Commerce Terms

1. Who the contract is between

When you buy something on Sebairo, the contract of sale is between you and the seller. Sebairo is not the seller, not the importer, not the manufacturer and not a party to that contract. It provides the listing surface, the checkout and the order record.

This is the ordinary marketplace position and it has a real consequence: your first route for a faulty item, a late delivery or a wrong description is the seller, and your statutory rights as a consumer run against the seller, not against Sebairo.

Section 3 describes the one place where that clean separation does not yet hold, because Sebairo currently receives the payment.

2. If you sell

You must have the right to sell it

You own the item or are authorised to sell it, it is not counterfeit or stolen, and it is not on the prohibited list in the Acceptable Use Policy.

The listing must be true

Describe what you are actually sending — condition, quantity, dimensions, what is included, what is not. Photographs must be of the item or an accurate representation of it. Price, delivery cost and delivery time must be stated before checkout, not revealed afterwards.

You must deliver

Fulfil within the time you stated, or tell the buyer promptly if you cannot and offer a cancellation. Marking an order fulfilled that you have not fulfilled is fraud, not an administrative shortcut.

Your legal duties are yours

Consumer law, distance-selling and cancellation rights, product safety, labelling, licensing, import and export rules, and tax on what you earn are your responsibility. Sebairo does not verify your licences and does not collect or remit your taxes for you.

You are the trader

If you sell in the course of a business, you must identify yourself as a business to buyers. Presenting a business sale as a private one to escape consumer-law duties is a breach of these terms.

Handle buyer data properly

A delivery address is given to you to deliver an order. Do not use it for anything else, do not add buyers to a marketing list without consent, and do not keep it longer than you need.

3. Who holds the money today

This is the most important disclosure in this document, so it gets its own section rather than a clause inside one.

What this means for a seller: there is no automatic payout of a Marketplace sale into your withdrawable cash balance today. Do not plan around one. Reconciliation and payment are arranged manually, and you should contact support@sebairo.com about proceeds from a real sale rather than waiting for a balance to appear.

What this means for a buyer: your payment is held by Sebairo rather than passed straight to the seller, which in practice makes a refund easier to obtain than it would be on a platform that had already forwarded the money. That is a side effect of an unfinished feature, not a designed escrow service, and it should not be relied on as one.

This is a bridge state and it is documented as such in Sebairo's own architecture decisions. When per-seller payouts are built, this section changes, the change is logged on the changes page, and sellers are told before it takes effect.

4. If you buy

• Read the listing before you pay. Ask the seller a question if something is unclear — that is what the message thread on a listing is for.
• Pay through Sebairo checkout. A seller who asks you to pay by bank transfer, gift card or any off-platform method is either breaking these terms or running a scam, and you lose every protection described here.
• Give a correct delivery address and be available to receive the item.
• Do not use a chargeback as a substitute for talking to the seller first. Chargeback abuse is a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy.

5. The order lifecycle

An order has exactly five states, and who may move it between them is enforced in the database rather than in the app:

pending

The order exists and payment has not been confirmed. A buyer or the seller can cancel it at this point.

paid

Stripe has confirmed the payment by signed webhook. Only that webhook can set this state — not the app, not the seller, and not the page the buyer lands on after checkout, which anyone could reload.

fulfilled

The seller has sent or delivered the order. Only the seller can set this, and only from paid.

cancelled

The order will not be completed. Reachable from pending or from paid.

refunded

Money has been returned. Like paid, this is written by the payment webhook rather than by anyone in the app.

Orders are created only by the server-side checkout function; there is no path by which a client can insert an order or name its own price. Prices are re-read from the listing on the server at checkout, so a tampered request cannot buy a £400 item for £4.

6. Cancellation, returns and refunds

Refund policy is set by the seller and must be stated in the listing. It cannot be less than the law requires: where you buy as a consumer from a trader at a distance, you generally have statutory cancellation and return rights, and a seller's stated policy does not override them.

• Before payment is confirmed, either side can cancel and nothing is owed.
• After payment and before fulfilment, ask the seller to cancel and refund. A seller who cannot deliver should cancel promptly rather than let the order sit.
• After fulfilment, the seller's return policy and your statutory rights apply.
• Where a refund is agreed, it is returned through Stripe to the payment method used. Sebairo cannot refund to a different card or a different person.

Refunds of SBX credit follow the Terms: credits are prepaid and non-refundable except where the law says otherwise or where the charge was Sebairo's error.

7. When a sale goes wrong

1. Message the seller through the order. Most problems are a delay or a misunderstanding and end here.
2. If that fails, report the listing or the seller from the app, and include the order reference. The report goes to the same moderation queue as everything else.
3. Contact support@sebairo.com with the order reference. Sebairo can see the order record, the payment reference and its state, and — because the payment is currently collected into Sebairo's own account — can act on a refund directly in a way it could not if the money had already been forwarded.
4. If the item never arrived or was not as described and the seller will not engage, your card issuer's chargeback process remains available. Use it after trying the steps above, not instead of them.

Sebairo does not adjudicate the merits of a sale as a judge would, and does not guarantee an outcome. What it will do is look at the record, act on fraud, remove listings and sellers that breach these terms, and — where the facts are clear and the funds are still held — return a buyer's money.

8. Fees

There is no Sebairo commission on a Marketplace sale today. Card processing is Stripe's and is priced by Stripe. Sebairo earns from subscriptions and advertising rather than from taking a cut of every sale.

If that changes, it changes with advance notice, it applies to sales made after the change and never retroactively, and the change is logged on the changes page.

9. What Sebairo may do

• Remove a listing that breaches these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy.
• Suspend a seller's ability to list, or an account entirely.
• Cancel an order where there is reasonable suspicion of fraud.
• Hold a withdrawal while a dispute or a fraud review is open.
• Decline to carry a category of goods at all, with or without a prior warning to sellers of that category.

Each of those actions is recorded with a reason and can be appealed to support@sebairo.com with [Appeal] in the subject line.

10. Responsibility and its limits

Sebairo does not inspect goods, verify sellers' licences, test product safety, or guarantee that an item is as described. It is not liable for the quality, legality, safety or delivery of anything sold through it, nor for a seller's failure to honour a refund.

The overall liability limits in section 13 of the Terms apply to everything in this document. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, and if you buy as a consumer, your statutory rights against the seller are untouched.