Terms of Service

The agreement

By creating a Crate account or using the service you agree to these terms. If you are doing that on behalf of a business, you are confirming you are authorised to accept them for it, and the business is the party bound.

These terms cover the Crate dashboard, the storefronts Crate hosts, and the marketing site. Where a separate signed agreement exists between you and Crate, that agreement wins over this page for anything the two of them cover differently.

Your account, and the staff you invite

You are responsible for your account, for keeping your sign-in credentials secure, and for what the staff you invite do inside it. Keep your contact details accurate, because they are how Crate reaches you about a payout, a security event or a change to these terms.

Tell us promptly if you believe somebody is using your account without permission. Crate provides two-factor authentication, per-permission staff roles and a way to end every other session at once, and you should use them.

Acceptable use

Use Crate lawfully. Do not sell what the prohibited products page says cannot be sold, do not infringe anybody else's rights, and do not attempt to disrupt, overload, probe or reverse-engineer the service or anybody else's store running on it.

Most of the prohibited list is not Crate's preference. It is the law in the markets Crate operates in, the card network rules, and the terms of the payment provider you connect. Crate cannot waive any of the three on your behalf.

Your content, and what Crate may do with it

You keep ownership of everything you add to Crate: your products, your images and video, your written copy, your customer records and your orders. Nothing on this page transfers any of it.

You grant Crate the licence it needs to host, store, back up, reproduce and display that content for the purpose of running the service for you, and to show it to the buyers you show it to. That licence is limited to running the service, it is not exclusive, and it ends when the content is deleted.

Crate does not use your content or your buyers' data to train a model, its own or anybody else's, and does not sell it. That is a term rather than a policy statement.

Fees, trials and billing

Every plan starts with a free trial and no card is required to begin one. When you move to a paid plan, the fee and the billing period are the ones shown when you choose it, and they are charged for the period selected.

You can change or cancel your plan from your own account. Cancelling stops the next renewal rather than refunding the period already running, unless the law where you are says otherwise, in which case it says otherwise and Crate follows it.

Prices are shown in your own currency where Crate supports it, and tax is applied according to where your business is registered. A price change is announced before it takes effect, and never applied to a period already paid for.

Payments, payouts, and who the merchant is

This is the section most worth reading carefully, because it is where Crate differs from a marketplace. When one of your buyers pays, the money moves from the buyer to the payment provider you connected, under the agreement you have with that provider. Crate is not the merchant of record, does not take custody of your funds, and is not a party to that payment.

Practically, that means your payout schedule, your settlement currency, your chargeback liability and your account limits are set by your provider and not by Crate. If a payout is late or an account is frozen, your provider is who resolves it, and Crate will give you every record it holds to help you do that.

It also means the contract of sale for anything you sell is between you and your buyer. Refunds, returns, delivery and the consumer rights your buyer has are yours to honour. Crate gives you the tools; the obligation is yours.

Availability, and what Crate does not promise

Crate works to keep the service fast and available and monitors it, but the service is provided as it is, without warranties beyond those the law requires and does not allow to be excluded.

There is no contractual uptime commitment and no service credit scheme today. There is also no published status page with historical uptime, because a page reading all systems operational with no monitor behind it would be worse than publishing nothing. Both are named on the security page's open list rather than left out of this one.

If a written availability commitment is a condition of your purchase, ask, and you will get a real answer about what Crate can commit to rather than a hopeful one.

Liability

To the extent the law allows, Crate's total liability to you is limited to the fees you paid Crate in the period before the claim arose, and neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profit or lost data as a separate head of claim.

Nothing in this section limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law where you live does not permit to be limited. Where your local consumer law gives you a protection you cannot waive, you keep it, and this page does not try to take it.

Data protection

For the personal data inside your store you are the controller and Crate is your processor. For your own account data Crate is the controller. The data processing addendum sets out the terms of the first relationship and the privacy policy governs the second.

Where the addendum and these terms disagree about the processing of personal data, the addendum wins. Everything else stays here.

Suspension and ending the agreement

You can close your account at any time from the dashboard. Export what you need first, because store data is deleted within ninety days of closure and a copy you hold is worth more than a copy you have to ask for.

Crate may suspend a store that breaks the acceptable use section, that a payment provider or card network requires be stopped, or that is being used to harm somebody. A suspension comes with a written reason you can reply to and be read by a person, and payouts already earned on lawful orders are still paid.

Crate may end this agreement on reasonable notice if it stops offering the service. In that case you get notice long enough to move, and help exporting.

Changes to these terms

Crate may update these terms as the service changes. A material change is posted here with a new date before it takes effect, and account holders are told by email rather than being left to notice. Continuing to use Crate after that date is acceptance of the new version.

Questions about these terms, including a countersigned copy for your records, go to [email protected].