01 · Agreement
The agreement
These Terms of Service are a contract between you — the merchant who installs Meerkat Scout, and the business you represent — and Meerkat Scout, a sole proprietorship owned by Nana A. Smith ("Scout", "we"). By installing or using the app you agree to them, together with our Privacy Policy.
Scout is distributed through the Shopify App Store. Shopify's own terms also apply to your store and to any app you install; where they conflict with these terms on a matter Shopify controls (such as billing or app permissions), Shopify's terms govern.
02 · Service
The service
Meerkat Scout is an embedded Shopify app that:
- syncs your Shopify product catalog, read-only;
- transforms it through a rules engine you configure;
- generates and publishes product feeds to the sales channels you connect;
- collects each channel's rejections and diagnostics and normalizes them into one vocabulary that names the field to fix;
- monitors competitive pricing and generates pricing and content recommendations; and
- if you enable it, connects feed quality to sales outcomes.
Scout has read-only access to your catalog. It does not create, edit, or delete products, variants, prices, or inventory in your Shopify store, and holds no permission that would let it.
03 · Account
Your account
You must be the owner of, or authorized to act for, the Shopify store on which you install Scout. You are responsible for the people you give access to the app through your Shopify staff accounts, and for what they do with it.
Scout is a business tool for merchants and is not offered to consumers.
04 · Your data
Your catalog and data
Your catalog, feeds, rules, and store data remain yours. You grant Scout a limited licence to store, process, transform, and transmit that data solely to provide the service to you — including sending it to the channels and services described in the Privacy Policy.
You are responsible for the content of your catalog: that it is accurate, that you have the right to sell and advertise the products in it, and that it complies with the policies of each channel you publish to. Scout's diagnostics help you find what a channel has flagged; they do not certify that a listing is lawful or policy-compliant.
Every record Scout holds is scoped to your store and isolated from every other merchant at the database level.
05 · Channels
Connected channels
When you connect a channel — Google Shopping, Google Ads, Microsoft Bing, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Amazon, Walmart, or eBay — you authorize Scout to publish your feed to your account on that channel and to retrieve the channel's diagnostics. Your relationship with each channel is governed by that channel's own terms, and you are responsible for keeping your channel accounts in good standing.
What Scout does and does not control
Scout publishes what you configure. Whether a channel approves, rejects, limits, or suspends a listing or an account is entirely that channel's determination, made under that channel's policies. Scout does not make those decisions, cannot override them, and is not responsible for them. Scout reports each channel's decision back to you and names the field it relates to; acting on it is your choice.
Channels change their requirements, APIs, and policies on their own schedules. We work to keep Scout current, but we cannot guarantee that a channel will remain available through Scout or that a feed that passed yesterday will pass tomorrow.
06 · Advisory only
Recommendations are advisory
Scout's pricing and content recommendations — including anything generated with the help of an AI model — are suggestions for you to evaluate. Scout never applies a recommendation. It does not change a price, edit a title or description, or alter any product in your Shopify store or in a published feed on its own. You decide whether to act, and you make the change yourself in Shopify.
This is deliberate. A feed price that differs from the price on your storefront is a common reason for a Google Merchant Center suspension. Keeping the decision — and the edit — in your hands keeps your feed and your storefront in step.
Accordingly, you are solely responsible for your pricing and merchandising decisions and their results, including margins, compliance with minimum-advertised-price or other agreements, and any channel action that follows from a change you make. Recommendations are provided for information; they are not financial, legal, or professional advice and carry no guarantee of accuracy or outcome.
07 · Orders
Optional order access
Conversion Intelligence needs read access to your orders. That permission is not requested at install; Shopify asks you for it only if you choose to enable the feature, and you may decline or revoke it at any time in your Shopify admin without affecting the rest of Scout. Personal shopper fields are removed before any order data is stored, as described in the Privacy Policy.
08 · Market data
Competitive price data
Competitive prices shown in Scout are gathered from publicly available listings through a third-party search API and may be incomplete, delayed, or inaccurate. They are indicative, not authoritative. Scout does not warrant that a competitor price is current or that a matched product is identical to yours.
09 · Conduct
Acceptable use
You agree not to:
- use Scout to publish listings that are unlawful, infringing, deceptive, or prohibited by a channel;
- attempt to access another merchant's data or to probe, disrupt, or overload the service;
- reverse-engineer, resell, or sublicense the service, or use it to build a competing product; or
- use competitive price data for any purpose other than informing your own store's decisions.
10 · Billing
Fees and billing
Plans and prices are shown on the pricing page and in the app. All fees are charged through Shopify's billing system and appear on your Shopify invoice; Scout does not process, store, or see your payment card details. Charges recur on Shopify's billing cycle until you uninstall the app or downgrade.
- Free trial14 days, no payment method required.
- RefundsSubscriptions are billed through Shopify. Refunds are handled in accordance with Shopify's billing policies; Scout does not process payments and cannot independently issue refunds.
- Price changesWe will give you at least 30 days notice in the app before a change to your plan's price takes effect.
Taxes are applied by Shopify according to your store's location.
11 · Uptime
Availability and support
We aim to keep Scout available continuously but do not promise uninterrupted service; maintenance, channel outages, and Shopify platform changes can all interrupt it. Support is provided by email at support@meerkatscout.com Monday through Friday, excluding US holidays. We aim to respond within one business day. No service-level agreement applies unless we have signed one with you separately.
12 · Ownership
Intellectual property
Scout — its software, rules engine, diagnostics vocabulary, design, and the Meerkat Scout name and marks — belongs to us. You keep all rights in your catalog and store data. If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them without obligation to you.
13 · Warranties
Disclaimers
Scout 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, and non-infringement. In particular, we do not warrant that any feed will be accepted by any channel, that any recommendation will improve your results, or that competitive price data is accurate.
14 · Liability
Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost sales, or lost data, arising from your use of Scout. This includes losses from a channel's rejection, limitation, or suspension of your listings or account, and from any pricing or merchandising decision you make, whether or not informed by a Scout recommendation.
Our total liability to you for all claims in any twelve-month period is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months preceding the claim. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations; in those places, our liability is limited to the smallest extent the law permits.
15 · Ending
Termination
You can end this agreement at any time by uninstalling Scout from your Shopify admin. Your subscription stops through Shopify, and your operational data is deleted on the timeline described on the GDPR & Data Rights page. Feeds already published to a channel remain in that channel's systems under its terms; disconnect or delete them there if you wish.
We may suspend or end your access if you materially breach these terms, if Shopify requires it, or if we discontinue the service, in which case we will give reasonable notice where we can.
16 · Law
Governing law and changes
These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States, and disputes will be resolved in the courts of the state and federal courts located in Worcester County, Massachusetts, unless applicable law gives you a right to a different forum.
We may update these terms. If a change is material, we will notify you in the app before it takes effect and update the effective date above. Continuing to use Scout after that date means you accept the updated terms.
17 · Contact