Terms of service

1. Who this agreement is between

This agreement is between Tekeats, the business that operates the platform (“Tekeats”, “we”, “us”), and the business that has signed up to use it (“you”, “your business”). Tekeats is operated as a sole trader business; we will publish the trader’s name and business address here shortly, and in the meantime both are available on request.

You can reach us about this agreement, or request our business details, at hello@tekeats.com.

These terms take effect when you first use the platform or when an authorised person at your business accepts them, whichever is earlier. If you are accepting on behalf of a business, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

Where we have signed a separate order form, contract or trial agreement with you, that document takes precedence over these terms to the extent of any conflict.

2. What Tekeats provides

Tekeats is software that lets your business take orders directly from your own customers. It includes an ordering website on a domain associated with your business, a management dashboard for your staff, a merchant application for order handling, and customer-facing mobile applications.

Availability differs by surface and changes over time. At the date of these terms the merchant application is available for Android; customer applications are available for iOS and Android. We will not misrepresent what is available, but you should not rely on a surface being available on a particular platform unless we have confirmed it in writing.

Some capabilities are enabled per business, either because they are part of what was agreed with you or because they were switched on for you specifically. Multiple locations and connecting your own domain are examples. A capability that is not enabled for your business is not part of the service to you.

We may change, add to or withdraw parts of the platform. Where a change materially reduces functionality you rely on, we will give you reasonable notice by email or in the dashboard.

3. Your account, your staff and security

You are responsible for everything done through your account, including by your staff. Each person who uses the dashboard must have their own login; shared logins make it impossible to tell who did what, and we do not support them.

The platform provides roles (Owner, Manager and Staff) with different levels of access. Assigning the right role to each person is your decision and your responsibility. Giving a member of staff broader access than their job requires is a risk you are choosing to accept.

You must keep credentials confidential and tell us promptly if you believe an account has been compromised.

Our support and engineering staff can, in limited circumstances, access your dashboard in order to diagnose a problem. Every such access is recorded against the individual who performed it. See our privacy policy for what that means for personal data.

4. Your data and your customers stay yours

Your menu, your branding, your content and your customer records belong to your business. We claim no ownership of them, and we do not use them to market to your customers or to build a competing marketplace. Your customers are not our customers.

We use your data only to provide and support the platform to you, to keep it secure and working, and where the law requires it. We may produce aggregated statistics about platform usage that cannot identify your business or any individual.

You grant us the licence we need to host, copy, transmit and display your content for the purpose of running the service for you. That licence ends when the content is deleted or the agreement ends, save for backups that expire on their normal cycle.

You are responsible for your content being lawful and accurate: that includes allergen and ingredient information, which carries specific obligations under food law. We do not check it and cannot check it.

5. How payments work: read this one carefully

When a diner pays for an order, the money goes to your own payment account. Tekeats does not hold, receive or handle your customers’ funds at any point, and we do not take a share of any order.

Card payments are processed by a provider you contract with directly (Stripe, Revolut or Worldpay) using credentials you supply. Their terms and their fees apply between you and them, and they bill you directly. Card details are submitted from the diner’s browser or app to that provider; they do not pass through and are not stored by Tekeats.

This means you are the seller and the merchant of record for every order. Consumer law obligations that attach to the sale (refunds, cancellations, complaints, allergen accuracy, distance-selling information) are yours, not ours. Chargebacks are between you and your provider.

You are responsible for your own tax on your sales, including VAT where it applies.

If your payment provider suspends or restricts your account, online payment will stop working on your storefront. That is outside our control.

6. Fees and payment to us

Fees for the platform are set out in the order form, proposal or written agreement between us. Published prices exclude VAT, which is added where applicable.

Fees are invoiced monthly in advance, by bank transfer or direct debit, payable within 14 days of the invoice date.

If an invoice is unpaid after 14 days, we may suspend access to the platform after giving you notice. Suspension does not cancel accrued fees. We may charge interest on overdue amounts at the statutory rate under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998.

We may change fees on 30 days’ notice. If you do not accept a change you may terminate before it takes effect.

7. Acceptable use

You must not use the platform to sell anything you are not lawfully permitted to sell, to publish content that is unlawful, misleading or infringes someone else’s rights, or to send communications that break marketing or spam law.

You must not attempt to access another business’s data, probe or test the security of the platform without our written permission, reverse-engineer it, resell it, or use it to build a competing product.

You must not use the platform in a way that damages its performance or availability for others, and you must not use automated means to extract data from it beyond the interfaces we provide.

8. Availability and support

We work to keep the platform available and will handle faults with reasonable skill and care, but we do not commit to a specific uptime figure in these terms. Where a service level is agreed with you, it will be in a separate written document. We would rather state no number than a number we cannot stand behind.

The platform depends on third parties: your payment provider, mapping and address services, push notification services, hosting and networks. An outage at one of those may affect the platform, and those are outside our control.

We may take the platform down for maintenance. Where maintenance is planned and likely to be disruptive, we will try to schedule it outside typical trading hours and to give notice.

Support is provided by email using the contact details we give you when your account is set up. Where we agree specific response times with you, they will be in writing.

9. Suspension and termination

Either party may terminate this agreement by giving 30 days’ written notice, expiring at the end of a billing period.

We may suspend or terminate immediately if you materially breach these terms and do not remedy it within 14 days of being asked, if you become insolvent, or if your continued use presents a legal or security risk we cannot otherwise contain. We will use suspension in preference to termination where suspension is enough.

On termination your access ends. You are responsible for exporting anything you want to keep before that point; ask us and we will help you get your data out while the account is live.

After termination we delete or return your data in line with the data processing agreement and our retention practice. Some records are kept where the law requires it: tax and accounting records in particular.

Fees already incurred remain payable. Prepaid fees are not refunded where you terminate for convenience. Where we terminate for convenience, or you terminate because we have materially breached these terms, we refund prepaid fees for the unexpired period pro rata.

10. Data protection

Where we process personal data on your behalf (your customers’ order and account details, principally), you are the controller and we are the processor. Those arrangements are set out in our data processing agreement, which forms part of this agreement.

Where we process personal data for our own purposes (your staff’s dashboard accounts, our billing records, enquiries made through our website), we are the controller and our privacy policy applies.

You must have a lawful basis for the customer data you put into the platform and for the messages you send through it, and you must give your customers the privacy information they are entitled to.

11. Intellectual property

The platform, its software and the Tekeats name and marks belong to us or our licensors. Nothing in these terms transfers any of it to you. You get a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the platform for your own business while this agreement is in force.

If you send us feedback or suggestions we may use them without obligation to you. We will not identify your business in doing so without asking.

We would like to name your business and use your logo as a customer reference. We will not do so without your written permission, and you can withdraw it at any time.

12. Warranties, liability and indemnity

We provide the platform with reasonable skill and care. Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties, including that the platform will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for a particular purpose you have not told us about.

Neither party limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that, neither party is liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of anticipated savings, loss of goodwill, or indirect or consequential loss.

Subject to the two paragraphs above, each party’s total liability arising in any twelve-month period is limited to the total fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. A cap tied to fees paid is the conventional position for software of this kind.

You indemnify us against claims arising from your content, your sales to your customers, or your breach of these terms.

13. Confidentiality

Each party will keep the other’s non-public information confidential, use it only for the purposes of this agreement, and protect it with at least the care it applies to its own confidential information.

This does not apply to information that is already public, is independently developed, or must be disclosed by law, and where disclosure is legally required, the disclosing party will tell the other where it is permitted to.

14. General

We may update these terms. For material changes we will give you 30 days’ notice by email or in the dashboard. Continuing to use the platform after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not accept it, you may terminate.

You may not transfer this agreement without our consent. We may transfer it as part of a reorganisation or sale of our business, on notice to you.

If any provision is unenforceable, the rest continues in force. A failure to enforce a right is not a waiver of it.

This agreement, together with the data processing agreement and any order form, is the entire agreement between us on its subject matter.

Nothing in this agreement creates a partnership, agency or employment relationship between us.

This agreement is governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.