1. Parties and acceptance
These terms govern the agreement between Virtually Earthed Ltd ("we", "us", "our", or "the platform"), a company registered in England and Wales, and you (the organiser using Podium to sell competition t-shirts to your customers).
By ticking the agreement box on our sign-up form, you confirm that you have read these terms, that you have authority to enter into this agreement on behalf of your organisation, and that you accept them as binding.
2. What Podium does
Podium is a software platform that provides each organiser with a hosted online shop for taking competition t-shirt orders. Specifically, we provide:
- A web shop branded to your organisation, hosted on Netlify.
- An admin area where you can view orders, manage the catalogue (competitions, clubs, sizes, prices), trigger refunds, and resend confirmation emails.
- Card payment integration via Stripe Connect (destination charges).
- Transactional email via Brevo (order confirmations to you and your customers).
- Per-order data storage in Netlify Blobs.
Podium is software only. We do not produce, supply, distribute, or warehouse t-shirts. Your shop is the user interface; you are the seller behind it.
3. What you, the organiser, are responsible for
You are the merchant of record for the goods sold through your shop. That means:
- Product: you design, source, produce, quality-check, and deliver the t-shirts. We are not responsible for product quality, sizing accuracy, stock availability, or fulfilment timing.
- Catalogue: you set the competitions, the clubs attending each competition, the sizes offered, and the per-size prices, all via the admin area.
- Customer relationship: the contract for the t-shirts is between you and the parent — not between us and the parent. Customer enquiries, complaints, and disputes about the goods are yours to handle.
- Consumer law: you comply with UK consumer protection law as it applies to your sales, including the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. The admin area provides a "Refund everything" option to handle the statutory 14-day cancellation right where it applies.
- Tax: you account for any VAT or other taxes due on your sales. We do not collect or remit tax on your behalf.
- Accuracy: the brand assets, copy, prices, and other content you supply or set in the admin area are accurate and not misleading.
- Admin access: you keep the list of authorised admin email addresses up to date, and keep those mailboxes secure (since the admin area uses one-time magic-link sign-in).
4. Payments and Stripe
Card payments are processed by Stripe Payments Europe Ltd and its affiliates. We are not a payment service provider and we do not hold customer funds. You will be asked to complete Stripe's "Connected Account" onboarding before going live — this is where you supply your bank details and identity verification information directly to Stripe.
We use Stripe's destination charges model. In practice:
- The customer pays a single combined amount on Stripe's hosted Checkout page.
- The shirt portion of the payment routes directly to your Stripe balance.
- The £1 service charge per order routes to our Stripe balance as a Stripe "application fee".
- Stripe's per-transaction processing fee is deducted from our balance (not yours) under destination-charge rules, so the shirt amount that reaches your balance is the gross shirt subtotal.
You are bound by Stripe's terms. By completing Stripe Connect onboarding you enter into Stripe's Connected Account Agreement directly with Stripe. Stripe controls payout schedules, KYC requirements, and risk decisions — not us.
5. Fees
We charge a £1 service fee per paid order, collected via Stripe's application-fee mechanism. The fee:
- Is added as a separate line item on the customer's Checkout page, so the customer sees it transparently before paying.
- Covers our software hosting, transactional email, and the Stripe processing fee on the combined charge.
- Is non-refundable by default (see Refunds).
- May be varied by us on 30 days' written notice; see Changes to these terms.
There is no setup fee, monthly fee, or per-seat charge.
6. Refunds
You issue refunds yourself from the admin area. Two refund actions are available per paid order:
- "Refund shirts (£X)": the default. Returns the shirt amount only; the £1 service charge is retained. We use this as our standard model because Stripe has already deducted its processing fee from our balance regardless of whether the order is refunded.
- "Refund everything (£X+1)": returns the shirts and the service charge. Intended for statutory cancellations (UK Consumer Contracts Regulations 14-day right) and event cancellations where a full refund is required.
You are responsible for deciding which refund action is appropriate, taking your obligations under UK consumer law into account. Where you must give a full refund as a matter of law (for example, where the parent exercises their statutory cancellation right and the goods are not exempt from it), you must use "Refund everything".
Refunds reduce your Stripe balance (via Stripe's "reverse transfer" mechanism). If your Stripe balance is insufficient at the moment a refund is issued, Stripe may put your account into a negative balance — Stripe will recover this from future sales. We will not cover negative balances from our platform balance.
7. Data and privacy
Each order stored by the platform contains: gymnast name, parent / guardian email, club, competition, size, quantity, amount paid, the Stripe payment id, and refund metadata (if any). We store this data in Netlify Blobs. Card data is never stored by Podium — it is held by Stripe on Stripe's PCI-compliant infrastructure.
For order data, you are the data controller and we are a data processor acting on your behalf. We use the following sub-processors:
- Netlify, Inc. (USA) — hosting and Blobs storage.
- Stripe Payments Europe Ltd (Ireland / USA) — payments.
- Brevo SAS (France) — transactional email.
Each sub-processor publishes its own Data Processing Addendum. By using Podium you authorise us to engage these sub-processors. We will give you at least 30 days' notice before adding or replacing a sub-processor in a way that materially affects your data.
You must give your customers a privacy notice that explains how their data is collected and used, and you must have a lawful basis under UK GDPR for collecting the personal data your order form asks for. The order form on your shop already collects explicit consent at submit time.
On termination, we will provide a one-time CSV export of your order data within 14 days of request and then delete it from our systems within 30 days. We retain anonymous, aggregated metrics (e.g. order counts) where necessary for operational purposes.
8. Intellectual property
We retain all rights, title, and interest in the Podium platform — the codebase, the design, and the underlying systems. You receive a non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the platform for the duration of this agreement.
You retain all rights in your brand assets (logo, cover image, colours, copy, organisation name) and the customer data flowing through your shop. You grant us a non-exclusive licence to host and display your brand assets on your shop and in confirmation emails, for as long as this agreement is in force.
9. Liability
We provide the platform "as is" and do not guarantee uninterrupted service, error-free operation, or fitness for any particular purpose beyond the description in section 2.
Our total liability to you, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), or otherwise, is capped at the service fees we have actually received from your account in the 12 months preceding the event giving rise to the claim.
We are not liable for:
- Defects in the shirts themselves, sizing inaccuracies, late delivery, or any other goods-side issue.
- Decisions you make in the admin area (catalogue edits, refund choices, archiving of items).
- Outages, errors, or data loss caused by Stripe, Netlify, Brevo, or any other sub-processor.
- Chargebacks initiated against your Stripe account.
- Loss of profit, loss of business, loss of goodwill, loss of anticipated savings, or any indirect or consequential loss.
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded under the laws of England and Wales.
10. Termination and suspension
Either party may terminate this agreement at any time by giving the other party 30 days' notice in writing (email is fine).
We may suspend or terminate your shop immediately, without notice, if:
- You materially breach these terms and do not remedy the breach within 7 days of being asked.
- You use Podium for any illegal purpose, or to sell goods you do not have the right to sell.
- Your Stripe account is closed by Stripe.
- You are insolvent or enter formal insolvency proceedings.
On termination, you can request a one-time CSV export of your order data (see Data and privacy). Outstanding service fees on orders already paid before termination remain payable to us.
11. Changes to these terms
We may change these terms from time to time — for example, to reflect changes in payment processor behaviour, the law, or our service. We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email to the contact address on file before any material change takes effect. If you don't agree with a change, you can terminate under section 10 before the change takes effect.
12. Governing law
These terms, and any dispute arising out of or in connection with them, are governed by the laws of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any such dispute.
13. Contact
Questions about these terms? Email Virtually Earthed at the contact address shown in the footer of our marketing site. Operational questions about your shop should go to the same address.