Terms of Service

NeedEverything (“we”, “us”) is the operator of needeverything.com and of the software your Chat Shop runs on. You are the business or person who creates a shop on it. Your shop’s visitors and buyers are shoppers.

This agreement is between us and you. It is not an agreement between us and your shoppers. When somebody buys from your shop, they buy from you: you are the seller, the goods or services are yours, the money is yours and the obligation to deliver is yours. We provide the software the sale happens in.

If you are a shopper and you are reading this, the part that concerns you is the refunds policy, which explains who you actually bought from and what we can and cannot do if something goes wrong.

You need an account to open a shop. Give us a real name and an email address you actually read — every notice in these terms is sent there. Keep your password to yourself.

You can invite team members to your shop. How many depends on your plan. Anything a person you invited does in your shop counts as something you did, so remove people when they leave.

You must be legally able to enter into a contract, and old enough to run a business. NeedEverything is not for under-18s.

A plan is a monthly subscription for one shop, priced in South African rand. It sets how large your catalogue may be, how many team members you may have, how much of the analytics you can see, and whether you can send custom-priced offers in a chat. You need an active plan (or a trial that has not ended) to publish your shop and keep it published.

Some plans include a free trial. The length is shown on the plan when you pick it, and a trial costs nothing — it is not a discount on a charge, so there is nothing to refund if you stop during it.

Plan limits are enforced, not billed. When you reach your catalogue or team limit we refuse to add another one and tell you which plan would allow it. We never quietly let you go over and charge you for it.

On top of the plan, we charge a commission on the sales your shop makes through NeedEverything. It is currently 10%. Your own rate is shown on your billing page beside every month’s statement.

What it is calculated on. The commission is worked out per order, on the order’s subtotal less any discount you gave, floored at zero. That figure — not the total your customer paid — is what the rate is applied to.

• Delivery is excluded, up to a limit. Shipping you collect on a courier’s behalf and pay straight out again is not your money, so it comes out of the base. What comes out is the delivery on the order up to R200 or the value of the goods being delivered, whichever is larger — which covers a real courier fee, including a large item going a long way. Anything charged as delivery above that is treated as part of the price and is in the base.
• VAT is excluded, if you are registered. If you have told us you are a VAT vendor, your prices are treated as VAT-inclusive and the VAT is divided back out before the rate is applied, so we never charge commission on SARS’s share. If you are not registered, every rand of the price is yours and the base is the full amount after discount.
• Only sales we processed and verified. We charge on orders whose payment was confirmed through a gateway connected to your shop. A payment still pending is not charged. A payment you took outside NeedEverything entirely — cash at a counter, an EFT you arranged yourself, a card machine we have never heard of — has no record here and is never billed.
• Refunds credit it back. When a refund completes, the commission on the refunded share is credited to you. The rule is set out in the refunds policy.

Amounts are worked out in whole cents and rounded to the nearest cent. The rate used is the one in force during the month the sale settled in, and it is written onto that month’s bill — a later change to the rate never rewrites a month already worked out.

Small balances wait. If a month’s commission comes to less than R50 we do not charge it on its own; it carries forward and is added to the next bill. We carry a balance for up to 90 days before presenting it regardless.

The prices and the rate above are what we charge today. We can change both at any time — the monthly plan price, the commission rate, the plan limits, and which plans exist at all.

How you are told. Before a change takes effect we put a notice on your dashboard and email your store’s contact address. The change then applies from your next billing month.

Carrying on is accepting. If you keep using NeedEverything after the change takes effect, you have accepted the new price or rate. If you do not want to, cancel your plan before the effective date. You will keep the month you have already paid for and you will not be charged the new price.

Never backwards. A commission rate is written onto each month’s bill when that month is worked out, and a plan price is charged for the month it covers. Changing either changes what is billed from then on and rewrites nothing already billed.

Your plan and your commission cover the same month, so they arrive as one amount with one reference. The bill falls due seven days after the month it covers ends, which gives you time to notice it and to replace a card that has expired.

How we take it. We charge the card you have on file. We never see or store your card number — our payment provider keeps the card and gives us back a token we can charge, which we hold encrypted, along with the brand and last four digits so you can recognise your own card.

If the charge is refused it becomes an invoice for you to settle yourself, and we present the card again on days 7, 8, 10, 14, 21 and 28 past the due date — at most seven attempts in total, spread over four weeks. After that we stop asking the card. The money is still owed; we simply stop trying to take it that way.

What changes while a bill is unpaid. Three things, in this order, counted from the due date:

1. Day 0 — we tell you. A notice appears in your dashboard saying what is owed and for which month. Nothing else changes.
2. Day 7 — your shop stops growing. Your allowances drop to the entry plan’s, so you cannot add a new product, a new service or a new team member. You keep everything you already have and it keeps working.
3. Day 30 — new online payments are refused. Your checkout stops accepting new online payments. Shoppers can still browse, chat, and place orders, carts still work, and any payment already in flight still completes.

What never happens. We do not take your shop offline for an unpaid bill, we do not delete your data, and we do not delete your customers or their conversations. Your first invoice never goes past the notice at day 0, whatever it says — the first bill is the one nobody has seen the shape of before.

An unpaid amount stays owed after any of this, and we may recover it as a debt.

You connect your own payment gateway account to your shop — Paystack, PayFast, Yoco, Ozow or PayPal. That account is in your name, under your own agreement with that provider, and it is the account your shoppers pay into.

We are not in the money. We are not the merchant of record for your sales. We hold no escrow, no wallet and no float, we take no split of a payment, and there is nothing in our systems that could pay money out to anybody. A shopper’s payment goes from them to your gateway account, and we only ever read whether it succeeded.

That is also why our commission is a bill and not a deduction: we invoice you afterwards for the software you used, rather than taking a cut on the way past.

Your gateway keys are encrypted before they are stored and are only ever decrypted on our servers to ask your gateway to do something on your behalf. They are never returned to a browser, including ours.

You are responsible for your gateway account: its own fees, its rules, the documents it asks you for, its chargeback process, and staying in good standing with it. If your gateway suspends you, your checkout stops working and there is nothing we can do about it from our side.

Everything you put into your shop is yours: your product and service names, descriptions and photos, the files you upload, the digital goods you sell, your logo and colours, your conversations and your customer list. We claim no ownership of any of it and we do not sell it, license it or use it to train anything.

You give us permission to store, copy, resize and display it for one purpose only: running your shop and delivering what you sold to the people you sold it to. That permission lasts while the content is in your shop and ends when you delete it or close the shop.

You promise that you have the right to everything you upload — that the photos are yours to use, the files are yours to sell, and the words are yours to publish. If someone tells us otherwise with a credible claim, we may take the item down and will tell you why.

Our own software, design, documentation and the NeedEverything name and logo stay ours. Using the product does not give you a licence to copy them.

Use NeedEverything to run a real shop. In particular:

• Sell only what you may lawfully sell in South Africa, and only what you can actually deliver. Nothing illegal, stolen, counterfeit, or requiring a licence you do not hold.
• Do not use the chat for bulk unsolicited messages. The inbox is for talking to people who came to your shop, not for broadcasting to a bought list.
• Respect the upload limits. Images up to 8 MB, documents up to 25 MB, and up to 100 MB for a deliverable or a digital product you are selling. There is also a daily upload allowance per shop. For anything larger, sell a link to where the file is hosted — the product offers you that instead.
• Digital goods are metered. Each purchase allows a set number of downloads (ten by default, which you can change per product), with short-term limits on top so one link cannot be used to mirror a file. You can reset a buyer’s downloads yourself.
• Do not try to get around the product. No probing, scraping, load-testing or reverse-engineering, no attempts to reach another shop’s data, and no working around rate limits, plan limits or the billing gates above.
• One shop, one business. Do not run payments for an unrelated business through a gateway connected to your shop.

Suspension is a deliberate act by a NeedEverything administrator, with a reason recorded against it. It is not automatic, and it is not what happens when you owe us money — an unpaid bill goes through the three steps in section 6 and never further.

A suspended shop is taken off the internet: the storefront stops serving, the shop is unpublished, and it cannot be published again while the suspension stands.

We suspend a shop for things like:

• Selling something unlawful, or something you are not permitted to sell.
• Fraud, or a well-founded suspicion of it — including using a shop to launder payments or to test stolen cards.
• Breaking the acceptable-use rules above after we have asked you to stop.
• Content we are legally required to remove, or a credible claim that the catalogue infringes someone else’s rights.
• A demand from a payment provider, a bank or a court.
• Using the platform in a way that puts other shops at risk — including anything that threatens the payment processing the whole platform depends on.

We tell you the reason. A suspension can be lifted by an administrator, and your data is kept while it stands. If we get it wrong, say so and we will look again.

You can cancel your plan at any time from your billing page. It runs to the end of the month you have already paid for and then stops. We do not refund part of a month — see the refunds policy.

Cancelling does not clear what you already owe, and any unpaid commission for months you traded stays payable.

We can end it by giving you reasonable notice, or immediately for any of the reasons a shop is suspended. If we end it without a reason of that kind, we will refund the unused part of a plan month you have already paid for.

Export what you need before you go. We keep a closed shop’s data for a while so an account can be reopened, but do not treat us as your archive.

We work hard to keep NeedEverything running, but we provide it as it is. We do not promise it will never be unavailable, never have a bug, or work with every device and browser. Parts of it depend on other companies — our hosting provider, your payment gateway, our email provider — and when one of them is down, so is the part of the product that needs it.

We do not promise that your shop will make sales, and nothing in the product is a forecast.

We are not a party to the contract between you and your shopper, we do not vet what you sell before you list it, and we do not guarantee your shoppers’ conduct or your suppliers’.

Limit. To the fullest extent South African law allows, our total liability to you for everything arising out of this agreement in any twelve-month period is limited to the platform fees you actually paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. We are not liable for lost profit, lost sales, lost goodwill, or loss caused by a third party we do not control.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including for fraud, and including rights you have under the Consumer Protection Act where it applies to you.

You cover us for claims brought by your shoppers, your suppliers or a regulator that arise from what you sold, what you uploaded or how you ran your shop.

Billing month

The month your subscription runs on. Your plan and your commission always cover the same one, which is why they arrive as one bill.

Commissionable value

An order’s subtotal less any discount, floored at zero; excluding the delivery on the order up to R200 or the value of the goods, whichever is larger; and excluding VAT if you have told us you are registered. This is what the commission rate is applied to.

Past due

A bill is past due seven days after the month it covers ends. The steps in section 6 are counted in days from that date.

Your gateway

The payment provider account you connected to your shop, in your own name. Your shoppers pay into it and we never hold what they pay.

Suspension

A NeedEverything administrator taking a shop off the internet for a recorded reason. Section 10 lists the reasons.

This agreement is governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa, and the courts of South Africa have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it.

Tell us first. Most disagreements about a bill are a misread statement or a dead card, and we would rather fix it than argue about it. Every commission line on your statement shows the order it came from and the rate applied, so a number can always be checked.

If a clause here turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of the agreement stands. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given it up.

We can change these documents. Our plan prices and our commission rate are what they are today and we can change them at any time.

When we change anything here, we bump the version at the top of the page, put a notice in your dashboard and email your store’s contact address before the change takes effect. Carrying on using NeedEverything after that date is how you accept the change. If you would rather not, cancel your plan before the date and you will not be charged the new price.

A change never runs backwards. A billing month that has already closed keeps the price and the commission rate that were in force while it was open, because both are written onto the bill when it is worked out and nothing recalculates them afterwards.

Your rights under POPIA — South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act — and your right to complain to the Information Regulator are not ours to change, and nothing we publish here narrows them. See the privacy policy for what those rights are and how to use them.