Service Terms

1. What these terms cover

These terms apply to every website project, one page website (including the Black Friday offer) and Steady orbit care plan you book with Merkcoco. They work together with your accepted proposal or booking. If the two ever differ, your accepted proposal wins.

“We”, “us” and “Merkcoco” mean MP Pretorius, sole proprietor, trading as Merkcoco (full details in our Terms of Use). “You” means the person or business booking the work.

2. How a booking becomes an agreement

• A proposal or quote is valid for 30 days. After that we may update the price and timeline.
• Our agreement starts when you accept the proposal or booking in writing (a reply by email or WhatsApp is enough) and pay the deposit.
• The work we do is exactly what your proposal or booking describes. Anything else is extra work, quoted separately before we start it.

3. The deposit

Every project starts with a 50% deposit. For the Black Friday one page website that is R1 750 of R3 500.

• The deposit reserves your place in our schedule, which means we turn other work away for that time, and it pays for the research, planning and design we start on straight away.
• By paying the deposit you ask us to begin work immediately.
• The deposit is not refundable once work has begun. We agree that this is a reasonable cancellation charge for the time reserved and the work done.
• If you cancel within seven days of booking and before we have started any work, we refund the deposit in full.

4. Paying the balance

• The remaining 50% is due when you approve the final website, and before it goes live.
• Invoices are payable within 7 days by EFT, using the invoice number as the reference.
• We are not VAT registered, so no VAT is added to our prices.
• We launch the website and hand over files and logins only once every invoice is paid in full.
• If an invoice is more than 14 days overdue, we may pause all work until it is settled, and we may charge interest on the overdue amount at the rate the law allows.

5. What we need from you

• Your content (logo, photos, text and details) by the agreed date. Our timelines start once we have it.
• Feedback within five working days of each preview, sent together in one message.
• One person who can make decisions and approve the work.
• The right to use everything you send us. You confirm that you own, or have permission to use, every logo, photo, font and piece of text you supply, and you are responsible if it turns out you don’t.

6. Reviews and changes

• Two rounds of changes are included, as described in your proposal or booking.
• Further rounds, new features or a change of direction after you have approved a stage are extra work, charged at R450 an hour or quoted as a fixed amount, always agreed with you before we start.
• Fixing anything we got wrong is always free.

7. Timelines, pauses and closing a project

• Timelines are estimates. They depend on receiving your content, feedback and payments on time, and they move if those arrive late.
• If we hear nothing from you for 30 days, we pause the project. Restarting is easy, but we may need to fit you into our next open slot.
• If a project stays paused for 90 days, we close it. The deposit is kept, and any work completed beyond what the deposit covers is invoiced at R450 an hour, up to the agreed project fee.

8. Cancelling

If you cancel, please tell us in writing. The deposit is not refundable once work has begun (see section 3). Work completed beyond what the deposit covers is invoiced at R450 an hour, up to the agreed project fee. Once that is settled, the completed work you have paid for is yours.

If we cancel, for example because we can no longer deliver the project, we refund what you have paid for work we have not yet delivered.

9. Who owns what

• Once you have paid in full, the final website, its design and the content we wrote for you belong to you.
• Until then, everything we create remains ours. Design options you didn’t choose, and our own tools, code libraries and know how, remain ours.
• Fonts, stock photos and other third party items stay under their own licences, which we set up in your name or tell you about.
• We may show your website in our portfolio and on social media. Tell us if you would rather we didn’t.

10. Domain, hosting and other services

• Your domain and hosting are paid by you, to the provider of your choice, and registered in your name.
• We aren’t responsible for outages, price changes or problems caused by your domain registrar, hosting provider, email provider or any other third party service.

11. Results on Google

We build every website to be found, with good structure, speed and search setup. Rankings, traffic, enquiries and sales depend on many things outside our control, such as your competition and Google’s own decisions, so we can’t guarantee them.

12. The Steady orbit care plan

• R1 150 a month, billed monthly in advance, month to month.
• Includes 2 hours of changes a month. Unused hours don’t roll over. Extra time is R450 an hour, agreed before we start.
• It covers looking after and updating your website, not a rebuild or a redesign.
• Either of us can cancel with 30 days written notice.

13. Limits on our liability

We work with care and keep backups, but things outside our control can go wrong. As far as the law allows, our total liability for any project is limited to the fees you have paid us for that project, and we aren’t liable for indirect losses such as lost profits or lost business. You agree to cover any claim against us that arises from content you supplied.

14. Your rights under the law

Nothing in these terms takes away any right you have under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008, the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 or any other law that can’t be excluded. Where the law says a charge must be reasonable, these terms are applied in that way.

15. Disagreements and the law

If something isn’t right, please tell us first at hello@merkcoco.com. Most things can be fixed with a conversation. These terms are governed by the law of South Africa.