Terms and Conditions

These Terms and Conditions are the agreement between BongoMart and your business. They cover the web portal and the mobile app, and they apply from the moment somebody in your business creates an account or signs in to one. If you are using BongoMart on behalf of a business, you are confirming that you are authorised to accept these terms for it.

Read them together with the Privacy Policy, which forms part of this agreement and which sets out what we do with personal data. The two documents are meant to agree with each other. If you find a place where they do not, tell us, because one of them is wrong and we would rather correct it than argue about which one you should have believed.

Registered name: to be confirmed

BongoMart is the name the product wears. The party to this agreement is the operating company, whose registration is in progress, so the line above is marked as not yet confirmed rather than filled in with a guess. When the registration completes, that line carries the registered name and the company is the party on our side.

A handful of words are used in a particular way throughout this document, and it is worth two minutes to fix them now rather than to guess at them later.

The service

The BongoMart web portal, the BongoMart mobile app, and everything we provide through either of them.

Your business

The business account that you or your owner created, including every shop or branch inside it.

A shop

One trading location inside your business. A business may have one shop or many, depending on the plan it is on.

You

The business, and every person who signs in to it. Where an obligation can only sensibly fall on one person, such as scheduling a deletion, this document says owner instead.

A merchant

The business using the service in order to trade. That is our customer, whether it is one counter or a chain of branches.

Your customers

The people your business sells to, and whose details your business records in the service.

Controller and processor

A controller is whoever decides why personal data is collected and for how long it is kept. A processor is whoever handles it for the controller and on the controller's instructions. For your customers' data, your business is the controller and we are the processor.

An account belongs to a person, not to a seat that gets passed around at the counter.

• You give us a real mobile number and a real name. The number is how we reach you about your account and your money, and it belongs to one person only.
• You keep your password to yourself. A shared sign-in is how a business loses the ability to tell who did what, which is the one question its audit trail exists to answer.
• You are responsible for what is done under your sign-in. If you think somebody else has reached it, change your password, which ends every other session, and then tell us.
• You keep your contact details current. A verification message we cannot deliver is a door we cannot open for you later.
• One person may work in more than one business. That is still one account, and ending their access to one business does not end their access to another.

We may refuse or close an account created with details that are not true. An account nobody can attribute to a real person is of no use to the business it sits in either, because it cannot be held to anything.

An owner decides who works in the business and what each person is allowed to do in it.

• Permissions are granted per shop and per job rather than in one lump. A cashier who may record a payment is not for that reason a manager who may change a price.
• The owner is responsible for the permissions they grant. We enforce the limits that are set; we do not second-guess who ought to have them.
• Ending a person's access is the owner's to do, and what it does depends on whose account it is. The retention section of the Privacy Policy sets this out in full, because it decides what data survives.
• How many people can be active in a business at once depends on the plan. Removing somebody frees their seat straight away.

An owner cannot be removed by another owner through the staff controls, and the service refuses the attempt. Who owns a company is a question about the company and not about a permission setting, and it is not a question the app is in a position to settle.

The service is sold as a subscription, and these are the terms of it.

• Every new business starts on a Pro trial lasting 30 days. No card is needed in order to start it.
• Plans differ by what they include: how many products, how many shops, how many people, how much file storage, and which modules are open. The current list and the current prices are on the pricing page.
• Prices are in Tanzanian shillings. A cycle is monthly or annual, and an annual cycle is charged once for the year.
• Payment is taken through Flutterwave. Your card or mobile money details go to it directly rather than to us.
• When a trial ends, or a paid subscription lapses, the business moves to the Free plan. It keeps selling, within the Free plan's limits, and nothing it created is deleted. A lapse is a change of plan and not a loss of your records.
• Where a limit on the lower plan is below what you already hold, your existing records stay and stay readable, and adding new ones may be refused until you are back inside the limit or back on a higher plan.

Refunds: to be confirmed

The refund position is shown above as not yet confirmed because it is a commercial decision that has not been finalised, and a term we might not honour would be worse than a gap you can see. Until it is settled, write to us with any billing question and we will deal with it one case at a time.

SMS is metered separately from the subscription, because every message costs real money and the mobile networks charge us for each one.

• A message is counted in segments. A plain message of up to 160 characters is one segment; a longer one is split and each part counts. Characters outside the standard GSM set shorten a segment, so a message with unusual punctuation can cost more than its length suggests.
• Some messages are funded by us, such as a verification code or a notice about your own account. Others draw on your business's credit, such as a marketing campaign or a reminder you send to a customer who owes you.
• Credit is consumed when a message is accepted for delivery. The report the network returns is recorded against that message, and it is what we read when a charge is queried.

A campaign you send to your own customers is yours. You choose the recipients, the words and the moment, you hold the consent, and the credit comes off your balance. The data protection section below sets out exactly what you are warranting at the moment you press send.

Most of the rules below are obvious. The list exists so that the ones which are not obvious are written down somewhere you can point at.

• Do not use the service to break the law, including the Personal Data Protection Act, 2022 and the law on consumer protection and on tax.
• Do not send messages to people who have not agreed to receive them from you.
• Do not enter another person's details in order to pass yourself off as them, and do not create an account in somebody else's name.
• Do not try to reach data belonging to another business, do not probe the service for weaknesses uninvited, and do not work around a limit that a plan enforces.
• Do not resell the service, or hand access to a business that is not yours, without our written agreement.
• Do not use it to keep the books of a trade that is itself unlawful.
• Do not upload material you have no right to upload, including photographs that are not yours to publish.

If you find a weakness in the service, tell us rather than use it. We take such a report seriously, and we will not pursue somebody who reports one in good faith and who went no further than they had to in order to show us it was real.

What you record in the service is yours. We claim no ownership of your products, your prices, your sales, your customer list or your figures, and we do not trade on them.

You can get your records out. The reporting module produces documents of what the service holds, and where the app itself does not offer the export you need, ask us and we will help. We would rather you were able to leave than locked in: a business that cannot leave is not a customer, it is a hostage.

You are responsible for what you put in. Every figure the service shows you is built from what you and your staff entered, so a price typed in wrongly is a profit reported wrongly. We are answerable for the arithmetic. The inputs are yours.

For the data your business holds about its own customers, your business is the controller and we are the processor. That is not a form of words, it is a division of duty, and it decides who answers for what. You decide what you collect from your customers, why you collect it and how long you keep it. We hold it and handle it in order to provide the service and on your instructions, and for no purpose of our own.

What you warrant to us. By entering a customer's details, and above all by sending that customer a message, you are telling us the following, and we are relying on it.

• You have a lawful basis for every customer record you enter, and you could say what it is if somebody asked.
• Before any marketing message is sent to a customer, you have that customer's consent. This is the warranty that matters most in this agreement, because the message goes out under your business's name and it is your customer who receives it.
• The consent state recorded in the app is truthful. The app records whether a customer consented, where the consent came from, when it was captured and which member of your staff captured it, and that record is only worth keeping if it is accurate.
• You do not put special category data into a customer's notes. Health, religion, political opinion, trade union membership, sexual life and biometric data do not belong in a shop's customer notes, and the service is not built to protect them to the standard they require.
• You have told your customers, in whatever way suits your trade, that you keep records about them and that a service provider holds those records on your behalf.

What you owe your own customers. We cannot answer to them in your place, because we do not hold the relationship and in many cases we cannot tell which of your records refers to which person.

• You answer their requests to see, to correct or to erase what you hold about them. The app gives you an erase control which replaces a customer's name, phone number, notes and tags while leaving your sales history intact. It is unavailable while that customer has an unsettled Pay Later sale.
• If a customer asks you to stop messaging them, you stop, and you mark them as opted out in the app so that a later campaign does not reach them by accident.
• Every marketing message we send for you also carries a link the customer can tap to stop them without going through you. When they do, we record them as opted out for your business immediately and no later campaign of yours reaches that number, so a withdrawal is honoured whether it arrives at your counter or through the link.
• You keep your own record of any consent you captured outside the app, for example on paper at the counter, because the app can only hold what somebody entered into it.
• Where a customer complains to you about how their data was handled, you deal with it, and you tell us if any part of the complaint concerns something we did.

What we owe you as processor. These are commitments rather than intentions, and they are the ones to hold us to.

• We process your customers' data only in order to provide the service and only on your instructions. We do not use it for purposes of our own, we do not sell it, and we never move it from one business to another.
• We keep it confidential, and the people here who can reach it are the ones whose work requires it.
• We apply the security measures described in the Privacy Policy.
• We help you answer a request from one of your customers, as far as the service allows.
• If we become aware of a personal data breach affecting your data, we tell you without undue delay, with what we know at the time rather than waiting until we know everything.
• We use only the sub-processors listed in the Privacy Policy, and we tell you before we add one.
• When your business is deleted we delete your data through the 30-day process the Privacy Policy describes, except for the records that policy names as permanently retained. Those are named there by name, rather than covered over with a general phrase here.

Both of us comply with the Personal Data Protection Act, 2022 of the United Republic of Tanzania, and nothing in this agreement relieves either of us of that.

We aim to keep the service available, and we are not going to promise that it always will be. It is software, it runs on infrastructure we rent, and it depends on networks that neither of us controls. We do planned work at the quietest hours we can find, and we tell you about it in advance where we can.

The service needs a working internet connection. Where a feature depends on something outside the service, such as a mobile network delivering an SMS or a payment provider authorising a card, we are answerable for handing the work over correctly and not for what the other party then does with it.

The service, its software, its design and its name belong to us. These terms give you the right to use it while your subscription is current and nothing beyond that: no right to copy it, to take it apart, to build a competing product out of it, or to use our name or our marks without our written agreement.

What you put in stays yours, as the records section above says. Where you send us feedback about the service we may act on it without owing you anything for it, which is the only basis on which a suggestion can be acted on at all.

Either of us can bring this agreement to an end, and the circumstances are not the same on both sides.

• You can stop using the service whenever you like, and an owner can schedule the business for deletion from inside the app. The 30-day window and what happens after it are described in the Privacy Policy.
• You can cancel a subscription at the end of its cycle. The business then moves to the Free plan rather than stopping, so your records remain reachable.
• We can suspend access where the acceptable use section has been broken, where a payment has failed and has not been put right, or where the law requires us to. Except where the breach is serious or the law leaves us no room, we tell you first and give you the chance to put it right.
• We can end the agreement if the business stays in breach after we have asked it to stop, or if we stop offering the service altogether, in which case we give as much notice as we reasonably can and help you get your records out.

Ending the agreement does not cancel a charge already incurred, and it does not change what the Privacy Policy says about the records that are retained after a deletion.

This section limits what we are liable for. It is written to be read rather than merely to be enforceable, because a limit you did not understand is a limit you did not agree to.

• The service is a record keeping and selling tool. It is not an accountant, not a tax adviser and not a lender. Every figure it shows is built from what you and your staff entered, and a decision you take on the strength of one is yours.
• We are not liable for lost profit, lost business, or a loss that follows on from something else rather than from the service itself failing. We are not liable for what the mobile networks, the payment provider or the device in your hand do.
• We are liable for direct loss that we caused. Nothing in these terms limits a liability that the law does not permit us to limit, including liability for fraud.

Liability is capped at the fees paid over: to be confirmed

The period above is shown as not yet confirmed because it is a commercial decision that has not been finalised. Publishing a cap nobody had decided on would be worse than a gap you can see, so the gap is visible. Until it is settled the limits in the list above apply and no cap does.

We change these terms when the service changes or when the law does. The date at the top of this page is the date of the version you are reading, and it is set by hand when the words change rather than generated from the clock.

Where a change materially affects you we tell you before it takes effect, through the channels the Privacy Policy describes. If you do not accept a change you can cancel, or delete the business, rather than be bound by it. Using the service after a change has taken effect means you accept it.

This agreement is governed by the laws of the United Republic of Tanzania, and the courts of Tanzania have jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of it. Before it comes to that, write to us. Most disagreements turn out to be a misunderstanding about what the service actually did, and the audit trail usually settles one of those within a day.

Write to us about anything in these terms. The email address below is monitored today; the other two are shown as not yet confirmed rather than invented.

Email: support@bongomarts.com

Telephone: to be confirmed

Postal address: to be confirmed

These terms are published in English and in Swahili, and the two versions are meant to say the same thing. If they disagree, the English version governs.