Merchant Responsibilities & Acceptable Use Policy
What you are responsible for as a business operating a storefront on OrderVora, and what nobody may do on the platform.
This Policy is part of the OrderVora Terms of Service and applies to every Merchant that uses OrderVora, and to everyone a Merchant gives access to its account. The prohibited-conduct sections apply to all users of the Service, including Customers.
The premise is simple. OrderVora provides the software; you run the business. You decide what to sell, at what price, to whom, and how to fulfill it — and you are responsible for those decisions and for operating lawfully. OrderVora does not review, verify, or approve your business, your products, your content, or your compliance.
1. Your business and your right to sell
- You are the seller of everything offered through your storefront, and the merchant of record for your order transactions.
- You are responsible for determining that you may lawfully offer, sell, and fulfill every product and service you list, in every place you accept orders from and deliver to.
- You must operate a real, lawfully constituted business and provide accurate business information, and must keep it current.
- You must not use OrderVora to sell on behalf of an undisclosed third party, or to present another business's products as your own without the right to do so.
- OrderVora making a feature available to you is not advice, approval, certification, or confirmation that your business, product, content, or practice is lawful or compliant.
2. Licences, permits, and registrations
- You must hold every licence, permit, registration, and certification your business and products require under applicable federal, state, and local law, and must keep them valid and current.
- That may include business registration, food-service and health permits, food-handler certification, alcohol, tobacco, nicotine, or other product-specific licences, sales-tax registration, and delivery or vehicle requirements.
- You must stop offering an affected product, and where necessary take your storefront offline, if a required licence lapses, is suspended, or is revoked.
- Where you have signed a compliance agreement for a regulated business type in the dashboard, that agreement's obligations apply in addition to this Policy. Information you provide there — including a licence number, state, and expiry — must be accurate, and you must update it.
3. Taxes
- You are solely responsible for determining whether your sales are taxable and at what rate, and for configuring your tax settings in the Service correctly.
- You are responsible for collecting, reporting, and remitting all applicable sales, use, excise, product-specific, and other taxes on your transactions.
- Tax features in the Service apply your own configuration. They are tools, not tax advice, and not a determination of your obligations. OrderVora does not file or remit your taxes.
- You are responsible for your own income, payroll, and business taxes, and for any tax reporting your payment provider requires of you.
5. Ingredients, allergens, and food safety
If you sell food or beverages, this section is the one where an error can hurt someone. OrderVora does not inspect your kitchen, your ingredients, or your practices, and does not verify any claim you publish.
- You must provide accurate, complete, and current ingredient and allergen information for what you sell, and must update it when a recipe, supplier, or preparation method changes.
- You must not publish a "free-from", "no", or similar allergen or dietary claim unless it is true for the product as you actually make it, taking cross-contact in your premises into account.
- You are responsible for disclosing cross-contact risk where it exists, and for saying so plainly when you cannot safely accommodate a request rather than accepting the order.
- You must handle allergen and dietary enquiries from Customers accurately and promptly.
- You must comply with all applicable food-safety, sanitation, handling, storage, temperature-control, labelling, and inspection requirements, and must maintain any required certification.
- You must not rely on AI-generated content for allergen, ingredient, nutritional, health, or food-safety information.
- Nutritional and health claims must be accurate and substantiated where the law requires it.
6. Fulfillment, pickup, and delivery
- You are responsible for accepting, preparing, and fulfilling orders you accept, and for the accuracy and quality of what you hand over.
- You are responsible for your stated hours, preparation times, capacity, and order cut-offs, and for keeping them realistic.
- For pickup, you are responsible for safe handover and for holding orders appropriately.
- For delivery you operate yourself, you are responsible for the delivery and its outcome, and for your drivers — including their conduct, licensing, insurance, vehicle, employment or contractor classification, and compliance with employment and traffic law. OrderVora does not employ or engage your drivers.
- You are responsible for your delivery areas, zones, fees, minimums, and estimates, and for confirming they are correct — mapping and distance calculations come from third-party providers and can be wrong.
- Where you hand an order to a third-party delivery service, that service's terms also apply and its performance is not OrderVora's responsibility.
- Where a product requires an adult signature, identification, or a refusal at handover, you are responsible for that check actually happening.
7. Payments and chargebacks
- You connect and use your own payment provider. That relationship, and its terms, merchant agreement, and underwriting decisions, are between you and that provider and its acquiring bank.
- You must comply with your payment provider's terms and acceptable-use policy, your acquiring bank's requirements, applicable card-network rules, and the PCI DSS obligations that apply to you.
- You must not connect credentials that are not yours, or that you are not authorised to use.
- You own the financial responsibility for chargebacks, reversals, disputes, and related fees on your transactions, and for handling them with your provider within its timelines.
- You must not use the Service to process a transaction that is not a genuine sale of your own products — including test transactions on real cards, transaction laundering, processing for another business, cash advances, or any arrangement your provider prohibits.
- You are responsible for your own refund practice and for honouring your posted policy and applicable law — see the Refund & Cancellation Policy.
8. Refunds and customer service
- You decide refunds and cancellations for your orders and are responsible for those decisions, subject to applicable law.
- You must publish or make available a refund and cancellation practice, and honour it consistently.
- You must provide working contact details on your storefront and order confirmations, and must respond to Customers within a reasonable time.
- You must handle order problems — missing items, incorrect orders, quality complaints, failed deliveries — directly with the Customer.
- You must not misrepresent OrderVora's role to a Customer, and must not tell a Customer that OrderVora is responsible for your order, your refund decision, or your customer service.
9. Regulated and age-restricted products
If you sell age-restricted or otherwise regulated products, additional obligations apply and they are yours alone. OrderVora providing software for a regulated business type is not permission or approval to sell anything.
- You must determine that you may lawfully offer, sell, ship, and deliver each product in each jurisdiction you serve.
- You must comply with all applicable minimum-age requirements and age-verification obligations, and must not sell to anyone below the applicable age.
- You must hold and maintain every required licence and permit for the category.
- You must comply with product restrictions, including flavour, ingredient, packaging, quantity, and product-type restrictions and bans.
- You must display all required warnings, labelling, and point-of-sale disclosures, and must not remove, obscure, or weaken a mandatory warning.
- You must comply with restrictions on shipping, mail order, remote sale, and delivery, including the PACT Act and state analogues where they apply to you.
- You must verify age and identity where the law requires it, including checking photo identification at handover, and must refuse the order if it cannot be verified.
- You must comply with excise, tobacco, and other product-specific taxes, stamping, and reporting.
- You must comply with advertising and marketing restrictions for the category, including restrictions on promotion, discounting, and messaging.
9.1 The storefront age gate is not verification
Where the Service shows an age gate, it asks a visitor to declare a date of birth and applies a minimum age. It is a self-declared attestation. It does not check a government-issued identity document and does not verify identity against any database.
It is not, and must not be treated as, legally sufficient age or identity verification. Displaying a statutory warning or a minimum-age badge is likewise the Service rendering text and settings, not confirmation that your products, warnings, or practices satisfy the law.
You must implement whatever verification the law actually requires for your business, including at handover, and you remain responsible for every sale.
10. Your staff and account access
- You are responsible for everything done under your account, including by your owners, managers, staff, contractors, and anyone else you grant access.
- You must grant access only to people who need it, assign appropriate roles, and remove access promptly when someone leaves or changes role.
- You must not share credentials, use shared or generic logins for individual people, or let anyone use another person's account.
- You must ensure the people you give access to understand and follow this Policy and the Terms.
- You must not circumvent additional verification required for sensitive actions, such as connecting a payment provider.
- You must tell us promptly at hello@ordervora.com if you suspect unauthorised access to your account.
11. Content you upload and publish
- You must have all rights necessary to upload, use, and publish your content — text, images, logos, menus, and files — and must not use anyone else's photographs, artwork, menus, trademarks, or brand assets without the right to do so.
- You must not use stock or licensed material outside the terms of its licence.
- Your content must be accurate, lawful, and not misleading, and must not infringe any intellectual-property, publicity, or privacy right.
- You must review AI-generated content before publishing it and are responsible for it once published — see the AI & Generated Content Policy.
- You must not publish content that is deceptive, defamatory, harassing, hateful, obscene, sexually exploitative, or otherwise inappropriate for a storefront.
- You must not publish false reviews, testimonials, endorsements, or ratings, or solicit or incentivise them in a way applicable law prohibits, and must not suppress or manipulate genuine customer reviews deceptively.
12. Privacy and customer information
- You are responsible for how your business handles the personal information of your customers, and for complying with applicable privacy law.
- You may use customer information you obtain through the Service only to fulfill and support orders, to provide customer service, and — where you have the required consent — to market to that customer. You must not use it for an unrelated purpose.
- You must not sell, rent, or disclose customer information without a lawful basis, and must not transfer it to a third party except as necessary to run your business and lawfully.
- You must keep customer information secure, limit staff access to what is needed, and not export or retain it beyond what you need.
- You must respond to a customer's privacy request about your own use of their information, and must co-operate where OrderVora forwards or assists with one.
- You must tell us promptly if you become aware of unauthorised access to or disclosure of customer information obtained through the Service.
- You must not use the Service to collect sensitive personal information you do not need.
13. Marketing and customer communications
- You are the sender of the marketing you send through the Service, and you are solely responsible for it.
- You must have a valid legal basis and the required consent before sending marketing email, SMS, or push messages, and must not send to anyone who has not consented.
- You must not import or upload contacts obtained without consent, purchased lists, or scraped contact details.
- You must honour opt-outs and unsubscribe requests promptly, and must not re-add or re-subscribe someone who has opted out.
- You must comply with applicable law, including the TCPA, CAN-SPAM, state telemarketing and messaging laws, and applicable carrier and provider requirements, including quiet-hours and identification rules.
- You must identify your business clearly in your messages and must not misrepresent who is sending them.
- Your marketing content must be accurate and must comply with any restriction applying to your products, including for regulated categories.
- Transactional messages the Service sends about an account or an order are not marketing and must not be used to carry promotional content where applicable law prohibits it.
14. Prohibited conduct
The following are prohibited for everyone using the Service. This list adds to, and does not replace, the prohibited activities in the Terms.
14.1 Fraud and unlawful activity
- fraud, deception, or misrepresentation of any kind
- any unlawful activity, or facilitating one
- money laundering, transaction laundering, or sanctions evasion
- offering or selling anything applicable law prohibits, including illegal drugs, stolen or counterfeit goods, weapons or components where prohibited, and any product you are not licensed to sell
- selling age-restricted products to anyone below the applicable minimum age
- deliberately deceptive pricing, product presentation, or fee disclosure
14.2 Security and system integrity
- accessing, or attempting to access, any account, store, data, or part of the Service that is not yours
- circumventing or attempting to circumvent authentication, authorisation, tenant isolation, rate limits, plan entitlements, usage allowances, step-up verification, or any other security or access control
- probing, scanning, or testing the vulnerability of the Service without our prior written authorisation
- uploading or transmitting malware, or anything designed to disrupt, damage, or gain unauthorised access to a system or data
- denial-of-service activity, or otherwise interfering with, disrupting, or overloading the Service
- scraping, crawling, harvesting, or bulk-extracting data from the Service except as expressly permitted
- credential stuffing, brute-force attempts, account takeover, or trafficking in credentials
- using another person's or business's credentials, or sharing your own
- reverse engineering or attempting to derive the source code, models, or prompts of the Service, except to the extent applicable law prohibits that restriction
- removing, obscuring, or altering any proprietary notice, or platform attribution your plan requires
14.3 Impersonation and misuse of others' rights
- impersonating any person or business, or misrepresenting your identity, affiliation, or authority
- operating a storefront that passes itself off as another business
- infringing or misappropriating any intellectual-property, publicity, or privacy right
- using OrderVora's name, logo, or brand without permission, beyond stating factually that your storefront is powered by OrderVora
14.4 Misuse of information and of the platform
- misusing customer information, including using or disclosing it without a lawful basis
- harvesting information about other merchants, customers, or the platform
- using the Service to send unsolicited marketing, spam, or messages to people who have not consented
- reselling, sublicensing, or making the Service available to a third party except as expressly permitted
- using the Service in a way that creates material legal, regulatory, security, or reputational risk to OrderVora, its users, or the public
15. Co-operation and reporting
You must co-operate reasonably with OrderVora in investigating a suspected violation of this Policy, a security incident, a fraud pattern, or a legal or regulatory request, and must provide information reasonably requested for that purpose.
Report a suspected violation, a security issue, or a vulnerability to hello@ordervora.com. Do not test or exploit a suspected vulnerability against live data or another merchant's store — report it instead.
16. Enforcement, suspension, and termination
OrderVora may act on a violation of this Policy, the Terms, or applicable law, or on conduct that creates risk. Depending on the seriousness we may:
- contact you and ask you to fix the problem
- remove, disable, or unpublish specific content, a product, or a feature
- limit or disable a feature, including AI features
- suspend or unpublish a storefront
- suspend or restrict your account, immediately and without prior notice where reasonably necessary
- terminate your account and these Terms
- report conduct to a payment provider, a regulator, or law enforcement where appropriate or required
For a serious violation — fraud, unlawful activity, a security compromise, sale of prohibited products, sales of age-restricted products to underage purchasers, or conduct creating material risk to Customers, third parties, or the Service — OrderVora may suspend or terminate immediately and without prior notice.
Where practicable we will tell you the reason and, for a curable problem, give you an opportunity to fix it. Enforcement action does not relieve you of amounts owed, does not waive any other right, and does not make OrderVora responsible for consequences of your own violation. If you believe an action was taken in error, contact hello@ordervora.com and we will review it.
17. Indemnity and allocation of responsibility
The indemnification and limitation-of-liability provisions of the Terms apply to this Policy. In particular, a Merchant indemnifies OrderVora for claims arising from its products, food and allergens, fulfillment and delivery, content, taxes, licences, regulated products, marketing, handling of customer information, and violations of law or of this Policy — to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law.
Nothing in this Policy excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law.
18. Changes to this Policy and contact
We may update this Policy, and will update the effective and last-updated dates above. For a material change we will take reasonable steps to notify Merchants before it takes effect. Continued use of the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Policy.
Questions about this Policy: hello@ordervora.com.