Effective date: October 8, 2026
These Terms of Service govern use of Merchstead, a hosted ecommerce platform operated by JCB Publishing LLC.
JCB Publishing LLC
4157 Fox Run Trl, Ste 1
Cincinnati, Ohio 45255, USA
Contact:
joseph.bily@merchstead.com
By creating a Merchstead account, accessing the service, or using a Merchstead storefront or administration feature, you agree to these Terms and our applicable policies, including the Acceptable Use Policy and Privacy Notice.
If you use Merchstead on behalf of a company or other organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization.
If you do not agree to these Terms, do not use the service.
Merchant account holders must be at least 18 years old and legally capable of entering into a binding agreement.
You agree to provide accurate account and billing information, protect account credentials, manage authorized personnel and permissions, and promptly report suspected unauthorized access.
You are responsible for actions taken through accounts and credentials you authorize.
Merchstead provides ecommerce tools that may include:
Availability depends on your account, plan, configuration, connected third-party providers, and activation status.
Trial registration does not guarantee approval for live sales.
Features identified as early access, pilot, beta, preview, or experimental may change, be limited, or be discontinued.
Each merchant is the seller of products offered through its storefront.
JCB Publishing LLC and Merchstead are not parties to transactions between merchants and their customers.
Merchants are responsible for:
Merchants should publish their own applicable store terms, return policies, and privacy notices.
Unless a specific offer states otherwise, Merchstead's advertised trial period is 14 days.
Trial registration alone does not authorize undisclosed recurring charges.
Subscription pricing, billing frequency, included services, taxes, and applicable recurring-payment authorization will be disclosed before a paid subscription begins.
Authorized subscriptions renew at the disclosed interval until canceled.
Payment-provider fees, carrier charges, domain costs, taxes, duties, and other third-party charges are separate unless expressly included.
You may cancel through available subscription controls or by contacting joseph.bily@merchstead.com.
Cancellation stops future subscription renewals once processed but does not necessarily result in immediate deletion of account or business records.
Except where required by law or stated in a particular offer, fees already paid are nonrefundable.
Merchstead may connect with third-party providers such as Google, Square, UPS, hosting providers, domain providers, and other services.
Your use of those services may be governed by separate agreements with those providers.
You are responsible for maintaining any third-party accounts, permissions, credentials, authorizations, approvals, and payment arrangements required for integrations you choose to enable.
By enabling an integration, you authorize Merchstead to transmit and receive the information reasonably necessary to perform the requested integration.
Provider availability, rates, policies, approvals, service interruptions, and fees are outside Merchstead's control.
Merchants should independently verify consequential third-party actions such as payments, refunds, shipping labels, rates, and tax calculations.
Merchstead may allow merchants, platform administrators, or authorized recovery accounts to connect Google accounts through OAuth 2.0.
When a Google account authorizes Merchstead to use the Gmail API, Merchstead may send email on behalf of that authorized account within the scope granted by the user.
Merchstead currently uses the Gmail gmail.send authorization scope
for supported email functionality.
Merchstead does not obtain ownership of a connected Google account or its content.
Users remain responsible for:
Google integrations may stop functioning if authorization is revoked, credentials expire, provider policies change, quotas are exceeded, or Google services are unavailable.
Merchstead does not guarantee uninterrupted delivery through Google or any other third-party provider.
Our handling of information obtained from Google APIs is described in the Merchstead Privacy Notice.
Merchstead may send transactional, account, security, billing, recovery, support, and merchant-authorized communications.
Merchants are responsible for ensuring that communications sent through their connected accounts comply with applicable email, privacy, consumer-protection, and marketing laws.
Merchstead must not be used to send spam, deceptive email, unlawful solicitations, phishing content, malware, or other prohibited communications.
Delivery is not guaranteed. Email providers may reject, delay, filter, rate-limit, or otherwise restrict messages.
You retain ownership of content that you provide to Merchstead.
You grant JCB Publishing LLC a nonexclusive license to host, reproduce, process, transmit, display, modify as technically necessary, back up, and otherwise use that content solely as reasonably necessary to provide, secure, maintain, and support the service.
You represent that you have the rights and permissions necessary to provide and use the content.
JCB Publishing LLC and its licensors retain ownership of Merchstead software, documentation, designs, trademarks, branding, and other platform materials.
You may not use Merchstead to engage in or facilitate:
We may restrict or suspend activity reasonably believed to threaten users, merchants, third parties, or the security or operation of Merchstead.
Merchants are responsible for determining the lawful purposes for which they collect and use their customers' information.
Merchants must provide legally required privacy notices, obtain permissions where required, respond to applicable privacy requests, and avoid collecting unnecessary sensitive information.
Merchstead processes merchant customer information as necessary to provide the hosted service, subject to applicable law, contractual obligations, and merchant instructions.
Any required data-processing agreement, international-transfer safeguard, or other privacy arrangement must be established where applicable.
The Merchstead Privacy Notice explains our own data practices and our use of Google API information.
Merchstead uses technical and organizational safeguards intended to protect the platform and stored information.
Users are responsible for protecting their own passwords, third-party credentials, OAuth authorizations, recovery methods, and administrative access.
No internet-connected system can be guaranteed completely secure.
You agree to promptly notify us of suspected unauthorized access or compromise relating to your Merchstead account.
Support availability depends on your selected service or plan.
Unless expressly agreed in writing, Merchstead does not guarantee a particular response time or service-availability percentage.
Maintenance, provider outages, infrastructure incidents, security events, network failures, integration failures, or circumstances outside our reasonable control may temporarily interrupt service.
Merchants should retain independent copies of business records they consider important.
We may restrict or suspend access because of:
Where practical, we will provide notice and an opportunity to resolve the issue. Immediate restriction may occur when necessary to address urgent security, legal, or operational risks.
You may cancel your service as provided through Merchstead account controls or by contacting us.
Cancellation, subscription termination, account closure, and permanent data deletion are separate processes.
Retention and deletion are governed by the Privacy Notice, merchant instructions, legal obligations, and applicable agreements.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, Merchstead is provided as is and as available.
We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, completely secure, or suitable for every business requirement.
We do not guarantee:
Mandatory rights that cannot legally be excluded remain unaffected.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, neither party will be liable to the other for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages or lost profits arising from the service.
JCB Publishing LLC's aggregate liability arising from or related to Merchstead will not exceed the fees paid by you to us during the 12 months preceding the event giving rise to the claim.
These limitations do not apply to liability that cannot legally be limited, or to fraud or willful misconduct where applicable law prohibits limitation.
To the extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify JCB Publishing LLC against third-party claims and reasonable associated costs arising from:
This obligation does not apply to claims caused by JCB Publishing LLC's own wrongful conduct.
We will provide reasonable notice of covered claims and allow appropriate participation in the defense.
Please contact joseph.bily@merchstead.com first to attempt informal resolution of a dispute.
Subject to mandatory law, these Terms are governed by the laws of Ohio, USA.
Disputes will be brought in state or federal courts having jurisdiction in or serving Cincinnati, Ohio, unless applicable law requires otherwise.
These Terms do not impose mandatory arbitration or a class-action waiver.
We may update these Terms as Merchstead evolves.
Updated Terms will identify a new effective date.
Material changes will be communicated through the website, account interface, or email where appropriate.
Where applicable law requires consent to a change, we will obtain that consent before the change becomes binding.
A separately signed agreement controls to the extent it expressly conflicts with these Terms.
If any provision is found unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain effective.
Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver.
Neither party is responsible for delays caused by circumstances beyond its reasonable control, except for obligations already due that cannot legally be excused.
JCB Publishing LLC
4157 Fox Run Trl, Ste 1
Cincinnati, Ohio 45255, USA
General, billing, and cancellation inquiries:
joseph.bily@merchstead.com