Terms for Businesses

1. Who these terms are for

These terms are between TheReviews, a TJG venture operated by Ikaroa (“we”, “TheReviews”) and the organisation that claims a business profile on thereviews.net (“you”). Registered address available on request. They cover the dashboard, invitations, replies, reports, the API, webhooks, widgets, the badge, connected review sources and paid plans. If you accept them on behalf of a company, you confirm you are allowed to.

The Terms and Conditions, the Review and Business Guidelines, the Privacy Policy and, once you send an invitation, the Data Processing Addendum are part of this agreement. Where these terms and the Terms and Conditions disagree about a business activity, these terms win.

Three rules sit under everything else and cannot be varied by any plan or contract: you cannot remove a review, you cannot pay to change a moderation decision, and every moderation action on your profile is logged in public.

2. Claiming and verification

A business profile can exist before anyone claims it, because reviewers can review any business. Claiming it gives you the right to reply, to invite customers, and to show the badge. To claim, you prove control of the business's domain by confirming an email address at that domain or by adding a DNS record we give you. We can reverse a claim that turns out to be false, and we log the verification and any reversal.

One organisation can hold several businesses, up to the number of locations on its plan. A business can be claimed by one organisation at a time. If two parties claim the same business, the one that proves domain control keeps it; a dispute between them is theirs to settle.

You must keep your contact details current. Notices under this agreement go to the email address of the organisation owner and are treated as received the next business day.

3. Plans, billing and limits

3.1 Prices

Prices are on the pricing page and in your billing settings, in US dollars, before any VAT or sales tax that applies to you. The Free plan costs nothing and has no time limit. Enterprise pricing is agreed in writing.

3.2 Monthly plans

A monthly plan renews each month on the date you started it until you cancel. Cancel from the billing page at any time; the plan runs to the end of the month you have paid for and then drops to Free. We do not refund part of a month.

3.3 Yearly plans

A yearly plan is paid in advance and renews each year until you cancel. Cancel at any time and the plan runs to the end of the year you have paid for. Yearly fees are non-refundable, except where the law of the country you are in gives you a right to a refund that cannot be excluded, or where we have failed to provide the service and cannot put it right.

3.4 Payment

Payments are taken by Stripe from the card or payment method you register on Stripe's pages. Card details never reach our servers. If a renewal payment fails we retry for 14 days and email you; if it still fails, the plan drops to Free and your data stays where it is. Invoices are issued by us and available from the billing page.

3.5 Plan limits

Each plan carries the limits below. Invitation allowances reset monthly from the date the plan started. Queued invitations over the limit wait for the reset; they are not lost.

3.6 Add-ons

1,000 extra invitations cost $25. They are used in the current billing period and do not roll over. An extra location costs $10 per location per month on Starter and above. Add-ons are billed with the plan and end when the plan ends.

3.7 Price changes

We can change prices with 30 days' notice by email. A change does not affect a yearly plan until its next renewal. If you do not accept a change, cancel before it applies.

3.8 Downgrades

If you move to a plan with fewer seats or locations than you are using, we ask you to choose which to keep. Until you do, the extras are read-only. Reviews and the log are never affected by a plan change.

4. Invitations: who you must invite and what you must not offer

Invitations are sent by us, from our domain, on your behalf. That makes the rules below conditions of the service rather than advice.

4.1 Invite every customer from a channel

When you connect a channel (a store integration, the API, a CSV upload or manual entry from the dashboard), you invite every customer from that channel. You do not filter by likely rating, by whether they complained, by order value, or by anything else that predicts the review. On integrated stores we compare orders to invitations. A persistent gap without a reason you have told us about costs the Verified business badge and is noted on your Transparency tab. Cherry-picking is also a breach of the consumer protection law in the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United States, and we say that not to frighten you but because it is true.

4.2 No incentives

You must not offer anything in exchange for a review, a particular rating, or a change to or removal of a review. Not a discount, not a prize draw, not a refund, not priority service. Asking for a review is fine. Asking for a five-star review is not. If a reviewer reports being offered something, the offer and our finding go in the log.

4.3 Lawful basis for the addresses you give us

You confirm that you are entitled to give us each customer's email address for the purpose of a review invitation. In the United Kingdom and the European Union that is usually the existing-customer exemption for your own products or services, or the customer's consent. You are the controller of that list; we process it under the Data Processing Addendum.

4.4 Unsubscribes, bounces and complaints

Every invitation carries an unsubscribe link. An unsubscribe is honoured across every channel for your business and you cannot see or clear the suppression list. If bounces or spam complaints on your invitations rise above the norms the mail carrier applies, we pause sending for your business and tell you why.

4.5 Consequences

A breach of this section can lead to any of the following, in proportion to what happened: a note on your Transparency tab; loss of the Verified business badge; suspension of invitations; and for fake reviews or paid reviews, permanent loss of verified status and a published finding on your profile that stays for two years. We would rather never use the last one.

5. Replies

You can reply once to each review, publicly, and edit that reply at any time. Replies carry the name of the person who posted them. A reply can dispute facts, apologise, explain, or offer to take the matter offline. It cannot disclose the reviewer's personal details, threaten legal action, or demand the review be changed. A reply that breaks these rules is removed and the removal is logged.

6. Reporting a review

Report a review when it breaks Part 1 of the guidelines, with the section and any evidence. Do not report a review because it is negative. A report is read by a member of staff within two business days and is upheld or dismissed with a written reason in the log. If a report is dismissed you can appeal once with new evidence; “we disagree” is not new evidence. An organisation that repeatedly reports without grounds loses the ability to report for ninety days, and that too is logged. Nothing about this process depends on your plan.

7. API, webhooks, widgets and the badge

7.1 Keys and secrets

API keys and webhook secrets belong to your organisation and are confidential. You are responsible for every request made with your keys. Revoke a key from the dashboard the moment you suspect it has leaked.

7.2 Rate limits and fair use

The API is limited to 60 requests per key per minute and widget data to 20 requests per IP address per minute. We may adjust these with notice on the developers page, and we may suspend a key that degrades the service for others. The API and the widgets are the only supported ways to fetch content from TheReviews. Scraping the site, automated reading beyond what a browser does, or bulk downloading is not permitted.

7.3 What you can do with reviews you fetch

You may show reviews of your own businesses on properties you control, with the reviewer's display name, the date, the rating, and a link back to the review on TheReviews. You may not alter the text or rating, remove negative reviews from a display that claims to show your reviews, resell the data, or use it to train a system that generates reviews. The licence reviewers give us is what lets us pass reviews to you, and it ends for a review when the reviewer deletes it; you must drop deleted reviews from your own displays within seven days of the webhook or API telling you.

7.4 Widgets and the badge

Widgets may be embedded on sites you control. You must not alter a widget or the badge, hide parts of it, change the score or the reviews it shows, or place it so that it appears to endorse something other than the business it belongs to. The badge is shown only while your business is verified and must link to your profile on TheReviews. We can withdraw a widget or badge that is being misused, and we log the withdrawal.

7.5 Webhooks

We sign every webhook with HMAC-SHA256 using your webhook secret and retry failed deliveries with backoff up to six times, after which the endpoint is marked failed until you re-enable it. Delivery logs are kept for 30 days.

8. Connected review sources

On paid plans you can connect Google, Facebook, Trustpilot and Yelp so that reviews from those platforms appear on your profile alongside TheReviews reviews. Connections use each platform's official API with credentials you authorise.

You confirm that you hold the rights and the authorisations to connect each source: that the account you connect belongs to your business, that you are permitted by that platform's terms to display its content in this way, and that you will disconnect the source if that stops being true. We follow each platform's rules on attribution and caching, including Google's 30-day limit on cached Places content, and we may disconnect a source that a platform tells us to.

Imported reviews are always shown with their source label. They never count towards the TheReviews Score, they cannot be replied to through us, and they are not covered by our moderation process; take those up with the platform they came from. When you disconnect a source, its reviews are removed from your profile.

9. Data processing

For the customer lists you give us to invite, you are the controller and we are your processor. The Data Processing Addendum sets out our obligations: the sub-processors we use, security measures, breach notice within 72 hours, deletion at the end of the service, and how you can audit us. It applies from the first invitation you send and needs no signature. For everything else (your own account, reviews of your business, the log) we are an independent controller under the Privacy Policy.

You will not use the dashboard, the API or any data from us to identify a reviewer beyond what is shown publicly, to contact a reviewer outside the platform about a review, or to build a profile of a reviewer.

10. Suspension and termination

You can close your organisation account at any time from settings. Paid plans end as section 3 describes. Your replies stay on the profile unless you delete them first; reviews of your business stay, because they belong to the reviewers, not to you.

We can suspend part of the service (invitations, the API, the badge) or the whole account if you break these terms or the guidelines, if your payments fail, or if your use puts other users or the platform at legal risk. We say why, in writing, and where the reason concerns a published review it is in the log. For anything other than fake reviews, paid reviews or a legal risk, we give you 14 days to put it right first.

If we stop operating the service we give 90 days' notice and an export of the reviews of your businesses and your replies.

11. Liability

The service is provided as it is. We do not guarantee uninterrupted availability, that every review is genuine, that any particular review will be published or removed, or that the score will move in any direction. The score is a published formula applied to published reviews and we do not adjust it by hand for anyone.

To the extent the law allows, neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, business, goodwill or reputation. Our total liability to you under this agreement in any 12-month period is capped at the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim. Where you are on the Free plan, that cap is one hundred US dollars.

You indemnify us against claims from third parties that arise from your breach of section 4 (invitations), section 7.3 (use of fetched reviews) or section 8 (connected sources), including the costs of dealing with them.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, except that we may seek an injunction in any country to stop misuse of the service. Before starting a claim, each of us agrees to try to resolve the dispute by email between senior people on both sides for 30 days.

13. Changes to these terms

Each version carries its number and effective date at the top. We announce material changes on the transparency page and by email to the organisation owner 30 days before they apply. Continuing to use the dashboard after that date is acceptance. If you do not accept a change, cancel before it applies and we refund any unused whole months of a yearly plan.

Questions to email@thereviews.net. Every document is listed on the Legal hub.