Terms of Service

These terms bind the merchant who opens a store, every staff account the merchant creates, and anyone who uses the merchant dashboard or the platform's own site.

They do not create a contract between us and a shopper who buys from a store. That contract is between the shopper and the merchant.

Opening an account, opening a store, or continuing to use the service means you accept these terms.

Where a separate written agreement has been signed with the operator, that agreement prevails over these terms to the extent of any conflict.

“The platform” or “eMatjarak”: the software, the merchant dashboard, the hosted storefronts, the APIs and the platform's own website.

“The operator”, “we” or “us”: the company that runs the platform, named in section 3.

“Merchant”: the person or business that opens or runs a store on the platform. The merchant is the seller.

“Staff”: the accounts a merchant creates for their team, with the permissions the merchant chooses.

“Store”: an individual shop on the platform, with its own address, catalog, orders and customers.

“Shopper” or “customer”: a person who deals with a store run by a merchant on the platform.

“Order”: a purchase recorded in a store.

“Content”: products, texts, images, prices, pages and anything else a merchant publishes through the platform.

“Plan”: the tier that sets a store's subscription fee, commission rate and feature limits.

eMatjarak is a software platform operated by [[ TODO: legal review — company legal name / registration number / jurisdiction / registered address ]].

We supply and host the software. We are not the seller of anything sold through a merchant's store, we are not a courier, and we do not take possession of any goods.

You must give accurate information when you create a store, and keep it up to date.

You must be legally able to run a business and to sell what you list. [[ TODO: legal review — the minimum age and legal capacity required to open a merchant account ]]

An account belongs to one merchant. You are responsible for your login details and for everything done by the staff accounts you create, including after someone leaves your team.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, that is used for illegal activity, or that puts the platform or other merchants at risk.

You own your store and everything in it. In particular you are responsible for:

the legality of what you sell and any licence or permit it requires;

product descriptions, images, prices, stock accuracy and any promise made to a customer;

fulfilling orders, arranging delivery and collecting payment, including cash on delivery;

customer service, complaints, returns and refunds for your own orders;

any tax, duty or fee arising from your sales;

the privacy commitments you make to your own customers, and the marketing you send them.

The merchant is the actual seller in every sale made through their store, and is responsible for the relationship with the customer, for fulfilling the order, and for warranty, exchange, return, customer service and every legal obligation attached to the product or the service.

The merchant must publish their own store terms, return policy and privacy notice, and must honour them.

eMatjarak is not a party to the sale. We do not hold, transfer or guarantee customer money: cash on delivery is collected by the merchant or their courier, and wallet transfers go directly between the customer and the merchant.

We do not inspect goods and we do not guarantee any merchant's performance.

A dispute about an order is between the shopper and the merchant. We can help by supplying the order records we hold.

A hosted storefront for your store, a merchant dashboard, order, catalog and customer management, and the payment, shipping, messaging, marketing and reporting features described on this site and included in your plan.

What you can reach depends on your plan, and the limits of each plan — products, staff accounts, AI credits and the rest — are shown on the pricing page.

Features may be added, changed or withdrawn as the platform develops. We give notice before materially reducing a feature that is included in a paid plan. [[ TODO: legal review — the notice period for withdrawing a feature from a paid plan ]]

Two charges may apply, and both are shown on the pricing page before you choose a plan:

a subscription fee for paid plans, billed monthly or yearly in US dollars;

a commission on each placed order, at the rate of your plan.

Commission is calculated on the order total including tax, at the rate of the plan the store is on when the order is placed, and is recorded per currency — amounts in different currencies are never added together.

An order that is later cancelled reverses its commission automatically: an offsetting entry is written so the two net to zero. An order that is refunded without being cancelled keeps its commission. [[ TODO: business decision + legal review — commission on partial refunds, on deliveries refused at the door that are recorded as refunds rather than cancellations, and on orders later found to be fraudulent ]]

Orders you place in your own store to test it are recorded like any other order; cancel them if you do not want them counted.

Commission is currently recorded and reported to you, not collected. Merchants will be given notice before it begins to be charged. [[ TODO: legal review — how commission is invoiced, when it becomes payable, and the consequences of not paying it ]]

Fees are stated without any tax, duty or transfer charge that may apply to them. [[ TODO: legal review — the tax treatment of the operator's fees and any withholding obligation ]]

Subscription invoices are issued per billing cycle and are settled by transfer with a reference, which we reconcile manually.

You can upgrade your plan yourself. The upgrade applies to what your store can do immediately, while the new fee applies from your next cycle and is not prorated. To move to a lower plan, contact us.

An unpaid invoice is treated as overdue 14 days after it is issued, and reminders are then sent every 7 days. A store whose invoice is still unpaid 30 days after it was issued is suspended automatically until the invoice is settled. [[ TODO: legal review — late-payment interest or charges, and whether the notice given before suspension is sufficient ]]

The platform lets a merchant switch on payment methods — cash on delivery, and wallet transfers such as Sham Cash, Syriatel Cash and MTN Cash — and records what the merchant marks as received.

Unless we state otherwise in writing, eMatjarak is not a payment processor, not a payment agent and not a party to any payment. Money moves between the customer and the merchant.

Cash on delivery is the merchant's responsibility, including collection by a courier and any shortfall or loss.

A wallet payment is verified by the merchant against the reference the customer supplies. We record that verification; we do not confirm that a transfer actually cleared.

We do not guarantee that any payment provider is available, that it will accept a merchant or a transaction, or that its fees, limits and rules will stay as they are. A failure at a payment provider is not a failure of the platform.

The platform provides tools to set shipping rates, delivery zones and governorates, to hand an order to a courier and to record tracking.

eMatjarak is not a carrier and is not a party to any delivery contract unless we say so expressly in writing. Delivery is arranged between the merchant, the courier and the customer.

Courier integrations depend on the courier's own service, and may change or stop without notice from us.

Every store gets an address on a subdomain of the platform. The subdomain is part of the service, it stays with the operator, and it may be changed where security, legal or technical reasons require it.

A merchant may connect a domain they own by proving control of it with a DNS record. The domain stays registered to the merchant, who is responsible for registering it, renewing it and keeping its DNS correct. We do not register or renew domains on your behalf.

We may disconnect a custom domain where verification fails, where the store is suspended or closed, or where we receive a credible claim that the domain infringes someone else's rights.

When a store closes, its subdomain is released and its custom domain stops resolving to the store. A dispute over the ownership of a domain, or over a trademark inside it, is between the merchant and the party claiming it.

Your products, texts, images and brand stay yours. By publishing them on the platform you allow us to host, display and reproduce them as far as it takes to run your store and, where relevant, to show your store in search engines and product feeds.

The platform software, its design and its documentation stay ours. Your plan gives you the right to use the service, not to copy or resell it.

We may remove content, or suspend access to it, without closing the merchant's account — where the content is illegal, infringes someone else's rights, carries malicious code, offers something that may not be sold on the platform, defrauds or endangers customers, or creates a serious legal or security risk.

Where we receive a credible complaint that content infringes copyright, a trademark or another right, we may remove the content or suspend access to it while we look into the complaint, and we tell the merchant what was removed and why.

A merchant who believes content was removed in error can contest it by contacting us. [[ TODO: legal review — the notice-and-takedown procedure, counter-notice rights and repeat-infringer policy required under the applicable law ]]

The platform includes an AI writing assistant that drafts product descriptions in Arabic and English from the product information a merchant supplies. It is metered as AI credits against the store's plan.

What it produces is a draft. It can be wrong, incomplete or unsuitable — including about materials, measurements, compatibility, health, safety or any legal claim.

The merchant must read what is generated before publishing it, and is responsible for the published text exactly as if they had written it themselves.

The information sent with a request is processed by our AI provider to produce the answer. Do not put confidential information, your customers' personal data, or anything you would not want to leave your store into a prompt.

We record that a generation happened and how many tokens it used, for metering. We do not keep a separate copy of the prompt or the answer beyond the product content it writes into your catalog. [[ TODO: legal review — the AI provider to be named, its retention period, and confirmation that prompts are not used to train models ]]

Some features need an account or a service belonging to someone else — payment and wallet providers, couriers, e-mail, SMS and WhatsApp providers, and marketing and analytics services such as Google, Meta, TikTok and Snapchat.

Those services are governed by their own terms and policies, and by connecting one you accept them. We do not control them, we do not guarantee that any of them stays available or keeps its current terms, and we are not responsible for what they do with the data sent through them.

Where you give us a key, token or pixel ID for such a service, you confirm that you are entitled to use it and that you have whatever consent that service requires from your customers.

You may not use eMatjarak to sell or promote anything illegal under the law that applies to you, counterfeit or stolen goods, weapons, drugs, or anything you are not licensed to sell.

You may not use the platform to defraud or mislead customers, to send unsolicited bulk messages, to upload malicious code, to attack or overload the service, or to scrape data belonging to other merchants.

[[ TODO: legal review — sanctions, export-control and payment-network restrictions that apply to the operator ]]

Keep your login details confidential, and tell us immediately if you suspect that someone has reached your account without permission.

Give each member of your team their own staff account rather than sharing one login, and remove the account when they leave.

Where there is a security concern we may force a password reset, end active sessions, revoke API keys, or restrict a store temporarily. We tell the merchant when we do.

You may close your store by contacting us. [[ TODO: product — closing a store from the dashboard is not built yet; update this line when it is ]]

We may suspend a store immediately where there is illegal activity, a serious security risk, or unpaid fees. Suspension takes the storefront offline and ends the merchant's active sessions; the store's data is kept.

We may close an account for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, or if we stop offering the service. Except where the law or a serious risk requires otherwise, we give notice before closing an account that is in good standing. [[ TODO: legal review — the notice period for termination by the operator and by the merchant ]]

Closing a store stops future invoices. It does not by itself refund a cycle already paid, and it does not cancel fees already due.

You can export your catalog, orders and customer records as CSV from the dashboard at any time. Export before you close a store.

We back up the platform database daily, keep a limited history and hold a copy away from the server. Backups exist so the service can be restored after a failure. They are not a personal archive: we do not promise to recover an individual product, order or setting that a merchant deleted or changed, and a restore may lose whatever happened after the last backup.

Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. [[ TODO: legal review — how long store data is kept after closure and when it is deleted ]]

We aim to provide the service reliably. Parts of it may be unavailable from time to time for planned maintenance, for urgent fixes, or because of a fault.

We schedule maintenance for quiet hours where we can, and we announce planned maintenance that we expect to interrupt stores. Urgent security or stability work may have to happen without notice.

The service depends on things outside our control — hosting providers, networks and internet access, payment providers, couriers, messaging providers, and government or regulatory restrictions. An interruption caused by one of those is not a breach of these terms by us.

We do not offer a service-level guarantee, an uptime figure or a support response time unless one is agreed in a separate written agreement. [[ TODO: legal review — whether any SLA, uptime commitment or support target is offered, and any service credits ]]

The service is provided as it is and as available. To the extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties, including that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free or fit for a particular purpose.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for lost profit, lost sales, lost data, lost goodwill or other indirect losses arising from the use of the platform, nor for the acts of a merchant, a customer, a courier, a payment provider or any other third party.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law. [[ TODO: legal review — the liability cap, the warranty disclaimers that are enforceable, and any consumer or statutory rights that cannot be excluded under the applicable law ]]

The merchant will defend and indemnify the operator against claims, losses and costs arising from the merchant's own business — in particular from what the merchant sells and any harm it causes; the merchant's content and any infringement of someone else's rights; the merchant's dealings with their customers and their staff; the merchant's tax, licensing and regulatory obligations; and any illegal use of the platform through the merchant's account. [[ TODO: legal review — the enforceable scope and wording of this indemnity, and any reciprocal obligation on the operator ]]

Neither side is in breach for a delay or failure caused by something outside its reasonable control — including war, civil unrest, natural disaster, fire, a power or telecommunications failure, sanctions, embargo, currency restrictions, and acts of a government or a regulator. A payment already due is not excused by this, only postponed.

We may update these terms as the platform changes. The updated version is published on this page with a new “last updated” date, and material changes are announced to merchants in the dashboard. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept it.

We may also change subscription prices, commission rates, plan limits and the make-up of the plans. An increase that affects a paid plan is announced in advance and applies from a later billing cycle, not the current one. A merchant who does not accept a change may move to another plan or close their store before it takes effect. [[ TODO: legal review — the notice period required before a price or commission change takes effect ]]

[[ TODO: legal review — governing law, competent courts or arbitration forum, and the language of proceedings ]]