Terms of USE

Introduction

SoPost enables you to request physical product samples from your favourite brands. A service like SoPost, including our sampling community website, Productsamples.com (which, in this document, we’ll refer to as “the Service” or perhaps as “SoPost”) requires people to interact with each other (us included) within some kind of framework designed to keep everybody safe and free from harm. In essence, that framework is provided by these Terms of Use, which we’ll refer to as “the Terms”.

SoPost is delivered by SoPost Limited, a company incorporated in England under registered number 08216668. Our registered office is at The Core, Bath Lane, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE4 5TF. When we use words like “we”, “us” and “our” in these Terms, it is SoPost Limited that we are referring to. Likewise, when we use words like “you” and “your”, we are referring to you, whom, we hope, will soon be our user. When we refer to the “website”, this includes the websites which we host at www.sopost.com and www.productsamples.com, as well as any subdomains that we create and any software widgets that we install on external websites to deliver the Service.

Anybody can access the SoPost and Productsamples.com websites but in order to request a sample, you must accept these Terms as they are set out in this document.

Claiming a Sample

There’s not much that you need to do to claim a sample. Just complete a simple form with your basic personal details including a postal address to which we can send your samples. In completing and submitting this information, you confirm that it is accurate and up-to-date.

You will also need to check the box that is your confirmation that you accept these Terms. If you don’t do that, you won’t be able to claim the sample and that would be a shame. But if you do check the box and submit your details to us, please bear in mind that you are entering into a contract with us (and not the brand from whom the sample will come) and that contract is, of course, based on these Terms. Don’t worry, you don’t *have* to do anything in particular. Each time you use SoPost to request a sample from one of our brand partners, you will go through the same process so you’re not creating any long term commitments here. But since you are entering into a contract with us, it would be sensible to have a good read of these Terms just to make sure you are as happy as we are about it all.

You’ll always be able to find a copy of these Terms on the website, but you might want to print off a copy for your records. If you do, please bear in mind, however, that the Terms might change in the future, especially since we may add functionality to the Service over time. Each time you request a sample via the Service, you will be asked to accept the Terms as they stand at that time and those Terms will then govern your claiming of that sample.

You

We mentioned above that you have to provide us with information in order to claim a sample, through either registering as a user of productsamples,com; completing our online form; or consenting to us linking your social media account. That information alone will be enough to identify you personally and so for that reason, it is protected by law, that law being until 25 May 2018 the Data Protection Act 1998 and thereafter the General Data Protection Regulation (usually referred to as the ‘GDPR’) and any successor legislation to the GDPR. If you’re not in the UK, there will probably be equivalent laws in your jurisdiction. We will handle that information in accordance with our Privacy Notice, which forms part of these Terms and thereby, our contract with you. We must be able to identify you as an individual from the information contained within your profile and to that extent at least, you confirm that your information is accurate and up-to-date.

We would love to make SoPost available to everyone but unfortunately, because of the way English law works, children are not capable of entering into contracts. Consequently, you must either confirm that you are at least 18 years of age and capable of entering into binding contracts, or that you are at least 13 years of age and can confirm that you have your parent or guardian’s consent. Some of the offers that we circulate are age-restricted and therefore will not be available to all users.

Assuming then that you are over 18 or over 13 and have your parent or guardian’s consent, your acceptance of these Terms gives rise to a contract between you and us that is binding on both you and us and those that may later inherit from us the benefit of the contracts that we have formed with you and others like you. You may not transfer or sell your rights under this contract to anybody else nor may you use it as security for anything. The nature of running a Service like SoPost means that we may, for some reason, have to ‘assign’ the contract that we’ve formed with you to another business (for example, as part of a restructure or if SoPost is bought by another company).

Although you will have to provide us with your information and accept these Terms of Use each time you claim a sample, you do have the right to access the information we hold about you or even ask us to stop holding information about you. There is more about this in the Privacy Notice so please follow the instructions there. As explained in our Privacy Notice, although we have obligations to our brand partners, we are the Data Controller and we are responsible to our users for how we handle the personal data we hold about them. Aside from any transactional emails that we may send to you, all communications that we send to our users come with an unsubscribe option. If you have any concerns about how any of this might affect you, please let us know.

Your Use of SoPost

As a platform technology, SoPost is what our users and our brand partners make it. That said, there are core purposes for it (as outlined in the Introduction above) that encompass everything that we and our users do with it. You agree that you will abide with those purposes and that you will not, under any circumstances, use the Service for actions that do not fall within those core purposes.

We are delighted when our users share offers they find through SoPost with their friends and we encourage you to do that. However, whilst sharing with friends is great, piggybacking on the services we provide in order to build your own business is very much not. You agree that whilst you may share offers with friends for personal purposes, you will not share our offers on a commercial scale and/or for business purposes, whether within a closed group or list of individuals or to the public at large. You acknowledge that should you breach this condition, we may pursue you for, amongst other things, the value of the samples that have been distributed as a result of your actions, for the cost of our time in dealing with the situation you have created and the loss of goodwill suffered by ourselves or our brand partners.

You will not use the Service for the distribution of unsolicited and unwanted communications (whether commercial or otherwise), which you might know as ‘spam’. Spam is a real nuisance and it makes us and our users very unhappy, so if you distribute spam through SoPost, we’ll terminate your use of the Service immediately and will prevent you from using it again in the future.

Also, you will not use SoPost to send to other people samples that, even though they are lawfully available wherever the offer we have made is valid, you know or have reason to suspect those people will find offensive in some way. If we find out that you have done this, we will suspend your use of the Service while we investigate and, having done so, we may, at our discretion, terminate your use of the Service and prevent you from using it again and even refer your behaviour to the authorities, should we believe that to be warranted.

Finally, we only allow one sample per person per campaign and where necessary, we may need to impose a limit of one sample per household per campaign. So, if you’re using a social media account or email address to request a sample, you warrant that the account or email address you’re using is your own, which you created in the regular course of things as far as the network in question that that account belongs to is concerned. Specifically, we’re talking here about using multiple accounts and/or multiple identities for the purpose of requesting multiple product samples. Doing this sort of thing is cheating and deprives others of a fair chance to request samples so if you do it, we’ll ban you from using SoPost and we may pursue you for damages for breach of contract should your actions harm a campaign we are running for a brand partner. To counteract this, you promise only to use one account for each social network for the duration of your relationship with us.

In using SoPost, you’ll give us feedback on your experience of the sample you have requested. You may also share that experience with others via our social media accounts. You promise that in doing so, the content you upload won’t deliberately offend. Yes, we have all told jokes that backfired or were misjudged or perhaps didn’t go down as well as we intended. That’s not what we’re talking about. What we are chiefly concerned with here is content that is offensive, obscene, abusive, libellous, false, deliberately misleading, or is otherwise illegal. For short, let’s call this “Unlawful Content”. If you do use SoPost to distribute Unlawful Content, we reserve the right to remove it immediately and to suspend or even terminate your account and we may not let you know that we have done this. If we do contact you, we may allow you to explain why you have uploaded the Unlawful Content but if your explanation is unconvincing or you take an unreasonably long time to respond, we may, at our discretion, terminate your use of the Service and prevent you from using it again. As with the previous paragraph, if you behave in this way, you may leave us with no alternative but to refer the incident to the authorities.

You may have heard of the term “intellectual property”. Intellectual property is the term used to describe things that can be owned but which are not physical in nature. The owner of intellectual property doesn’t own something that is tangible but instead has the right to control how that intangible thing is used, hence the term “intellectual property rights”. Trade marks, patents and copyright are well-known and commonplace forms of intellectual property, but there are lots more. And if you use somebody else’s intellectual property rights without their permission (which is often referred to as a “licence”), you’ve “infringed” their rights.

On that basis we confirm to you that we own the framework and content that makes up SoPost. That includes all the ‘copy’, the code, the look and feel and the trade marks and graphics that you use in making use of the Service (in accordance with these Terms). We build databases that contain details of the offers that we circulate and the people to whom those offers are circulated and to whom we subsequently deliver samples. We invest a lot of time and money into building and maintaining those databases and making sure that the data within them is as correct as it can possibly be. They are therefore the subject of database right that is owned by us, which we license to you only so that you can make use of our services for personal purposes. Even the copyright in these Terms are owned by our lawyers and licensed to us for this purpose. Were you to use their things without asking, they would get very unhappy. So please don’t try to use any of the intellectual property that we provide for purposes that are not intended or envisaged by these Terms. You can use our intellectual property in order to make use of our service as provided for in these Terms but for nothing else and you may not use our intellectual property for commercial purposes under any circumstances.

We confirm that we have the right to distribute the samples that you have claimed or are claiming, though that is not necessarily to say that those samples are lawful wherever you happen to live and if you’re in doubt, you should check your local law for yourself, just to be sure.

Samples that you request are for your personal use only. It’s a bit difficult to imagine how the samples that we facilitate could be turned into a business but technology allows us to do all sorts of things now that weren’t possible 20 years ago, so just to be completely clear, USING SOPOST FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES IS COMPLETELY FORBIDDEN – unless, of course, you happen to be one of our brand partners or one of our authorised distributors. If you wish to engage with SoPost as a business, we have other terms and conditions that apply to that. Contact us at hello@sopost.com to find out more on this or have a look elsewhere on the website. If you use SoPost for commercial purposes without engaging with us formally as a brand partner or authorised distributor, we will terminate your use of the Service immediately, prevent you from using it again and we may commence an action for breach of contract against you should we be of the view that your actions have harmed us or our brand partners.

If you come across any evidence to suggest that anybody else is using SoPost in breach of these Terms, it would be a terrific help if you would let us know so that we can take action to stop them.

Us

At any given time, we reckon we have a pretty good idea as to how well the functionality we’ve provided for SoPost is working. We’re working on new features all the time and occasionally, we may want to replace older features with new, better ones. It is inevitable that every now and again, we will provide features or functionality that seemed like a really good idea at the time but which, for whatever reason, don’t really catch on with our users. So when this happens, we reserve the right under these Terms to add or remove functionality and features. We will do our best to give you some advance notice of this but from time to time, this might not be possible. For example, if something breaks and it is complicated to fix and not sufficiently popular to warrant dropping everything to fix, we may decide to withdraw it immediately. That withdrawal may be temporary or it may be that we withdraw it permanently, and we have the right to decide what’s best in the circumstances.

It might be that the new functionality requires changes or additions to these Terms or the Privacy Notice, so when we launch new features, you might want to check to see whether we’ve made any changes to either.

Nothing in these Terms should be interpreted so as to apply any form of legal obligation or duty upon us to supply samples (or any particular sample) to you. You acknowledge that the receipt of samples is a “gratuitous benefit” – in other words, it’s something for which you’ve paid nothing and for which we are not contractually obliged to you to provide. We may not be able to deliver a sample that you wish to request and this could be for a number of reasons. It may be that we had a limited stock and you didn’t request it before we ran out. Or maybe we thought we had more than we did, perhaps because we have realised that some of our stock is damaged in some way. Or it may simply be that you don’t fit the profile of the types of consumers that the brand in question is trying to reach. Or it could be any one of a dozen or more other reasons. Whatever the reason, we will try to let you know that we’re not going to be able to deliver the sample as soon as we can within reason but we will not be obliged to explain why this is nor will we enter into and prolonged debate about it. We do promise, though, that we will approach the question of who gets a sample fairly, albeit within the bounds of what we are obliged to do for our brand partners.

If we are able to provide you with a sample, we will do our best to deliver it to the shipping address you have given as soon as reasonably practicable. However, as the UK leaves the EU over the course of the next few years (if, indeed, it eventually does), issues around border controls and customs may impact our shipping arrangements and cause delays that are beyond our control. We will do our best to keep these delays to a minimum and to keep you informed but please bear in mind that even if you are in the UK, the samples we are distributing may be stored elsewhere. And if you’re not in the UK, the samples we are distributing may be warehoused in the UK.

Consumers enjoy protection under a variety of laws in different jurisdictions around the world and, if you are using SoPost as a consumer, nothing in these Terms is intended to undermine your protection either in England or wherever you happen to be when you access the Service. In English law, it would be unlawful for us to attempt to exclude or limit liability for personal injury or death arising from our negligence or for any loss you suffer as a result of our fraud or for any statement we make fraudulently intending you to rely on it in entering into this contract with us. It’s pretty difficult to see how your use of our Service could result in anybody suffering any kind of physical harm, but we just need to be clear about these things.

Bearing in mind always the exceptions we have mentioned in the previous paragraph, there are certain types of liability that we are permitted by law to limit or exclude and, accordingly, WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU OR TO ANY THIRD PARTY FOR ANY INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL LOSS, DAMAGE OR EXPENSE (INCLUDING LOSS OF PROFITS, DATA, BUSINESS OR GOODWILL) THAT YOU MIGHT SUFFER AS A RESULT OF USING SOPOST, HOWEVER THAT LOSS DAMAGE OR EXPENSE MIGHT ARISE. In case you’re wondering, that bit has to be in capitals in order to comply with the laws of certain jurisdictions, including certain states in the USA.

In addition, WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE OR RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY FAILURE TO PERFORM OR FOR THE DELAY IN THE PERFORMANCE OF ANY OF OUR OBLIGATIONS UNDER THESE TERMS THAT IS CAUSED BY EVENTS THAT ARE BEYOND OUR REASONABLE CONTROL. This might include a failure of an internet service provider to deliver notifications to you, for instance.

If we happen to make a statement that turns out to be untrue (whether orally or in writing) prior to your acceptance of these Terms, then, unless that statement was made fraudulently by us, we will only be liable to you should that untrue statement result in us breaching these Terms. If it does not, the untrue statement has no impact on our relationship with you save insofar as it may impact on your legal rights as a consumer.

In accepting these Terms, we need you to understand that SoPost is a platform through which consumers like you can get access to product samples and samples. We’re not responsible for any of the campaigns that we facilitate. If you have a problem with the nature, quality or content of any campaign or sample that we deliver for a brand partner, whilst we may perhaps be sympathetic to you, there will be nothing at all that we can do to help and you should address any grievance of this nature you have to the brand on whose behalf the campaign is being delivered.

These limitations and exclusions of liability will survive the termination of our relationship with you (which, in turn, would terminate our contract with you).

In making sure that our users are happy and that SoPost is working efficiently, we may review the data being transmitted by you or any of our other users. This does NOT mean, however, that we are under any duty to do this and we do not and will not assume any responsibility for this.

You also need to be aware that viruses can be transmitted via websites, not just email. So if you want to make sure that your systems are safe from infection, you should run suitable security software because WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY VIRUS INFECTION OR OTHER HARM CAUSED TO YOUR SYSTEMS THROUGH YOUR USE OF SOPOST OR WHEN FOLLOWING ANY LINKS TO WEBSITES RUN BY OTHER PEOPLE.

There may come occasions where we choose not to insist on your total compliance with your obligations under these Terms or that, where you’ve breached the Terms, that we don’t make use of our rights to take action against you. This does NOT mean, however, that we are waiving those rights. We can take action against you later if we choose to and at any time during the lifetime of our relationship with you (or, indeed, thereafter), we can return to the issue and insist on your compliance.

Writing Reviews

Our brand partners want to be sure that when you’re reviewing one of their products, that your review is genuine and has been written honestly and exclusively by you. We’re also sure that when you read reviews about products that you yourself are interested in, you want them to be genuine and written to the same high standard. That’s why we use this section of our Terms, to which you will have to agree before you can submit a review on our site.

When you submit a review, you promise to us that:

You have previously agreed our Terms and are aware that the provisions contained within are all still valid and enforceable.
The product that you are submitting a review for had been personally received by you from us and that your review has been submitted through our review form.
You will only post one review per product and will not attempt to submit a second review of any individual product – you may have really liked something we sent you, but our brand partners insist on only one review per product per person.
Your review has been written by you and only you, and that it is your original work and not that of any other person. Copying other people’s work (or as the lawyers say, their ‘intellectual property’) is illegal without their consent and won’t be of any use to us or any of our brand partners.
Your review is truthful, accurate and genuine and you are not providing any false or misleading information. Our brand partners want the honest truth from you to help them improve and market their products, so please make sure everything is accurate and genuine, even if that means you didn’t like the sample.
You are aware that once a review is published any inappropriate and relevant negative content will not be hidden, suppressed, edited or deleted. There will also be no additional spelling or grammar checks before your review is published and to that extent your review will be published exactly how you’ve written it.
Our brand partner may make limited technical changes in order to correct incorrect or possibly misleading information contained in your review about the product concerned or claims that may be made by the brand partner in respect of that product. The underlying opinion expressed in your review will not be changed and our brand partner will try to ensure that your views remain very much evident despite any technical changes that it feel it has to make.
Your review contains no information as to pricing of the product(s) or to any potential or actual purchase locations. A lot of our products are in the early stage of coming to the market so our brand partners mightn’t have a good idea on pricing yet, so we don’t want to mislead anyone in the reviews as to pricing and where you can buy the product from.
You grant permission for us to distribute your review together with any information you have inputted alongside it. This information will be distributed to our brand partners and our third party service providers who we sometimes use to help us compile, verify and pass on your review.
You consent to the publication of your review by us, our brand partners and any other applicable third parties (or in legal jargon, you are waiving any moral and intellectual property rights in the review). We need this consent so we, our brand partners and any other applicable third parties can use your review either on the internet or in any other marketing activities.
You also give permission for us and our trusted third parties to use fraud and risk protection software to test your review in order to establish that reviews are genuine and to prevent fake reviews.

There may be occasional circumstances where for one reason or another, your review is not used by us or one of our brand partners. You acknowledge that once a review is submitted, neither ourselves nor our brand partners are under any contractual obligation to publish or display your review.

In addition to these terms and conditions we also have a few personal requirements and obligations that we need you to agree before posting a review. These are that:

When submitting a review, we will ask you to choose a nickname to submit alongside your review, that is not personally identifiable to yourself. This nickname may be used to be displayed by us or our brand partners alongside this review wherever it may be published as well as by you on any future reviews you may write.
We will use the email address with which you request the sample to identify you. You will only be able to review samples that you have requested and received.
You recognise when you submit your review that we will collect the IP address from the device from which the review was submitted from. We, alongside our trusted third parties, use this information to verify your review as genuine and to protect against fake reviews.

Finally, by agreeing to these terms and conditions you are aware that all requirements contained in this agreement apply not only to your first review but to all subsequent reviews that you post on our review form.

This Contract

From time to time, we will have to give you information relating to your use of the Service. This might be information about new functionality or old functionality that we are going to withdraw. It might be to let you know that we have made changes to these Terms or the Privacy Notice. We will send this information to you in the form of notifications via the website. We might also send an email to the address you have given us (which is why we need you to give us an up-to-date email address) or in some other form of electronic communication. English law requires that certain information that we might have to pass to you has to be in writing, so you accept that information we provide to you electronically is indeed ‘written’ for this purpose.

If, for some reason, you need to communicate with us for contractual purposes, you can do this by sending a letter by post to our registered office (which you will find on the website).

Information that we send to you or you send to us for contractual reasons we’ll call “Notices” for the purposes of these terms. There may be times when we all need to know when such a Notice was received. To make things easy, those Notices will be deemed to be received as follows. A Notice sent by us to you by way of notification through an app will be deemed as having been served immediately. A Notice sent by us to you via a notification sent to your account via the website only or an email sent by you to us or us to you, will be regarded as having been received the day AFTER it is sent, just to give everyone a reasonable chance to pick it up. If a Notice is sent in either direction by letter, that Notice will be regarded as having been received (assuming that it was properly stamped and sent by first class mail) three days AFTER the day on which it was sent, or in the case of a letter sent from overseas by airmail, ten days AFTER the day on which it was sent.

It might just be that at some point in the future, a court or some other authority has cause to review these Terms and in so doing, rules that some or other part of them is invalid, unlawful or unenforceable. Obviously, that could cause a bit of a problem, certainly for us and possibly also for you. So, in the very unlikely event that something like that happens, there will be two consequences. First, everybody accepts that the rest of the Terms will remain in place between us and that the contract will survive intact with the problematic element removed. Second, the authority or court taking action may compose a replacement for the stricken terms that do as good a job as reasonably possible as the job previously done by those terms or, where the authority or court taking action declines to do so, you agree that we may replace those terms ourselves with something else that complies with the ruling.

Everything relevant to our contractual relationship with you is set out either in these Terms or in the Privacy Notice. We have no earlier contractual arrangement or understanding with you of any sort. If there is anything that you seek to rely on in making your request for a sample, please disregard it right now, because in submitting your request and accepting these Terms, you must acknowledge that in using SoPost, you haven’t relied upon any statement made or promise given by us, whether stated plainly or implied from our conduct UNLESS that representation or statement is repeated either in these Terms of in the Privacy Notice. We have to have this rule because (1) we need some certainty about our relationship with you, and (2) because imagine having thousands of customers and having different, potentially undefined contracts with each: it just wouldn’t work.

In England, there is a law that gives third parties (that is, people who are not ‘party’ to a contract) certain rights to enforce terms that are intended to benefit them. This is called the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999. We can’t think of a situation where this might come into play, but just to be clear, any right of a third party to take action under that law is excluded. There is an exception to this, however. There may be a situation where third parties can take action and where we are not permitted to exclude that possibility, such third party rights remain, so you might want to bear that in mind.

This concludes these Terms and as soon as you check the ‘accept Terms’ box and complete your request of a sample, you will have a binding contract with us. All that is left for us to say is that your contract with us is subject to and governed by English law. Any dispute that arises from our relationship with you or your use of SoPost will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.