should be checked for the Article 31 seven-day withdrawal mechanism and the Article 23 payment-timing rule, both of which need to be reflected in the actual checkout or contracting flow, not only in a policy document. Finally, invoice templates used for Senegalese consumer sales should be reviewed against Article 13's mandatory content before being deployed at scale, since correcting a template after a large volume of non-compliant invoices have issued is materially harder than validating it beforehand.
Further reading
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