4 Practical Reasons Every Small Retailer Needs Liability Insurance
Retailers often disregard the importance of liability insurance. They often prioritize protecting their business from risks such as fire, theft, flood, and other disasters. While any good property insurance coverage can protect your business from these risks, they are by no means the only risk factors that can damage your investment.
In a lot of ways, consumer lawsuits are more damaging than a flood. Lawsuits can not only be expensive to fight and settle but they often end up damaging a retailer’s reputation. This is why all the best small business insurance packages or BOPs include both property insurance and liability coverage. There are a few different types of liability insurance that apply to small local retailers. In this post, we unfurl the complex insurance terms and help you understand the basics of liability insurance and why they are necessary.
Understanding Liability Insurance
Most insurance experts recommend general liability insurance for most local retailers. This insurance includes product liability coverage or professional liability coverage. This helps businesses settle claims of property damage and injuries caused by their business operations or products. Typical coverage amount of general liability policies are between 1 to 2 million dollars.
General liability insurance, however, is not a replacement for workers’ compensation policy as it does not cover injuries or death of employees in the workplace.
Commercial general liability insurance, which is more comprehensive than regular general liability coverages, provides wider protection against a long list of eventualities. This includes paying for the medical treatment of a customer if he or she is injured inside the store. This allows store owners to settle disputes without going into a lengthy legal battle. However, CGLs usually do not include product liability coverage, which is included in general liability policies.
Reasons You Need Liability Insurance
To Protect Yourself from Customer Lawsuits: Customer lawsuits can be filed for all sorts of reasons. Barring the typical instances of bodily injuries, customers can even sue a business for harming their reputation. Commercial liability insurance not only helps you to pay the damages instructed by the court, but it also covers the legal fees of fighting the case.
To Serve with Confidence and Without Interruption: Without the fear of lawsuits bankrupting your business you can serve your customers with confidence. You are also much more likely to handle a situation assertively when someone threatens you with a frivolous lawsuit.
Give Landlords Confidence About You Renting Their Space: Commercial general liability policies help businesses pay claims made by landlords. Landlords often sue or claim compensation for damages caused by business renting their property. A commercial general liability covers these claims and allows you to settle landlord disputes.
Preventing Lawsuits by Proactively Paying for Medical Cost: Lawsuits can lead to negative press and can damage your business’s reputation forever. To prevent getting sued you can offer to pay the medical cost of a customer who got injured in the store. Liability insurance packages often cover the medical cost of injured customers to settle the issue out of court.
