Storefront Scan terms

1. Who provides this service

The service is provided by Baltano — publisher of the Merchlint plugin. Behind that name stands one person, not a team and not a company.

Electronic address: contact@merchlint.com

That address handles everything to do with this service: questions, complaints, data requests. We reply from the same address.

2. What Storefront Scan is

Storefront Scan fetches the public catalogue data of the WooCommerce store whose address you give it, and lists what those data show from outside: products with no price or no way to buy them, sold-out products left in the catalogue, missing images and alternative text, duplicate product codes, empty categories and the like.

The service:

• reads only the store’s public API (/wp-json/wc/store/v1/…) — the same one the cart uses and the store serves to every visitor — and beyond it asks only for the headers of three product pages, to check that they open;
• never signs in anywhere and uses no passwords, keys or admin access;
• changes and stores nothing in the store;
• checks the store’s robots.txt before its first request and refuses to run if the owner has forbidden reading those addresses there;
• makes at most three requests per second and identifies itself with a MerchlintScanner header.

The check described in this section is free. It needs no account, no registration and no email address. The full level — more products, complete lists and an export — needs a code and is described in section 13.

3. Who may use it

By entering a store address you declare that it is your store, or that you have its owner’s permission for such a check. That declaration is a condition of using the service and you tick it deliberately next to the form.

You may not use the service in a way that:

• checks other people’s stores without their knowledge and consent;
• circumvents the limits in section 5 (through automation, multiple IP addresses, or altering the store address to get around the daily block);
• loads someone else’s server beyond normal use of the service;
• breaks the law or infringes third-party rights.

Supplying unlawful content is prohibited.

4. What you get, and what the result does not mean

The result is a list of observations about publicly available data at the moment of the check. It is not:

• a full store audit — orders are invisible from outside, so which gaps cost money cannot be seen. A separate section under every result says so plainly;
• an assessment of legal compliance — the service does not state whether a store meets any legal requirement, and is neither legal advice nor consultancy;
• a guarantee of completeness — a sample of the catalogue is checked (the first 150 products, or up to 2,000 with a full-scan code), and some stores expose no public API at all, in which case the service says so and stops.

The result is prepared with due care, but decisions about your own store are yours alone, and you make them at your own risk.

5. Limits and refusal of service

So that the service does not become a tool for mass-scanning other people’s servers, limits apply:

• a few checks per day from one IP address;
• one check of a given store per day at each level (free and full) — a repeat request returns the previously stored result and does not connect to the store again;
• a cap on how many checks run at the same time;
• no documented programming interface: the endpoint behind this page exists for this page alone, is guarded by the limits above, and bulk checking is not offered.

The service may refuse to run when limits are exceeded, when the store’s robots.txt forbids it, or when it cannot be carried out safely for technical reasons. A refusal needs no justification beyond the message you see on screen.

6. Technical requirements

A browser from the last few years and an internet connection. With JavaScript on you get a progress bar; without it the service still works and the result appears after a few seconds on its own page.

7. Start and end of the agreement

The agreement for the free check begins when you submit the form and ends when the result or the failure message is displayed. No account is created, there is nothing to terminate and neither side takes on any continuing obligation. The agreement for the full scan with a code is described in section 13.

You may stop at any time by closing the page.

The result page lives at an address that cannot be guessed, for 7 days (a full-scan result: until the end of access under section 13), and then disappears. It is not indexed by search engines. If you want it gone sooner, write to us.

8. Complaints

Complaints go to contact@merchlint.com. Describe the problem and which store it concerns. We reply within 14 days to the address the complaint came from.

9. Liability

The free check is provided as it is. We are not liable for the consequences of decisions made on the basis of a result, nor for interruptions in the service. The full scan with a code has to work as section 13 describes it — if it does not, a complaint under section 8 leads to a fix or a refund of the price. Nothing in this section limits liability to the extent that mandatory law does not allow it to be limited — in particular towards consumers.

10. Personal data

The service is designed to process as little of it as possible: there is no account, we collect no email address, and the IP address serves only to enforce limits and enters no permanent record. For a purchased code we record the transaction number from the listing site — not the buyer’s name, username or email address. What we fetch, what we store, for how long and on what basis is set out in the privacy policy.

11. Changes to these terms

These terms may change when the service changes or the law does. A new version applies from the day it is published, and the date at the top of this page always shows when that was. Material changes are also noted in the changelog, so that nothing changes quietly.

12. Governing law

Polish law applies to this service. This does not limit the protection a consumer enjoys under the law of their country of habitual residence.

13. Full-scan codes

Besides the free check, the service has a full level, opened with a code.

What the full level gives. A check of up to 2,000 products, the complete list of items for every finding instead of five examples, with a link to edit each item in the store admin, main image weights on a sample of 40 products, a CSV export of the lists and a result page kept until the end of the access period. The full scan reads the same public data, in the same way and with the same limitations as the free check (sections 2 and 4) — in particular, it cannot see orders.

Kinds of code.

• a purchased code — bought on a listing site (e.g. Allegro Lokalnie) at the price stated in the listing; it works for one store;
• a group code and a partner code — given away free as part of an offer (e.g. in a discussion group or for a publication’s readers); one code works for many stores, until the offer’s pool runs out.

Delivery of a purchased code. We send the code in a message on the listing site where you bought it, within the time stated in the listing. The message contains the code, the address of the activation page, what the full scan covers and the activation deadline.

Activation. You activate a code on the activation page by entering the code and the store address and making the declaration in section 3. The code is tied to the store (domain) at the first successful scan. If the scan does not start — because the address is wrong, the store does not expose the public API, robots.txt forbids reading it, or time ran out — the code is not used up.

Validity. A purchased code must be activated within 90 days of being issued, a group or partner code while its offer runs. After activation, access lasts 30 days; a group or partner code may give longer access if its offer says so. The end date of access is shown on the full-scan result page. During access the full scan of the store can be run once a day, and a repeat on the same day shows the latest result. A code activated for one store does not work for another; at the buyer’s reasonable request (for example when the store changes its domain) we can move the activation to another domain.

Offers with a group code. An offer has a number of places (a pool) and an end date. Who gets in is decided only by the order of activation, not by chance — it is not a lottery or a contest. The offer ends when the pool runs out or on its end date, whichever comes first. So that a public code cannot be used to check other people’s stores in series, at most two codes can be activated per day from one connection, and a store that already has access does not take a place from the pool.

Withdrawal. If you buy a code as a consumer, you may withdraw from the contract without giving a reason within 14 days of the purchase — as long as the code has not been activated. A message to contact@merchlint.com is enough; we refund the price the same way you paid, and the code is cancelled. By activating a purchased code you ask for the service to be performed straight away, before that period ends: at activation you tick your consent to immediate performance and acknowledge that you lose the right to withdraw from the contract as a result (Article 38 of the Polish Consumer Rights Act).

Complaints and refunds. Complaints about the full scan are handled like any other — section 8, with a reply within 14 days — and for a code bought on a listing site, also through that site’s messages. If a purchased code cannot work because your store does not expose the public API or forbids reading it, and the code has not been activated, we refund the price; a refund cancels the code. That is why the listing suggests running the free check before buying: if the free check works, the full one will too.