Terms of Service

1. Who we are and what this is

Sweetspot is a wholesale marketplace for small food businesses — home bakeries, cafés, commissary kitchens and local suppliers — operated as a sole proprietorship from Los Angeles, California. These Terms cover the website at sweetspot.la, the Sweetspot iOS app (which loads the same website), the ordering sites we host for individual stores, and everything you do through them. “We” and “Sweetspot” mean the operator of the service; “you” means the business using it.

We are a venue, not a party to your deals. Sweetspot introduces buyers and sellers, carries their messages, prices, offers and orders, and processes payment. We do not make, store, inspect, package or transport any food, and we do not take title to anything sold. The contract for any order is between the buyer and the seller.

By creating an account, placing an order, or using any part of the service, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use Sweetspot.

2. Who can use Sweetspot

Sweetspot is for businesses. To hold an account you must be at least 18 years old, be able to form a binding contract, and be acting for a food business — an operating one, or one you are in the process of licensing. If you sign up on behalf of a company, you are telling us you have authority to bind it, and “you” means both you and that company.

Sweetspot is not a consumer service and is not directed to children. Some stores we host sell to the public through their own ordering pages; a customer buying there is buying from that store, and section 9 still governs the refund.

You may not use Sweetspot if we have previously closed your account, or if you are barred from receiving services under United States law.

3. Your account

You are responsible for your account: keep your password to yourself, keep your business details accurate, and tell us at support@sweetspot.la if you think someone else has got in. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you. One person or company should not run duplicate accounts to evade a limit, a rating or a removal.

You can delete your account at any time from Settings → Account → Delete account in the app, or by emailing support@sweetspot.la. Deleting removes your personal information and takes your storefront down. Records the other side of a transaction relies on, and records we are required to keep for tax and accounting, survive deletion — see the Privacy Policy for what stays and for how long.

4. If you sell

Your listings

You decide what to list and what to charge. Everything in a listing has to be true: the product, the ingredients, the allergens, the unit and quantity, the lead time, the photos, and whether you actually have it. Photos must be of the product you are selling — not stock images of somebody else’s work.

Allergens and ingredients

You must declare major allergens on every product that contains them. If you cannot guarantee a product is free of an allergen because of shared equipment, say so in the description. This is the one thing on Sweetspot most likely to hurt someone, and it is yours to get right.

Fulfilment

Accept only what you can make. Once you confirm an order you owe the buyer that order: the quantity ordered, at the agreed price, ready at the agreed pickup or delivery slot. If something changes, tell the buyer through the app before the slot rather than after it.

Your prices and your customers

Your prices, your terms, your relationships. We do not require you to price on Sweetspot the same as anywhere else, and we do not claim your customers.

5. If you buy

Read the listing before you order — allergens, unit size, lead time and pickup window are the seller’s terms, not ours. Place orders you intend to collect and pay for. Show up in the pickup window, or arrange something else with the seller in the app. Inspect what you collect: a problem raised at pickup gets fixed far more often than one raised two days later.

Ratings and reviews should describe your actual experience with that order. Do not use them to threaten a seller into a discount, and do not post reviews of your own business or of a competitor.

6. What you post

You keep ownership of everything you put on Sweetspot — listings, photos, descriptions, store pages, messages, ratings. By posting it you give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, resize, cache, display and distribute it for the purpose of running and promoting the service — showing your listing to buyers, rendering your store page, generating a preview link when someone shares it, and featuring it in Sweetspot’s own marketing. The licence lasts as long as the content is on Sweetspot, plus the short window backups and caches take to clear. It ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies in an order, invoice or message the other party still holds.

You promise the content is yours to post: you took the photo or have the right to use it, the trade marks are yours, and nothing in it infringes anyone else’s rights.

What must not be posted

• Anything illegal to sell, or anything requiring a licence you do not hold — alcohol, cannabis or CBD edibles, tobacco or nicotine, prescription or unapproved supplements, raw milk where it is restricted, live animals, weapons.
• Health claims a product cannot support — that it treats, cures or prevents a disease, or causes weight loss.
• Someone else’s photos, recipes as published text, brand names or logos used without permission, or counterfeits.
• Harassment, threats, hate speech, sexual content, or the personal information of someone who has not consented.
• Spam, mass unsolicited messages, scraped listings, malware, or any attempt to move a transaction off-platform to dodge fees or the record it leaves.
• Fake ratings, fake orders, and payment fraud of any kind, including using a card you are not authorised to use.

We do not pre-screen content, but we can remove anything that breaks these rules, and we do not have to explain a removal in advance where waiting would cause harm.

7. Offers, orders and pickup

An offer is a proposal — a product, a quantity, a price and a slot. It can be revised or withdrawn until the other side accepts it, and it expires when its stated window passes. Acceptance creates the order and, with it, a contract between buyer and seller on those terms. Sweetspot records that contract; it is not a party to it.

Pickup and delivery slots are the seller’s commitment, not ours. ASAP orders are usually ready within about fifteen minutes but that is an estimate, never a guarantee. An order not collected by the seller’s closing time may be discarded, and the no-show row in section 9 applies.

Changes and cancellations happen in the app so both sides — and any refund — have the same record.

8. Payments, fees and payouts

How money moves

Payments are processed by Stripe, Inc. and are also subject to Stripe’s terms. Card details go to Stripe and are never stored on our servers. The amount shown at checkout is charged immediately; if the charge is declined, no order is created.

Our commission

Sweetspot charges the seller 6% of the order total. Card processing fees are paid by us out of that 6% and are not billed to you separately. A new seller pays 0% for their first 90 days. If we change the rate we will tell you at least 30 days before it takes effect.

Payouts

Sellers are paid through a Stripe Connect Express account. Stripe handles identity verification, your bank details and your tax forms; we never hold your account number. Funds for an order are released when the order is marked picked up, less our commission, and normally reach your bank in one to two business days on Stripe’s payout schedule. Orders never marked complete are not paid out. If Stripe restricts your account, payouts pause until you resolve it with them.

Taxes

Sales tax, income tax and any permit or licence fees are yours. We are not your tax adviser, and prices you set are the prices we charge.

Refunds you owe

If a refund becomes due after you have been paid out, we may offset it against your next payout. Where a card dispute (chargeback) is filed, we respond and normally absorb the cost; if disputes trace to a repeated failure on your side — orders not fulfilled, listings that misdescribe the product — we may pass the cost on after discussing it with you.

9. Refunds and disputes

This section is our refund policy. It applies to every order placed through Sweetspot, including orders placed on a store’s own ordering page.

Refunds are always returned to the original payment method. We do not pay out refunds in cash, to a different card, or as credit on another account.

Before you dispute a charge with your bank, email support@sweetspot.la. We can almost always resolve it faster than a chargeback, which takes weeks and freezes the money for both sides. Tell us the order number and what went wrong.

Disputes between a buyer and a seller are theirs to settle. We will help — we hold the messages, the offer history and the payment record, and we will look at all of it — but we are a mediator, not a judge, and we are not liable for the outcome of a deal we were not party to.

10. Food safety, permits and licences

Compliance is the seller’s responsibility, entirely and at all times. Before you list anything, you must hold whatever your jurisdiction requires for what you are making and where you are making it. In California that typically means a Cottage Food Operation registration or permit from your county environmental health department for a home kitchen (with the product and labelling limits that come with it), or a health permit for a commercial or commissary kitchen, plus a food handler card or manager certification, a business licence, and a seller’s permit where you owe sales tax. Selling across county or state lines can require more.

You must label products as the law requires — ingredients in descending order by weight, major allergens, net weight, your business name and address, and any Cottage Food statement your permit demands. Cottage Food operations in California may not sell wholesale for resale in some tiers; knowing which tier you are in is your job.

Sweetspot does not verify permits, does not inspect kitchens, and does not certify anyone as compliant. Nothing on the platform — a rating, a badge, a listing appearing in search — is a representation by us that a seller is licensed, insured or safe.

Buyers: you are also responsible for what you resell. If you buy on Sweetspot to sell on, confirm the seller’s licensing and labelling meet the requirements of your own operation.

11. Things you must not do

• Break the law, or use Sweetspot to arrange something that would be illegal offline.
• Impersonate another business, misstate who made a product, or misrepresent your licensing.
• Scrape, crawl, or bulk-export other businesses’ listings, contact details or prices; or use the service to build a competing dataset.
• Probe, disable or circumvent our security, rate limits or authentication; access an account or data that is not yours.
• Reverse engineer the service, or run automated agents against it beyond ordinary use of the app.
• Interfere with other users — spam, harassment, retaliation for an honest rating.
• Take a transaction that started on Sweetspot off-platform in order to avoid the commission.

12. Reporting, blocking, moderation and termination

Every listing, message thread and business page in the app carries a Report action, and every business can be blocked — a block stops messages and offers between you and hides you from each other. We review reports and, depending on what we find, leave it alone, remove the content, limit an account’s features, or close it. Reports about food safety, fraud and threats are looked at first.

We may remove content or suspend or terminate an account that breaks these Terms, that exposes other users or us to legal risk, or that we are required to act on. Where it is reasonable and lawful we will tell you why and give you a chance to fix it; where it is not — fraud, an imminent safety risk, a legal order — we will act first. You can appeal any decision by writing to support@sweetspot.la.

You can stop using Sweetspot at any time and delete your account as described in section 3. Whatever the reason an account ends, obligations already incurred survive it: orders you agreed to fulfil, money you owe, refunds due, and the sections of these Terms that by their nature outlast the account (6 licence for content still posted, 8, 9, 13–17).

13. AI features

Some features — Spot, the writing helpers, the design assistant, transaction categorisation — use AI models operated by third parties. They produce suggestions: drafts you can edit, proposals you have to tap to apply. They can be wrong, including about prices and order details, so check anything before you confirm it. You are responsible for what you publish or send, whoever drafted it. What gets sent to which provider is set out in the Privacy Policy.

14. Third-party services and links

Sweetspot connects to services we do not control — Stripe for payments and bank connections, Intuit QuickBooks for accounting, Google for maps and address lookup, and the AI providers above. Using them means accepting their terms as well as ours, and we are not responsible for what they do. Links to other websites are not endorsements.

15. The iOS app

We grant you a personal, non-transferable, non-exclusive licence to use the Sweetspot app on Apple devices you own or control, as permitted by the App Store Terms of Service. The app is licensed, not sold.

Apple is not a party to these Terms and has no obligation to furnish any maintenance or support for the app. If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple and Apple will refund the purchase price (the app is free, so that amount is zero); to the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation whatsoever. Any claim relating to the app — product liability, a failure to conform to legal requirements, a consumer protection claim, or a third-party claim that the app infringes intellectual property — is our responsibility and not Apple’s. You represent that you are not located in a country subject to a U.S. Government embargo and are not on any U.S. Government prohibited-party list. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms and may enforce them against you.

16. Disclaimers

Sweetspot is provided as is and as available. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from course of dealing or usage of trade.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, that listings are accurate, that a seller is licensed or that a buyer will pay or collect, that food bought through Sweetspot is safe, correctly labelled or free of any allergen, or that any business will behave as it says it will. We do not vet users beyond the identity checks Stripe performs for payouts.

17. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Sweetspot is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost goodwill or business interruption, however caused and on any theory of liability, even if we were told such damages were possible.

Our total liability for all claims relating to the service in any twelve-month period is capped at the greater of the commissions you paid us in that period, or one hundred U.S. dollars.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages; where that is so, these limits apply only as far as the law allows. Nothing here limits liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by our own negligence, where the law forbids it.

18. Indemnity

You will indemnify and hold harmless Sweetspot and its operator from any claim, loss, liability or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your use of the service, your content, the products you sell or buy, your compliance failures, or your breach of these Terms. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and you may control the defence, provided any settlement releases us fully and admits nothing on our behalf.

19. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. You and Sweetspot agree that any dispute that is not resolved by writing to support@sweetspot.la first will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Los Angeles County, California, and we each consent to personal jurisdiction there. Either of us may still bring an individual claim in small claims court.

Claims are brought individually. You and Sweetspot each waive any right to bring or participate in a class, collective or representative action, to the extent the law allows that waiver.

Any claim must be brought within one year of when it arose, or it is waived, unless applicable law forbids shortening the period.

20. Changes to these Terms

We update these Terms as the product changes. When we do, we change the effective date at the top, and for a change that materially affects your rights or your fees we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use Sweetspot after a change means you accept it; if you do not, delete your account.

21. The rest

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us about the service. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Not enforcing something once does not waive it. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them to a successor if the business is sold, on notice to you. Nothing here makes us partners, employer and employee, or agents of one another.

22. Contact

Questions about these Terms, a refund, a report, or anything else: support@sweetspot.la. There is more on how to reach us, and what to include, on the Support page.