Seller terms

Last updated: 1 November 2026. This is a draft that has not yet been reviewed by a solicitor.

These terms are between you (the farm) and Paul Freek, trading as Hilton Digital Media and farmtomouth ("we", "us"). Contact: hello@farmtomouth.co.uk [TO CONFIRM: confirm contact email]. Address: [TO CONFIRM: trading and geographic address]. By ticking "I agree to the seller terms" when you join, you agree to them.

1. What farmtomouth is

farmtomouth is an online marketplace. We provide the website, take card payments, help book delivery and bring customers to your farm. You are the seller of the food, not us. The contract for the food is between you and the customer.

2. Who can sell

You must be a food business. Before you can go live you must give us your food business registration (number and the council you registered with), upload proof of public and product liability insurance, and finish payment set-up with Stripe. We check these before approving your farm. You must keep them valid for as long as you sell. We recommend at least £1 million of cover [TO CONFIRM: minimum insurance amount; £1m public and product liability proposed]. If anything lapses, tell us straight away. We may pause your shop until it is fixed.

3. Your responsibility for the food

You are legally responsible for food safety, hygiene, labelling and allergen information on everything you sell.
Our tools can draft listing text from your photos, voice or typing using AI. That text is a draft. You must read and correct it, including ingredients, allergens, weights, storage and dates, before you publish. Nothing goes live until you say so.
What you list must match what you send. Goods must be as described and of satisfactory quality, as the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires of sellers.
Customers have a legal right to cancel distance purchases within 14 days. That right does not apply to goods that are made to order or are liable to spoil quickly, such as fresh, chilled or frozen food. You must still deal with faulty, wrong or unsafe items as the law requires.
You are responsible for any VAT on your own goods if you are VAT registered.

4. Prices, fees and payment

You set your prices in pounds sterling.
Our selling fee is 12% of the price of the goods. It does not apply to delivery charges.
For a customer's repeat orders from the same farm, the fee is 8%.
We are not currently VAT registered, so no VAT is added to the fee. If that changes we will tell you before it applies.
Card processing costs come out of our fee. You do not pay them on top.
We can change the fee, or what it applies to, by giving you at least 15 days' notice. If you do not accept a change, you can stop selling before it starts. Orders already placed keep the fee that applied when they were placed.
Payments are taken by Stripe through Stripe Connect. You must accept Stripe's terms. We take the customer's payment and pay your share to your Stripe account. We pay out for an order when you mark it as dispatched.
You can set your own delivery charge, or use the courier quote. Delivery charges pass to the farm or courier and are not part of our fee.

5. Refunds and chargebacks

If an order goes wrong because of the farm (for example wrong, late, damaged, unsafe or not as described), the refund comes from you, and we can take it from your balance or future payouts. If a customer disputes a card payment, we deal with the card company and carry the risk of the dispute in the first place. If the dispute is down to a fault on the farm's side, we recover the amount (and any fee the card company charges us) from you. Where the fault is ours or the courier's, you are not charged. We may also issue a refund ourselves where the law or fairness requires it, and we will explain why.

6. Delivery

You choose which delivery options to offer: a local courier collection day, or posting it yourself.
For a local courier collection, you must have the order packed and ready on your collection day by the cut-off time you set.
Chilled and frozen food sent by local courier must be packed in an insulated box with ice packs. If you post chilled or frozen food, you must use a cold-chain service.
You must put the courier tracking number on the order when you post it yourself.
Food that arrives unsafe because of poor packing is a farm fault under section 5.

7. Customer details

You will see the customer's name, delivery address and what they ordered. You will not see their email address or phone number; the phone number goes only to the courier. Use customer details only to fulfil that order, and delete them when you no longer need them. You are a separate controller of that data for that purpose. Do not use it for marketing. For the full picture see our privacy policy.

8. Keeping sales on farmtomouth

Building and running farmtomouth costs real money: the website, payments, delivery booking, marketing that brings customers to your farm, and the support behind it. Our fees pay for that, and keep the platform working for every farm on it. When a customer who found you through farmtomouth is moved to buying from you directly, those costs don't go away. They fall on every other farm instead. So we ask that, for 12 months after a customer's last farmtomouth order, you don't invite or encourage them to buy from you off the platform. Customers who already bought from you before farmtomouth, or who visit your farm shop on their own, are always yours.

In practice that means:

Do not put offers, contact details, website links or "order direct" notes in parcels, labels or messages.
Messages with customers go through the order thread on farmtomouth. Phone numbers, email addresses and links in them are removed automatically.

If we find this has happened:

First time: we'll get in touch, explain what we found, and give you a chance to respond.
If it happens again: your selling fee rises by 10 percentage points (for example from 12% to 22%) for 6 months. This covers the cost to the platform and the farms who play fair. We'll tell you in writing why, when it starts and when it ends.
If it carries on: we may suspend or close your shop.

You can always challenge a decision by replying to our notice. We'll review it and answer within 7 days. We act on evidence (for example blocked messages and customer reports), not suspicion.

9. Reviews and content

You keep ownership of your photos and text. You give us a free licence to show them on farmtomouth and in our marketing of your farm and products. You promise you have the right to use what you upload and that it is honest. You must not post fake reviews or ask others to.

10. Pausing, ending and our rights

You can stop selling at any time, once open orders are fulfilled. We can pause or close a farm for breaking these terms, for food safety concerns, for lapsed registration or insurance, or for repeated customer complaints. We will tell you why in writing unless the law stops us. Money properly due to you for fulfilled orders is still paid.

11. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, or anything else that cannot legally be limited. Otherwise, we are not liable for lost profit or indirect loss, and our total liability to you for any one event is limited to the fees we received from you in the previous 12 months. We do not promise the site will always be available.

12. Changes and law

We may change these terms by giving you at least 15 days' notice by email. If you keep selling after that date, you accept the change. These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction.