Terms of service

This is an agreement between you — the person or business opening a shop — and Shopsy, the platform your shop runs on. It starts when you create an account and continues until one of us ends it.

If you bought something from a shop that runs on Shopsy, this is not the document you want. Your purchase is a contract between you and that shop, under their terms. Refunds and cancellations explains where you stand and who to ask.

Staff you invite into your shop work under your account and under this agreement. You are responsible for what they do in it.

Hosted software for running a shop: a storefront on one of our designs, a product catalogue, a cart and checkout, orders and their statuses, delivery areas and charges, discount codes, appointments, analytics, notifications, and accounts for your staff. Your shop is served at a permanent path of the form /store/your-link.

What we are not is as important, because it decides who is answerable for what:

• We are not the seller. You sell to your customer; we are not a party to that sale and never become one.
• We are not a payment processor and we are not a merchant of record. We never hold, route or touch your customers’ money.
• We do not hold your stock, pack your parcels or deliver anything.
• We do not set your prices, write your product terms, or decide your delivery or returns policy. Those are yours, and your customers will hold you to them.

We may add features, change how one works, or retire one. Where a change would break something you rely on, you will hear about it before it happens rather than afterwards.

You need to be able to enter a binding contract where you live — in most places that means eighteen or older. If you are opening a shop for a business, you need to be authorised to agree to this on its behalf.

• Keep your password to yourself. Anything done with your credentials is treated as done by you.
• Two-factor authentication is available and takes about a minute to set up. Turn it on.
• Give your staff their own accounts rather than sharing yours. Removing someone ends their access straight away; a shared password does not.
• Tell us promptly if you think somebody else is in your account.

Changing your password or enrolling in two-factor authentication signs every other device out. That is deliberate.

Your products, photographs, written copy, customer records and order history remain yours. We store and serve them so that your shop works, and we do nothing else with them. We do not sell them, we do not use them to advertise to anyone, and we do not use one merchant’s data to help another.

What you upload has to be yours to upload. Photographs you do not have the rights to, and copy taken from somebody else’s shop, are your liability, not ours.

Where the writing assistant drafts a product description from your photographs, the result is yours and so is the responsibility for it. Read it before you publish it: it is a draft written from pictures, and it can be confidently wrong about a material, a size or an ingredient. It never sets your price, your stock level, or where a product appears.

Deleting your account deletes your stores, your catalogue, your orders and your analytics, in one step, immediately. There is no recovery window and no backup we can restore from. Export anything you want to keep first.

You connect your own payment gateway — Paystack, Flutterwave, Monnify or Stripe — with your own keys, under your own agreement with them. Your customer pays into your gateway account and the money settles to you. It does not pass through us, we hold none of it at any point, and we take no commission or share of it.

• Your gateway’s own terms, fees, settlement times and verification requirements are between you and them. We cannot speed up a settlement, release a held balance or reverse a charge.
• Your secret key is encrypted before it is written down and no screen in the product will ever show it back to you. If you lose it, get a new one from your gateway.
• Chargebacks, disputes and reversals are handled in your gateway and are yours to answer.
• Pay on delivery and bank transfer are available whether or not you connect a gateway. Money taken that way never comes near us either.

Everything a customer pays is priced on our side, from your own catalogue, in the same transaction that writes the order — a browser never sends us a price. That protects you from a tampered basket; it does not make us a party to the payment.

Opening a shop is free. There is no subscription, no plan to choose, no commission, and no share of your revenue. There is nothing to cancel if you stop using it.

Your payment gateway charges you its own fees on every transaction, as agreed with them. That is the only cost of selling here, and none of it reaches us.

If paid features are ever introduced, you will be told before they apply to you, the free tier you signed up on will be honoured or you will be given notice, and you can close your shop and take your data rather than accept them.

Two short lists. The first is about what you sell, the second about the platform itself.

• Do not sell anything you are not permitted to sell where you are, or where your customers are — that includes anything requiring a licence you do not hold.
• No counterfeits, stolen goods, or products you have no right to distribute.
• No fraud, and nothing designed to take money for goods that will not arrive.
• No malware, and nothing that would attack the people who visit your shop.
• Do not collect card numbers yourself, anywhere, by any means. That is what the gateway is for and the reason it exists.
• Do not impersonate somebody else’s business, or take a shop link intended to be mistaken for theirs.

• Do not probe, scan or attack the platform, and do not try to reach another merchant’s data. Report anything you find to support instead — we would much rather hear it from you.
• Do not scrape other shops, work around rate limits, or automate the product in a way that degrades it for other merchants.
• Do not resell or white-label the platform itself as if it were yours.

Anyone you invite into your shop is held to this too, and you are answerable for them.

We work to keep the platform up and we do not promise a percentage. There is no uptime guarantee in this document, because one we could not honour would be worth less than the honesty of not offering it. Planned work is announced in the dashboard before it happens.

Some parts of the platform are switches an operator holds — the writing assistant can be turned off, new sign-ups can be closed, new shops can be closed. Existing shops keep trading in every one of those cases.

Support is a person, reachable at the addresses in the footer of every page. We do not publish a response time, and we do answer.

We may suspend a shop that breaks the acceptable use section, or where we are required to. A suspension stops the storefront serving; it does not delete anything, and the reason is recorded. Where we can tell you first, we will — and where a shop is causing active harm, we will act first and explain immediately afterwards.

You can close or delete your shop yourself, at any time, from the dashboard, without asking us and without an exit interview. Deleting is immediate and permanent.

If we ever wind the platform down, you will get reasonable notice and time to take your data out. Orders already placed are not ours to cancel in either direction — they are between you and your customer.

The platform is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and to the extent the law allows, warranties that are not written here are excluded.

We are not liable for sales you did not make, for your payment gateway’s outage or decisions, for your courier, for what a customer does, or for a dispute between you and somebody who bought from you. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss.

Because we charge you nothing, a liability cap expressed as "the fees you paid us" is a cap of zero, and it would be dishonest to write that sentence as though it were a concession. What it means in practice: if something goes wrong that is genuinely our fault, we will fix it, and money is not the remedy this agreement offers.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

Before anything formal, write to support. Nearly everything that has ever looked like a dispute here has turned out to be a misunderstanding that a person could clear up in a day, and that route stays open regardless of anything below.

Which law this agreement runs under, and where a dispute would be heard, is set out at the foot of this page along with who you are contracting with.

Your own consumers keep whatever rights the law of their country gives them, and nothing in this agreement takes those away.

The date at the top of this page is the date the text last changed. Small corrections are made as they are found; a change that materially affects what you agreed to is announced by email and in the dashboard before it takes effect.

Continuing to use the platform after a change takes effect is how you accept it. If you would rather not, close your shop — there is nothing to cancel and no charge for leaving.