Terms of Service

The person who creates a Store is its owner. The owner can invite other people to work in the Store and choose their role and the areas they can use. Each invited person signs in with their own Merkora account and accepts these Terms. Some actions are reserved for the owner, including managing the plan and billing, pausing the Store and deleting it.

You are responsible for everyone you give access to. Everything your staff, contractors and agencies do in your Store counts as done by you, whether or not you approved it. Give people only the access they need, and remove it promptly when they no longer need it.

We treat the owner shown in our records as the person entitled to control the Store. If there is a disagreement about who owns a Store, we may ask for proof, and we may limit access to the Store until the disagreement is settled. We are not required to decide ownership disputes. If someone builds a Store for you, make sure the right person is recorded as its owner.

Use a strong password that you do not use anywhere else, and keep it secret. You are responsible for everything done through your account. Tell us right away at info@altiusapps.com if you believe someone has accessed your account or your Store without permission. We are not responsible for losses that result from your credentials not being kept secure.

Each Store runs on a paid plan, which you choose when you create the Store. Our plans, what they include and their current prices are on our pricing page. The plan, price and billing date are shown again at checkout before you pay, and those are the ones that apply to your Store. Prices are in U.S. dollars. Each Store has its own plan and is billed separately.

Some plans are arranged with our sales team. If you sign an order form or another written agreement with us, it controls wherever it differs from these Terms.

Your plan renews automatically every month until you cancel. When you subscribe, we charge the payment method you give us for the first month on that day. Your plan then renews each month on the renewal date shown in your Store admin under Settings, then Billing. Each time it renews, we charge your payment method on file the then-current price of your plan plus any tax. This continues until you cancel.

Before you subscribe, the checkout shows your plan, its price, that it is billed monthly, and your next billing date. After you subscribe, the Billing page shows your plan, renewal date, payment method and invoices. By subscribing, you authorize us and our payment providers to make these recurring charges.

You can cancel online at any time. The Store owner cancels in the Store admin: open Settings, then Billing, choose “Cancel subscription” and confirm. You do not need to call or write to us. If you cannot reach the Billing page, email info@altiusapps.com and we will help.

Canceling stops future charges. Your plan stays active until the end of the billing period you have already paid for, and then it ends. The date is shown when you cancel. Until that date you can change your mind and choose “Resume subscription”. To avoid being charged for the next period, cancel before your renewal date.

Canceling your plan does not delete your Store or its data. Deleting a Store is a separate step: see Ending your use of Merkora. Once your plan has ended, we may take the storefront offline and limit the admin as described in After a plan ends or an account is terminated.

Fees are not refundable. Unless the law requires it, these Terms say otherwise, or we agree otherwise in writing, we do not give refunds or credits for part of a billing period, for time or features you did not use, or for time when your Store was paused or suspended. If you believe we charged you by mistake, tell us promptly and we will look into it.

The Store owner can switch between self-serve plans on the Billing page. The new plan starts right away. Before you confirm, the Billing page shows the new price and the date it will first be charged. Unless that page says otherwise, the new price applies from your next invoice, and we do not charge or credit the difference for the current period.

If we offer a free trial, a discount or another promotion, the terms shown with the offer apply, including how long it lasts. If a trial or promotion leads into a paid plan, we tell you the price and the date of the first charge before it happens, and you can cancel before that date to avoid the charge.

Our prices do not include taxes. Where the law requires it, we may add sales tax, VAT or similar taxes to your invoice based on your billing information, and you agree to pay them. You are responsible for any other taxes on your purchase of the Services, apart from taxes on our income.

Keep a valid payment method on file. If a charge fails, your plan may be marked past due. We will let you know, for example on the Billing page or by email, and we may try the charge again. If we still cannot collect payment after telling you, we may suspend your Store or end your plan. You remain responsible for any amounts you owe.

We may change our prices and what each plan includes. We give you at least 30 days' notice before a price increase applies to you, by email to the Store owner or by a notice in the Store admin. The new price applies from your first renewal after the notice period. If you do not agree, cancel before the change takes effect. If you keep your plan after that date, you accept the new price.

You are the seller of record for everything sold through your Store. Each sale is a contract between you and the Shopper. Merkora is not a party to it, and is not the seller, a reseller, your agent or a marketplace operator.

You are responsible for fulfilling orders, delivery, customer service, returns, refunds, warranties and complaints. Your Store must tell Shoppers who they are buying from, including your business name and how to contact you.

You are responsible for your products and for everything you say about them: descriptions, images, prices, availability, comparisons, testimonials and advertising. All of it must be true, must not mislead, and must be backed by evidence that you hold before you say it.

Take particular care with claims about health, safety, performance, the environment and earnings. Do not claim that a product diagnoses, treats, cures or prevents a disease unless the relevant regulator has approved that claim. You must follow the rules of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and their equivalents wherever you sell. These include rules on advertising, endorsements, labeling, product safety, required warnings, pricing and discount claims, and subscriptions you sell to Shoppers.

You must hold every license, permit and registration needed to sell your products. What you may sell is also limited by our Acceptable Use Policy.

Some age-restricted goods may be sold only with our prior written approval: see Restricted goods and services. If you sell them, you are responsible for checking Shoppers' ages and for following the law on their sale and delivery. The Services do not verify a Shopper's age or identity for you.

You are responsible for working out which taxes and duties apply to your sales, registering with the tax authorities, and collecting, reporting and paying those taxes.

The Services let you enter tax rates and shipping rates and apply what you enter at checkout. They do not decide which taxes you owe, register you, file returns or pay taxes for you. If a rate is wrong or missing, that is your responsibility. Merkora does not collect or remit tax on your sales.

You must publish and follow your own policies for your Store. At a minimum these are a returns and refunds policy, a shipping policy, your terms of sale, and a privacy policy that accurately describes what you and the tools in your Store collect and how Shoppers can use their rights.

If a theme or template includes sample or placeholder text, it is only an example. It is not legal advice. Replace it with policies that fit your business.

You decide which analytics, advertising pixels and other tracking tools run in your Store, and you are responsible for making sure that tracking is lawful. That means giving Shoppers the notices the law requires, getting consent where it is required, honoring opt-outs including browser signals such as Global Privacy Control, having the right agreements in place with the advertising and analytics providers you connect, and completing any assessments or registrations that privacy law requires of you.

The Services include a consent banner and privacy controls. The banner appears when you turn on Merkora's Analytics app or connect an advertising or analytics pixel through Apps. It is designed to hold back the tags that the Services load for those tools until the Shopper makes a choice, and to respect a Global Privacy Control signal. You control its settings, including its wording, the link to your privacy policy, and whether it is shown to every visitor or only to visitors in the EU, EEA, UK and Switzerland. You are responsible for choosing settings that fit where your Shoppers are.

The banner controls only the scripts it knows about. Scripts you add yourself, for example in theme code or in an imported theme, are held back by the banner only if you mark them in the way the Services require for consent. Scripts that are not marked run whatever the Shopper chose, and you are responsible for them.

If you sell health-related products, you must use the sensitive-product setting as required by the Acceptable Use Policy.

The consent banner and our other privacy tools are aids. They are not legal advice, and using them does not guarantee that your Store complies with the law.

The Services can send emails to Shoppers on your behalf and in your Store's name. These include order and shipping confirmations and, if you turn them on, marketing emails such as welcome messages, reminders about unfinished checkouts and requests for reviews. You are the sender of these messages.

You are responsible for getting the consent the law requires before marketing to anyone, for the content of your messages, for honoring every unsubscribe, and for following the laws on commercial email and text messages wherever your Shoppers are.

The Services are designed to send marketing emails only to addresses recorded as opted in, to include an unsubscribe link, and to keep unsubscribed addresses suppressed. Do not try to get around those controls. The Services do not check that an opt-in was validly obtained. That is your responsibility.

If you send text messages or other marketing through a service you connect to your Store, you are responsible for getting the prior consent the law requires for those messages and for following that service's rules.

If you collect or show reviews, they must be genuine. Do not write, buy or arrange fake reviews. Do not publish reviews from yourself, your staff or people connected to you without saying so. Disclose any reward given for a review. Do not hide, change or hold back reviews because they are negative, and apply the same moderation rules whatever the rating.

The review tools in the Services are designed to collect reviews from Shoppers who bought the product. How you moderate and present reviews is your responsibility.

You are responsible for making your Store's content accessible to people with disabilities. This includes the text alternatives you write for images, your color and font choices, your media, your custom code and any theme you import. We do not promise that any theme, template or Store meets a particular accessibility standard or law.

You must follow the export control, sanctions and customs laws of the United States and of every other place that applies to you. Do not sell or ship to embargoed countries or regions or to sanctioned people or organizations, and do not export controlled items without the license required. You are responsible for the import rules, duties and paperwork of the places you ship to.

If you send us ideas, suggestions or other feedback about the Services, you give us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free license to use it for any purpose, without payment and without any obligation to you. Feedback is not confidential.

We may offer features labeled beta, preview, early access or test. They are optional. They may change or be withdrawn at any time, they may be less reliable than the rest of the Services, and they may come with extra terms. Beta features are provided as they are, without any warranty or commitment, and you use them at your own risk.

You can stop using the Services at any time. There are three separate steps, and the Store owner takes each one in Settings:

• Pause the Store. Setting the Store's status to paused hides it from Shoppers. Pausing does not cancel your plan or stop billing.
• Cancel the plan. This stops future charges at the end of the period you have paid for, as described in How to cancel. It does not delete the Store.
• Delete the Store. You confirm by typing the Store's name. You cannot delete a Store while it has open orders, meaning unpaid orders or paid orders that have not been fulfilled. Resolve those first.

Deleting a Store is permanent and takes effect immediately. It removes the Store together with its products, orders, customers, themes and files, and the Store's address and any connected domains stop working. It cannot be undone, and you should assume that a deleted Store cannot be restored. Deleting a Store ends its plan, and no refund is due for the time left in the billing period.

Copies may remain for a limited time in backups and logs. Information you sent to a Third-Party Service stays with that service until you delete it there.

To close your Merkora account itself, email info@altiusapps.com after you have deleted your Stores.

Export what you need before you delete a Store and before your plan ends. The Services provide downloads for certain data, such as your orders, products and customers. Not every type of record has a download. Check what is available, and make your own copies of anything else you need, such as images and theme files.

Image links inside an export file point to files that we host. They stop working once the Store is deleted, so download the images you need as well.

You are responsible for keeping the business records the law requires you to keep, such as tax and order records.

We may suspend all or part of the Services for a Store or an account. For example, we may take the storefront offline, switch off checkout, disable a feature or some code, or limit access to the admin. We may do this if we reasonably believe that:

• you have broken these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy;
• fees are overdue and remain unpaid after we have told you;
• your Store, your products, Your Content or Your Additions create a risk of harm or legal liability for Shoppers, for us or for anyone else;
• there is fraud, a security incident or unauthorized use of your account;
• the law, a court, a regulator, the payment processor or one of our infrastructure providers requires it;
• we have received repeated intellectual property complaints about your Store; or
• you gave us false information, or we cannot verify who you are.

We give you notice and a chance to fix the problem first where that is reasonable. We may suspend without notice when the matter is urgent. We tell you why, unless the law prevents it, and we lift the suspension once the problem is resolved. Fees continue during a suspension, and no refund is due for it.

We may terminate your account or close a Store:

• if you seriously break these Terms, or do not fix a breach within the time we give you;
• if you break these Terms repeatedly, including under the repeat infringer rules in the Copyright Policy;
• if the Store's plan has ended and has not been renewed; or
• for any other reason, with at least 30 days' notice. In that case we refund any fees you have paid in advance for the time after the termination date.

When a Store's plan ends or we terminate your account, your right to use the Services for that Store ends. We may take the storefront offline and limit or remove access to the admin. You still owe any unpaid fees, and you remain responsible for your obligations to Shoppers, including fulfilling or refunding open orders.

After a plan ends or an account is terminated, we may delete the Store and its data. We give you at least 30 days' notice before we do, so that you can export the data the Services make available. We may delete sooner, or withhold access, where we terminated for a serious breach, where the content is unlawful, or where the law or someone else's rights require it. After deletion we have no obligation to keep or provide any of your data.

The parts of these Terms that are meant to continue after termination do so. These include what you owe us, Merkora's property, Disclaimers, Limitation of liability, Your indemnity, Disputes, Governing law and courts and General terms.

Before starting an arbitration or a court case, the party with the Dispute must send the other a written notice. Send your notice to info@altiusapps.com or by mail to Altius Web Solutions LLC, [Mailing address]. We send ours to the email address on your account.

The notice must:

• give the name and contact details of the party sending it and, if it comes from you, your account email and the Store involved;
• describe the Dispute and the facts behind it;
• say what you want, including any amount of money; and
• be signed by the party personally, and cover that party's Dispute only.

For 60 days after the notice is received, you and Merkora will try in good faith to resolve the Dispute, including by talking directly if either side asks. Neither side may start an arbitration or a court case until those 60 days have passed. Any time limit for bringing the claim is paused during those 60 days.

If a Dispute is not resolved informally, it will be decided by binding arbitration between you and Merkora alone, and not in court by a judge or jury, except as this section says. You and Merkora each give up the right to a jury trial and to have a court decide the Dispute. An arbitrator can award the same individual remedies as a court. The arbitrator's decision is final, a court can review it only in limited ways, and it can be entered as a judgment in any court with authority.

The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section. The arbitration is run by an established, independent arbitration provider that Merkora designates, under that provider's rules for disputes of this kind in force when the arbitration starts, as changed by this section. You can ask us at any time which provider is designated. If no provider is designated, or the designated provider is not available, you and Merkora will agree on another. If we cannot agree, either of us may ask a court to appoint an arbitrator. One neutral arbitrator decides the Dispute.

Hearings take place by video, by phone or on written submissions, unless the arbitrator decides that a hearing in person is needed. A hearing in person takes place somewhere reasonably convenient for both sides or, if we cannot agree, in [State]. Each side pays its share of the arbitration fees as the provider's rules set out, and its own lawyers' fees, unless the rules, the law or the arbitrator's award say otherwise.

The arbitrator decides questions about the meaning and enforceability of this section and whether a Dispute falls within it. The exceptions are the questions this section gives to a court.

Disputes are resolved only on an individual basis. You and Merkora each agree to bring claims only for yourselves. Neither of us may bring a claim as a plaintiff or class member in a class action, a collective or consolidated action, a private attorney general action or any other representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not combine more than one party's claims, except as Coordinated claims allows, and may give relief only to the individual party asking for it and only as far as that party's own claim requires.

A court, not the arbitrator, decides whether this waiver can be enforced. If a court decides that it cannot be enforced for a particular claim or request for relief, that claim or request alone is decided in court, after the arbitration of everything else is finished.

You can opt out of arbitration within 30 days. To opt out, email info@altiusapps.com within 30 days after you first accept these Terms. Give your name and the email address on your Merkora account, and say clearly that you opt out of arbitration. Send the email from your account email address if you can.

Opting out does not affect your account or any other part of these Terms. If you opt out, Disputes are decided in the courts named in Governing law and courts, and the class action waiver still applies as far as the law allows. An opt-out covers only you. Once you have opted out, you do not need to do it again when these Terms are updated.

• Small claims. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small claims court, as long as the claim qualifies and stays in that court.
• Intellectual property and urgent relief. Either of us may go to court for an injunction or similar order to stop the infringement or misuse of intellectual property rights, or unauthorized access to the Services, without first using the informal process or arbitration.
• Regulators. Nothing in this section stops you from reporting a problem to a government agency.

If 25 or more similar Disputes are raised against Merkora by or with the help of the same law firm, or a group of firms working together, they are handled in stages. In the first stage, the claimants' lawyers and Merkora's lawyers each choose 10 Disputes, 20 in total, to go to individual arbitration, each before a different arbitrator unless both sides agree otherwise. The other Disputes wait. No arbitration is filed and no fees are due for them, and every time limit for bringing them stays paused from the date of their informal notice.

When the first stage has been decided or settled, both sides take part in a good-faith mediation covering the remaining Disputes. A Dispute that is still unresolved 30 days after that mediation begins may then go forward. The claimant may choose individual arbitration, which proceeds in further stages of up to 50 Disputes at a time, or may choose to bring the claim individually in the courts named in Governing law and courts.

A court, not an arbitrator, decides whether this process applies and whether it can be enforced. If a court decides that it cannot be enforced for a Dispute, that Dispute is decided in court on an individual basis instead of in arbitration.

If we change this Disputes section, other than to update our contact details or the designated provider, you may reject the change by emailing info@altiusapps.com within 30 days after we give notice of it. The version you last accepted then continues to apply to you. A change never applies to a Dispute for which an informal notice was sent before the change took effect.

This section continues to apply after these Terms end. Apart from what the class action waiver and coordinated claims parts say about themselves, if any part of this section cannot be enforced, the rest still applies.

We add, change and remove features as the Services develop. Where a change removes something important to how you run your Store, we try to give you reasonable notice. If a change materially reduces the core Services you pay for, you may cancel your plan.