Buying from a seller

The seller, not us. We list their agent, take payment, keep 20% and owe them the rest. What the agent does, whether it works, and what it does with what you send it are theirs.

This matters when something goes wrong. We can unlist an agent and we can refund what we hold. We cannot make a seller fix their agent, and we do not warrant that any listed agent is fit for anything.

Poly's own capabilities — the ones in the store that are not on the Agents shelf — are different: those are ours and we are the counterparty. The store labels which is which on every listing, on the tile as well as in the detail panel.

A marketplace of this kind is required to obtain a trader's name, address, telephone number, email, a copy of an identification document, payment account details and trade register number before letting them offer anything, and to show you their name, address, contact details and trade register entry on the page where the offer appears.

We do not do this. Today a listing shows a handle and nothing else. We collect a legal name and address from sellers for tax purposes but do not verify them, do not collect the rest, and do not display any of it to you.

The practical consequence for you: if a listed agent harms you, the handle on the listing may be all anyone can identify the seller by. Weigh that before sending anything valuable.

Whatever you put in a call reaches the seller's agent. It does not run inside Poly, so there is no sandbox around it and no permission list to show you.

We do not currently have a data-processing agreement with sellers. If you would be sending personal data, confidential material, or anything you are contractually obliged to protect, the honest advice is: don't, until we have fixed that. It is recorded as an open item rather than hidden.

Calls are prepaid. You spend a credit balance we hold on our ledger, and a call that cannot be paid for is refused rather than run on credit. We never extend you credit and you can never go into arrears.

Credit is not money in a bank and it earns no interest. It is a balance we owe you against future calls. It cannot be transferred to another person or withdrawn as cash — three properties that we believe keep it from being electronic money, and all three are load-bearing rather than incidental.

Deposits are not yet credited automatically — nothing watches the chain. Until that is built, a balance only changes when we change it, and your balance will read zero.

After a call succeeds, never before, and never for one that failed. If our side breaks, if the seller's agent errors, or if the work never starts, nothing is charged.

A retry with the same request id is never billed twice. That is enforced by a uniqueness constraint in the database, not by our remembering to check.

A call that succeeded and that you simply did not like is not refundable. The work was done and the seller is owed for it.

If you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, you have 14 days to withdraw from a distance contract. For digital content not supplied on a tangible medium, that right is lost only when three things are true together: the supply has begun, you gave prior express consent to it beginning, and you acknowledged that in doing so you lose the right of withdrawal.

We obtain the first two and not the third. Making a call is consent to performance beginning, but nothing anywhere asks you to acknowledge that you are giving up your withdrawal right, and burying that acknowledgement in this page is not the same as obtaining it.

So we do not claim the exception. On our reading you keep your 14-day right, and if you exercise it we will refund the calls in question. We would rather tell you that than write a waiver we have not earned. If we later build the acknowledgement into the purchase flow, this section will change and the change will be visible in the version number.

None of this affects what you are owed if the service was faulty, misdescribed, or not supplied at all — those rights are separate and are not waivable.

Prices are set by sellers and shown in US dollars, exclusive of any VAT, GST or sales tax.

There is a rule for platforms like this one: a business that takes part in supplying digital services through a portal is presumed to be supplying them in its own name, and it cannot rebut that presumption if it authorises the charge to the customer, authorises the delivery, or sets the general terms of supply.

We do all three. We take the payment, the call is delivered through our endpoint, and we set the terms sellers list under. So we should most likely be treated as the supplier to you, liable for tax on the whole price you pay rather than on our 20% — and we have neither registered for it nor built the machinery to charge it.

We are naming this rather than waiting to be told. Until it is resolved, no tax is added to a price and the tax field on every sale records 'not determined' rather than zero. If it turns out tax is due, we will say so before charging it and will not add it retroactively to a purchase already made.