Merchant Agreement

1. Who this agreement is between

This agreement is between Shopeazy Commerce (Pty) Ltd, a company registered in South Africa ("we", "us"), and the business that opens a ShopEazy account ("you", "your business", "the merchant").

The ShopEazy platform is wholly owned and operated by Shopeazy Commerce (Pty) Ltd. Where this agreement says "ShopEazy" it means that company.

If you accept these terms on behalf of a business, you confirm that you are authorised to bind that business. You must be at least 18 years old.

ShopEazy provides software. We are not a party to anything you sell, we do not take ownership of your stock, and we are not the seller of record for your orders. Your customer buys from you.

2. Your account

You are responsible for everything that happens under your account, including anything done by your staff or anyone you give access to. Keep your login details private and tell us promptly if you think someone else has access.

The information you give us — your business details, contact details and store category — must be accurate and kept up to date. We rely on it for billing, for compliance checks, and for the legal pages published on your storefront.

We may need to verify your identity or your business before or after you start trading, and we may pause an account while we do.

3. What you may sell

You may sell lawful goods and services that match the store category you selected. You are responsible for holding any licence, permit or registration your trade requires, and for meeting the law that applies to what you sell — including the Consumer Protection Act.

The following may not be sold or promoted through ShopEazy:

• Adult or pornographic content or services
• Illegal drugs, or drug paraphernalia
• Weapons, ammunition, or explosives
• Counterfeit, replica, or stolen goods
• Gambling, betting, or lotteries
• Hate speech, or content that harasses or endangers others
• Regulated goods sold without the required licence (alcohol, tobacco, medicines)
• Fraud, deceptive, or misleading schemes
• Anything that infringes someone else’s intellectual property
• Anything illegal under South African law

4. What ShopEazy charges

You pay a subscription for your plan, and a platform fee on each sale you make through your store. The platform fee depends on your plan:

Starter: 3.5% per transaction

Growth: 2.8% per transaction

Scale: 2.1% per transaction

Shopeazy Commerce (Pty) Ltd is not currently a registered VAT vendor. No VAT is charged on our subscription or platform fees, and we cannot issue you a tax invoice for them. If that changes we will tell you before it affects what you pay.

The detail of how fees work:

• ShopEazy charges a platform fee on each sale you make through your store, at the rate for your plan above.
• The fee is a percentage of the order total. There is no fixed per-transaction charge.
• The fee is a percentage of the order total your customer paid, including any VAT you charged them.
• ShopEazy is not currently a registered VAT vendor, so no VAT is charged on our fees and we cannot issue a tax invoice for them.
• Fees are billed monthly in arrears to the card on your account. A month totalling less than the minimum is carried over to the next month instead of being charged.
• Your payment gateway (Yoco, Peach, iKhokha and the like) charges its own processing fees. Those are separate, are set by them, and are your responsibility.
• Your plan subscription is billed separately from platform fees.
• We will give you 30 days notice before changing these rates.

5. Taking payment, and delivery

You connect your own payment provider and your own courier accounts. Money from your sales goes to your payment provider and then to you — it does not pass through ShopEazy, and we never hold your customers’ funds.

Your agreement with your payment provider and with any courier is between you and them. Their fees, their settlement times, their chargeback rules and their credit decisions are theirs, not ours. We pass instructions to them on your behalf; we cannot reverse a payment or a shipment they have already processed.

Where we show you a courier price, it is the price that courier quoted at that moment. A courier may re-measure or re-weigh a parcel after collection and bill you differently, and that difference is between you and them.

6. What you owe your customers

Your customer is buying from you, so the duties a seller owes a consumer are yours. That includes describing goods accurately, honouring the cooling-off and returns rights the Consumer Protection Act gives consumers, delivering within the time you promised, and handling complaints.

You must keep the legal pages on your storefront — terms, privacy, refunds and delivery — accurate and current. We publish a starting version for you, but they describe YOUR business, and you are responsible for their content.

If a customer has a dispute with you, it is yours to resolve. We may, but are not obliged to, give either of you information we hold about the order.

7. Personal information and POPIA

For the personal information of your customers, you are the responsible party under the Protection of Personal Information Act and ShopEazy is your operator: we process it on your instructions in order to run your store.

We will process that information only to provide the platform to you, keep it secure with appropriate safeguards, and notify you without undue delay if we become aware of a compromise affecting it.

You must have a lawful basis for collecting what you collect, tell your customers what you do with it through your privacy policy, and not use the platform to collect personal information you do not need.

For your own account information — your business and billing details — ShopEazy is the responsible party, and our own privacy policy applies.

8. Availability of the service

We work to keep ShopEazy available, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may take it down for maintenance, and we will try to do that at quiet times and to tell you first where we reasonably can.

Parts of ShopEazy depend on other people’s services — payment providers, couriers, messaging platforms and hosting. When one of those is unavailable, the part of ShopEazy that relies on it may be too.

9. Who carries what risk

Nothing in this agreement limits liability that cannot be limited in law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or under the Consumer Protection Act where it applies to you.

Subject to that, ShopEazy is not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of goodwill or indirect or consequential loss, however it arises.

Subject to that, our total liability to you for all claims in any twelve-month period is limited to the total amount you paid ShopEazy in fees during that period.

We are not liable for the acts or omissions of your payment provider, your courier, or any other third party you connect to your store.

10. Indemnity

You will hold ShopEazy harmless against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from what you sell, from your breach of this agreement or of the law, or from a dispute between you and one of your customers.

We will tell you promptly about any such claim, will not settle it without talking to you, and will let you take over its defence if you want to.

11. Ending this agreement

You may close your account at any time from your ShopEazy console. Fees already charged are not refunded, and a subscription runs to the end of the period you have paid for.

We may suspend or close your account if you breach this agreement, if you sell something on the prohibited list, if we are required to by law, or if your fees go unpaid after we have asked you to settle them. Where the circumstances allow it, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.

When the agreement ends your storefront comes down. You can export your data before you close your account, and we keep what the law requires us to keep for as long as it requires.

12. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. If a change materially affects you, we will tell you at least 30 days before it takes effect and ask you to accept the new version. If you do not accept it, you may close your account before it takes effect.

We give at least 30 days’ notice before increasing the platform-fee rate or your subscription price.

13. General

This agreement, together with the fee schedule and any plan details shown when you subscribe, is the whole agreement between us about the platform.

If a court finds any part of it unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

You may not transfer this agreement to someone else without our written consent. We may transfer it as part of a sale or reorganisation of our business.

This agreement is governed by South African law, and the South African courts have jurisdiction over any dispute about it.

14. Getting hold of us

Write to hello@shopeazy.co for anything about this agreement, your account, or how we handle personal information.