Terms of Use
The rules for using ReviewHopper: what the service does, what we ask of you, what you can expect from us, and the limits of our responsibility.
Some of this document limits our liability to you and allocates risk between us. Those sections are written in the same plain language as the rest and are not hidden in capital letters, but they matter, and the sections on warranties, liability and indemnity are the ones to read closely.
These terms, and your agreement to them
These terms are an agreement between you and ReviewHopper. They apply whenever you use the service -- whether you are a customer giving feedback or someone administering a business account -- and by using it you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.
Our privacy policy forms part of these terms. Where a business has signed a separate written agreement with us, that agreement governs its use of the service and prevails over these terms to the extent they conflict.
Who may use the service
- You must be at least 16 years old.
- If you are administering a business account, you must have authority to act for that business, and you accept these terms on its behalf as well as your own.
- You must not use the service if we have previously blocked your access, or if the law where you are prohibits it.
What the service is
A business gives its customers a link or a code. You open it, choose a rating from one to five stars, and are then shown one of two things, depending on your rating and on how that business has configured the service: an invitation to post a public review on a review site the business chose, or a private form that goes straight to that business's management.
We provide the software. The business decides its settings, chooses where public reviews are invited, and receives the feedback. We do not publish anything you write, we do not edit it, and we do not decide what a business does with it.
Using the service as a customer
There is no account, no password and nothing to pay. What we ask is that the feedback is yours and is about an experience you actually had. Specifically, you must not:
- Submit a rating or comment that is false, fabricated or deliberately misleading.
- Pretend to be someone else, or submit feedback on behalf of someone who has not asked you to.
- Submit anything unlawful, defamatory, abusive, harassing, hateful, threatening, obscene, or that incites any of those.
- Include someone else's personal information without their permission.
- Infringe anyone's intellectual property, or submit content you do not have the right to submit.
- Submit code, scripts or files intended to damage, disable or interfere with the service or anyone using it.
- Use automated means to submit feedback, or otherwise attempt to inflate, deflate or distort a business's ratings.
- Probe, scan, penetration-test, overload, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to the service or the systems it runs on.
- Copy, scrape, resell or systematically extract the service or its content, or reverse-engineer any part of it except to the extent the law says we cannot stop you.
The feedback you submit
- You keep it
- You own what you write. Nothing here transfers ownership of it to us.
- What you allow us to do with it
- You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce and transmit your feedback for the purpose of operating the service -- which means delivering it to the business you gave it to and including it in that business's own reports. The licence lasts as long as we hold the feedback and ends when it is deleted. It does not permit us to publish your feedback, to sell it, or to use it to advertise anything.
- What you are promising us
- That the feedback is yours to give, that it is honest, and that it does not break any of the rules in the section above.
- Private stays private
- A private comment goes to the business's management. We do not publish it, and we do not pass it to a review site.
- A public review is not ours
- If you are invited to post a public review on another site and choose to do so, that review is published there, under that site's terms and its privacy policy, not ours. We have no control over it and cannot remove it for you.
- We may remove content
- We may remove or refuse feedback that breaks these terms, or that we are required to remove by law. We are not obliged to monitor what is submitted, and not removing something is not an endorsement of it.
Our intellectual property
The service itself -- the software, the pages, the design and the ReviewHopper name and logo -- belongs to us or to our licensors, and is protected by intellectual property law. These terms give you permission to use the service as it is intended to be used, and nothing more. In particular they give you no right to use our name or logo without our written permission.
A business's own name, logo and content remain that business's property. It gives us permission to display them on its feedback pages and in the messages the service sends on its behalf.
Suggestions you send us
If you send us an idea for improving the service, we may use it without restriction, without compensating you and without any obligation of confidence. This is not about your feedback to a business, which is covered above -- it is about suggestions about the product itself. Please do not send us anything you consider confidential.
Using the service as a business
If you administer an account, the following apply to you and to the business you represent.
- Keep your sign-in details confidential. You are responsible for everything done under your account, and you must tell us promptly at support@reviewhopper.com if you believe someone else has access to it.
- Invite only genuine customers who actually had the experience you are asking about. Do not offer anything of value in exchange for a positive rating.
- Follow the rules of any review platform you send customers to. Those platforms set their own conditions on how reviews may be solicited, including conditions on inviting some customers and not others, and meeting them is your responsibility, not ours. If a platform penalises you, that is between you and the platform.
- You are responsible for the feedback and contact details you receive. In data protection terms you are the controller of that information and we handle it on your instructions; you must have a lawful basis for collecting it and must give your customers the information the law requires.
- Configure the service honestly. What your feedback page says to a customer is your text, not ours.
- Do not use the service to send anything a customer has not agreed to receive, where their agreement is required.
Other sites and services
The service may send you to a review site or another website we do not operate. We are not responsible for those sites, for their content, or for how they handle your information, and a link is not an endorsement. Their terms and their privacy policies apply once you arrive.
We rely on service providers -- hosting, storage and email among them -- to run the service. We choose them with care, but an interruption caused by one of them is covered by the availability and liability sections below.
Availability, changes and ending your use
- We aim to keep the service available, but we do not promise any particular level of availability, and we make no service level commitment in these terms. A business with a separate written agreement should look there.
- We may change, suspend or withdraw features, take the service down for maintenance, or stop offering it. Where a change is significant and we can give notice in advance, we will.
- You may stop using the service at any time. A business may ask us to close its account.
- We may suspend or end access -- yours, or a business's -- where we reasonably believe these terms have been breached, where it is necessary to protect the service or someone using it, or where we are required to by law. Where it is reasonable to give notice and an opportunity to put things right, we will.
- Closing an account does not delete feedback already given, which belongs to the business's record of its own customers. Deletion requests are handled as described in the privacy policy.
Reporting a problem with content
If you believe feedback held by the service is unlawful, defamatory, infringes your intellectual property, or contains your personal information without your permission, write to support@reviewhopper.com. Tell us what the content is, where it is, why it is a problem, and how to reach you.
We will look at it and act where we agree action is warranted, including removing the content. If a claim concerns your personal information rather than the content itself, the privacy policy sets out the process and the timescale.
What we do not promise
The service is provided as it is and as it is available. To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude all warranties, conditions and representations that are not expressly stated in these terms, including any implied warranty of merchantability, satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.
We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free, that defects will be corrected, or that it will produce any particular result for a business -- including any particular number, rating or quality of reviews.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties. Where that is so, this section applies to you only to the extent that jurisdiction permits, and your statutory rights as a consumer are unaffected.
The limits of our responsibility
To the fullest extent the law allows:
- We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, lost goodwill, lost opportunity or lost or corrupted data, however caused and whether or not we were warned it was possible.
- Our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to the service, taken together, is limited to the greater of the total amount you paid us for the service in the twelve months before the claim arose, and one hundred United States dollars.
- We are not liable for anything a business does with feedback after it reaches them, for what a review site does with a review you post there, or for a penalty a review platform imposes on a business.
- What we never exclude
- Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability that cannot be limited or excluded by law -- which, depending on where you are, may include liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and for breach of statutory consumer rights.
- If you are a consumer
- These limits apply only so far as the law where you live allows. Some jurisdictions do not permit the exclusion or limitation of certain damages, in which case the exclusions above apply to you only to the extent permitted, and your statutory rights are unaffected.
- Why the limit is set this way
- The service is provided to customers free of charge, and the allocation of risk in this section is part of what makes that possible. It reflects a deliberate bargain rather than an oversight.
Claims arising from your use
If someone brings a claim against us because of how you used the service, you will cover our reasonable losses. Specifically, you agree to indemnify us against claims, damages, liabilities and reasonable legal costs arising out of:
- Feedback or other content you submitted.
- Your breach of these terms or of any law.
- For a business: how it solicited feedback, what it did with feedback it received, and any penalty or claim arising from a review platform's rules.
- How this works in practice
- We will tell you promptly about any claim we want covered, will not settle it without your agreement where your money is at stake, and will let you take over its defence with counsel of your choice, provided we may participate at our own cost.
- If you are a consumer
- This section applies to you only to the extent the law where you live allows an indemnity of this kind, and it does not affect your statutory rights.
If something goes wrong between us
Please write to support@reviewhopper.com first and tell us what the problem is. Most things are resolved that way, and it is faster and cheaper for everyone than a formal dispute. We ask you to give us thirty days to respond before starting formal proceedings, and we will do the same for you.
Nothing in this section prevents either of us from applying to a court for an injunction or other urgent relief, or stops you complaining to a regulator or consumer body at any time.
Governing law
These terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of them or out of your use of the service -- including a non-contractual one -- are governed by the law of the State of Washington, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.
The courts of King County, Washington have exclusive jurisdiction, and each of us submits to them. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of the country you live in, or of your right to bring proceedings there.
Changes to these terms
The effective date at the top of this page tells you when this version took effect, and the version number identifies it. If we change these terms we publish a new version with a new date.
For a change that materially affects your rights or obligations we will give notice before it takes effect where we reasonably can -- for a business, by email to the account's administrators. Continuing to use the service after a change takes effect means you accept the new version. If you do not accept it, stop using the service.
General
- Entire agreement
- These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about the service, and replace anything said or written before -- except a separate written agreement with a business, which prevails where it conflicts. Nothing here excludes liability for fraudulent misrepresentation.
- Severability
- If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, that part is adjusted to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable, or removed if it cannot be. The rest continues to apply.
- No waiver
- If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
- Assignment
- You may not transfer your rights or obligations under these terms without our written permission. We may transfer ours to a company that acquires or reorganises the service, provided your rights under these terms are not reduced.
- Events outside our control
- We are not responsible for a failure or delay caused by something genuinely outside our reasonable control, including an outage at a hosting or network provider, for as long as it lasts.
- Notices
- We give notice to a business by email to its account administrators, and to everyone else by publishing it on the service. You give notice to us at support@reviewhopper.com.
- Electronic communications
- You agree that we may communicate with you electronically, and that an electronic notice satisfies any legal requirement that a communication be in writing.
- No third-party rights
- Nobody other than you and us has the right to enforce these terms.
- Survival
- The sections on your content, our intellectual property, warranties, liability, indemnity, disputes and this General section continue to apply after you stop using the service.
- Language
- These terms are written in English. If we provide a translation, the English version governs if the two disagree.
How to contact us
Write to support@reviewhopper.com.
Our postal address is 23318 SE 218th St, Maple Valley, WA 98038, United States.
The service is operated by Mindful Conversion, Inc.
Questions about this document
Write to support@reviewhopper.com and a person will reply.
See also our Privacy Policy.