Terms of Service

These terms are the agreement between you and the company operating Shipify (entity to be confirmed, "Shipify", "we", "us") covering the shipify.to website and the label service we intend to run on it.

They are a draft. Nothing in them is in force today. When we open the service we will date this document, remove the draft banner, and ask you to agree to it before you can buy anything. If you do not agree, do not use the service — the site itself will still be free to read.

In plain terms This page is a preview. You are not agreeing to anything by reading it.

Right now the only thing you can do with Shipify is join the early-access list and try the demo. That means:

• We are not selling labels, taking payments, or moving anyone's parcels.
• The app demo is a demonstration using sample packages. Nothing you do in it is purchased, printed, or sent to a carrier.
• Every feature described on this site as coming "at launch" is a plan, not a promise. Plans change, and some of them will.
• Joining the list does not reserve a price, a rate, a place in a queue, or a right to an account. It gets you an email when we open.
• We may never open. If we decide not to launch, we will tell the list and delete it.

In plain terms Nothing is live yet, and the waitlist is a mailing list — not a contract.

Shipify is a reseller of shipping labels. At launch we intend to buy carrier services at commercial rates, and sell you a label at that rate plus one flat markup per label. That markup is how we make money, and it is the only thing we plan to charge for.

We are not a carrier. We do not collect, sort, transport, or deliver anything. The carrier named on your label does that, under the carrier's own terms, and the carrier is who is responsible for the physical handling of your parcel — including delays, damage, loss, and the outcome of any claim.

The current published rate figures on this site come from our rate table at shipify.to/rates, which names its source and the date it was read. Those figures are carrier rate-table figures; they are not an offer, and they change when the carrier changes them.

In plain terms We sell you the label. The carrier moves the box.

At launch, buying a label will require an account. To open one you must be at least 18 years old, able to enter a contract, and shipping from an address we serve.

• Keep your login details to yourself. Anything bought through your account is treated as bought by you.
• Give us accurate information, and keep it current — especially the addresses you ship from and the email we send receipts to.
• Tell us promptly at support@shipify.to if you think someone else has access to your account.
• One person or business per account. Do not resell access to your account.

What you tell us when you sign up

Shipify is a tool for people running a business — resellers, small shops, anyone sending their own orders. It is not a consumer mailing service, and we do not build it for one. So the sign-up form asks you to tick one box, and ticking it is a representation you are making to us:

The box says "I'm buying for a business and I'm 18+."

By ticking it you are telling us both halves of that sentence are true: you are at least 18, and you are buying labels for a business or trade rather than as a consumer. If either half is not true, do not tick it and do not open an account — and tell us, because we would rather turn away a sign-up than hold one we cannot honour.

That representation matters beyond politeness. It is the reason the consumer-protection rules that would otherwise reshape sections 14, 15 and 20 are not written into this document, and if we later learn it was untrue we may close the account, refund what is refundable under section 08, and stop there.

We record the tick: which document you agreed to, and when. How that record is kept is section 21.

The price you pay for a label is the carrier's commercial rate for that service, weight and zone, plus one flat Shipify markup per label. There is no subscription, no monthly minimum, and no per-user fee in the plan.

• The full price, including the markup, is shown before you pay. We will not add a fee after you have seen a total.
• Carrier rates change — usually once a year, sometimes with surcharges in between. When they change, the price changes with them. We publish the date our rate table was read on the rates page.
• Prices are in US dollars. You are responsible for any tax that applies to you.

If we change the markup

We may change the markup. It is the only price we set ourselves, so it is the only one we can promise to change in the open. When we change it:

• The new markup applies only to labels bought after it takes effect. It is never applied backwards to a label you have already paid for.
• We post the new figure on the rates page, with the date it starts, before it starts — not after.
• Account holders get an email about it at the same time. You do not have to be watching the rates page to find out.
• Money already sitting in your Shipify balance is not repriced. It buys labels at whatever the markup is on the day each label is bought, which is the figure printed on that quote.
• If you do not want to ship at the new markup, stop buying labels and ask us to close the account. We refund what is refundable under section 08.

What we cannot promise is the carrier's half. Postage moves when the carrier moves it, often with weeks of notice and sometimes with none, and no clause here can hold it still.

In plain terms One flat markup per label, shown to you before you pay, never charged twice, and never raised on a label you already bought.

A label is a license to move one specific parcel, once, on the service you paid for. When you buy one you agree that:

• The weight, dimensions, service and addresses you enter are accurate.
• You will use each label for the one parcel it was bought for. Copying, reusing or selling on a label is fraud against the carrier, and we will cooperate with the carrier when they investigate it.
• The contents are lawful, correctly declared, and permitted by the carrier.
• You will drop the parcel with the correct carrier within the window that carrier allows for the label.

Labels are issued electronically. You print them yourself, on your own printer and stock. We do not ship supplies.

Carriers weigh and measure parcels in their own network. If a parcel is heavier, bigger, or going further than the label was bought for, the carrier bills the difference back to us as an adjustment, and we pass that exact amount on to you. We do not mark adjustments up.

We will itemize every adjustment against the label it came from, and tell you the reason the carrier gave. If you think an adjustment is wrong, write to us and we will raise it with the carrier — the carrier makes the final call, not us.

An adjustment is taken from your Shipify balance, and you will see it in your transaction list as its own line, named for the label it belongs to. If the balance does not cover it we will ask you to top up rather than reaching for a card you saved for something else. Unpaid adjustments can suspend an account, because the carrier has already billed us for them.

Adjustments run the other way too. If a carrier re-rates a parcel down and credits us, that credit is yours, and it lands in your balance the same way.

In plain terms Under-declare a parcel and the carrier will charge the difference. We pass on their number, with their reason attached, and we do not take a cut of it — in either direction.

A label you never used is money you should get back — all of it. At launch, when you ask for a label back and the carrier confirms it went unused, you get the postage and the markup, credited to your Shipify balance. We do not keep our cut on a label that never moved a parcel. The same rule is stated on the rates page and in the support answers, in the same words, on purpose.

Three things qualify that promise, and we would rather you read them here than discover them at the point you need the money.

1 · It is credit, not a card reversal

The refund is credited to your Shipify balance, where it buys the next label. It does not go back to your card, because the postage did not come from your card — it came from money we had already handed the carrier, and the carrier returns it to us as credit against the account we buy postage through.

That balance is a closed loop. It buys labels and pays carrier adjustments, and it does nothing else: no cash withdrawal, no transfer to another Shipify account, no sending it to anyone. If you close your account with money still in it, write to us and a person will return the remaining balance by reversing the payments that funded it, back to where they came from. That is a manual process handled by a human at launch, not a button — and it is the only route money takes out of Shipify.

2 · It runs on the carrier's clock, not ours

Carriers set two windows: how long you have to ask, and how long they take to confirm before releasing the money. We cannot pay you before they pay us, and we will not credit a balance against a refund that might still be denied.

We are not printing those two numbers here yet. We will publish the exact carrier windows on this page and on the support page before we sell a single label. A pre-launch company inventing a refund window is writing a number it has never had to meet, and you would be entitled to hold us to it.

3 · Some requests are refused, and here is the whole list

We will refuse, or the carrier will refuse and we will pass the refusal on with the reason they gave, when:

• The label has been scanned into the carrier's network. It has been used, even if the parcel is later returned to you — the service was performed.
• You asked outside the carrier's window for that service.
• The carrier denies the request on its own review. Their call is final; ours is to tell you what they said rather than paraphrase it.
• The label has already been refunded, voided, or credited once. Nothing is refunded twice.
• The charge is a carrier adjustment that was correctly applied under section 07.
• The label was bought with a payment we never received, or one that was later reversed or charged back.
• The account is under investigation for label reuse or carrier fraud. We hold the request until that is resolved, and then either credit it or explain why not.

Anything else is a bug or a misunderstanding, and both of those are ours to fix. If a refund is refused and you think the reason is wrong, reply to the message that refused it and a person will look at the label.

In plain terms Never shipped it? You get the postage and the markup back as Shipify balance, after the carrier confirms. Scanned labels, expired windows and correct adjustments do not come back, and we will always tell you which one applied.

Every carrier publishes its own list of prohibited and restricted items, and that list governs. You are responsible for reading the rules of the carrier you have chosen and for declaring the contents correctly.

You may not use Shipify to send anything that is illegal where it is picked up, in transit, or where it is delivered; anything the carrier forbids; anything requiring a license, permit or hazardous-materials declaration you do not hold; or anything mailed to defraud the person receiving it.

Getting this wrong is not a paperwork problem. Mis-declared contents can be seized, destroyed, or referred to law enforcement, and the liability for that is yours.

Use the service the way it is meant to be used. Do not:

• Break into, probe, overload, or interfere with the service or anyone else's account.
• Scrape rates or bulk-query the site outside an interface we have offered you for it.
• Use someone else's payment method, or a payment method you are not authorized to use.
• Impersonate another sender, or falsify a return address to shift liability.
• Use the service to build a competing rate database and pass our figures off as your own.

If you find a security problem, please tell us at support@shipify.to before you tell anyone else. We will not pursue you for a good-faith report.

Your address book, your shipment history and your customers' details are yours. We use them to run the service you asked for — quoting rates, buying labels, showing tracking, handling refunds and support — and for nothing else.

You give us permission to pass the details a shipment needs to the carrier that is carrying it, because a label cannot exist otherwise. What we collect, how long we hold it, and how you get it deleted is set out in our privacy notice.

In plain terms We do not sell your data, and we do not sell your customer list. Ever.

Running this service means depending on other companies: the carriers that move parcels, a payment processor that handles card details, and the hosting and email providers behind the site. Their terms apply to their part of the job, and we do not control what they do.

In particular, the carrier's terms and its liability limits govern the parcel itself. When a parcel is lost or damaged, the claim is a carrier claim. We will help you file it and chase it; we cannot decide it.

We intend to keep the service up and to say so honestly when it is down. We are not publishing an uptime guarantee or a response-time commitment, because a pre-launch company that promises a number it has never had to meet is making it up.

We may change, suspend or withdraw parts of the service, including carriers and features, with notice where we reasonably can.

Except where the law does not allow it, the service is provided "as is" and "as available", and we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, that a rate shown will still be available when you buy, or that a carrier will meet its own delivery estimate. Rate figures published on this site are for comparison and are not a quote until a total is shown to you at checkout.

Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

To the fullest extent the law allows, neither party is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, or lost data, even if warned that they were possible.

Our total liability to you for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amounts you paid us in the three months before the claim arose, or one hundred US dollars.

This cap is a limit on damages. It is not a limit on money we are simply holding for you: a refund owed under section 08, a balance owed back on account closure, and an overcharge caused by our own pricing bug are debts, and no cap in this section reduces them. We would not respect a company that used a liability clause to keep money it had already agreed was yours.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Some states do not allow these limits, so they may not apply to you.

In plain terms If we get something wrong, our exposure is capped near what you paid us. Money we owe you back is not capped by this section. The value of the parcel itself is a carrier claim, and carrier limits apply to it.

You agree to cover us for claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from what you shipped or how you used the service — in particular, mis-declared or prohibited contents, reused labels, and use of the service by someone you let into your account.

You can close your account whenever you like. We will refund what is refundable under section 08 and stop charging you.

We may suspend or close an account for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, for suspected fraud against a carrier or a cardholder, or where a carrier requires it. Where we reasonably can, we will tell you why and give you a chance to fix it first. Immediate suspension is reserved for fraud, safety, and a legal obligation to act.

Sections 11, 14, 15, 16, 19 and 20 survive the end of the agreement.

We will update these terms as the service becomes real. When we make a change that matters to you, we will change the version and date at the top of this page and email account holders before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that date is how you accept the new version; if you would rather not, close the account and we will refund what is refundable.

These terms will be governed by the laws of state to be confirmed, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and the courts of that state will have exclusive jurisdiction. We will fill this in — with the operating entity's real home state — before this document takes effect, rather than guessing at it now.

How a dispute actually gets resolved — talk first, then arbitration — is section 20.

This is the section people skim, so we have written it to be read. It changes how a disagreement gets decided, and one part of it asks you to give something up.

Step one: thirty days of talking

Before either of us files anything anywhere, we both agree to spend thirty days trying to fix it by email — you write to support@shipify.to, we write to the address on your account, and each of us says plainly what we want. Most things end here, and the ones that do not are at least understood by the time they leave.

Step two: individual arbitration

If thirty days does not fix it, the dispute is settled by binding arbitration before a single arbitrator, under the rules of an arbitration provider to be named before this document takes effect, seated in the state named in section 19. We are not going to pick an administrator and a fee schedule in a draft and then quietly swap them later — the name and the rules will be written here, in this paragraph, before anyone can agree to it.

The arbitrator decides the dispute, not the question of whether these terms are enforceable in the first place: that one is for a court.

The part you are giving up

Arbitration is private, faster, and cheaper than court, and it is also less appealable — an arbitrator's decision is close to final, and there is no jury. And:

• Claims are brought individually. You agree not to bring a class action, a collective action, or a representative action against us, and not to join someone else's. We give up the same thing.
• If a court decides the class-action waiver above cannot be enforced for a particular claim, then that claim leaves arbitration and goes to court — the rest stays in arbitration.

Two ways out of this section

• Small claims. Either of us can take a qualifying dispute to small claims court instead, and nothing in this section stops that.
• Opt out. You can reject arbitration entirely. Email support@shipify.to with the subject line ARBITRATION OPT-OUT and the email address on your account, within 30 days of first agreeing to these terms. That is the whole process. It costs nothing, it does not affect your account, we will not ask you why, and we will not treat you differently for it — we will reply confirming it, so you have the receipt.

Either of us can also go to court for an injunction over intellectual property or unauthorised access, without waiting for arbitration.

If we change this section later, the change does not apply to a dispute we already knew about.

In plain terms Talk to us for thirty days first. After that it goes to an arbitrator instead of a court, one claim at a time, no class actions. Small claims court is still open, and you can opt out of the whole thing with one email in your first 30 days.

A terms page that can be edited quietly is worth nothing to you. So the version you agree to is pinned, and pinned in a way we cannot revise after the fact.

When you tick the box at sign-up, we record four things: your account, that the document was /terms.html, the moment you ticked it, and a version hash — a SHA-256 fingerprint of the exact bytes of this page as they were served at that moment.

• Change one character of this page — a comma, a clause, a date — and the fingerprint becomes a completely different value. There is no edit small enough to slip past it.
• Your account page shows the version you agreed to and whether it still matches the document published here. When it stops matching, that is us having changed something, and section 18 says you get an email about it.
• The fingerprint is computed from the page itself, live. It is not a number we type in and maintain by hand, so it cannot drift away from the truth.

We do not print the current fingerprint on this page, and the reason is arithmetic rather than reluctance: a page that contains its own hash changes the moment the hash is written into it, which makes the printed value wrong immediately. If you want the value, it is on your account page, and support will confirm it against our log.

In plain terms We keep a fingerprint of the exact page you agreed to, so neither of us can argue later about what it said.

Questions about this draft — including the parts you think are unfair — go to support@shipify.to. A person reads that inbox. If you spot something that needs fixing before launch, that is exactly why this is published early.