Terms of Engagement

Below we have outlined our terms of engagement and terms and conditions in detail. Should you have a question, please contact our team directly via email info@lowaire.com.

Policy and terms

Lowaire Digital is a trading name of Big Web Creations Ltd – company no: 09004812, which is a business registered in England & Wales. Below you’ll find out terms & conditions which applies to all services and products provided by us to you as a client.

Please Note: Additional conditions apply for supply of websites and hosting, these will be provided with your agreement.

1. Charges

a) We reserve the right to review and modify fees periodically as service provision changes.

b) You will be provided separately with the details of your package and any optional charges, these are referred to as The Schedule of Works. These charges are reviewed periodically and any changes will be notified to you in writing 28 days prior to implementation.

c) Website development hours cover website support between 9:00 am – 5:30 pm, Monday – Friday. Due to the unsocial hours, any work completed outside our normal operating hours will be charged 1.3 hours for each 1.0 hour worked.

2. standard terms of payment

a) Lowaire Digital invoices must be paid immediately upon receipt unless subject to credit terms as specified in your offer and you will indemnify Lowaire Digital in full in respect of any third party expenses suffered or incurred by Lowaire Digital pursuant to your instructions. By making your payment today you are authorising Lowaire Digital to obtain payment information along with deducting future payments from your account inline with your agreement with Lowaire Digital.

By submitting your payment information today through our website you are authorising Lowaire Digital to obtain payment information via our secure payment processor GoCardless, along with deducting future payments from your account inline with your current agreement with Lowaire Digital.

Payments will be deducted from your account on the anniversary date of your account inline with your agreement with Lowaire Digital. Payments are processed through a secure merchant payment provider and Lowaire Digital are also PCI compliant allowing us to obtain sensitive payment information from our clients. Payments submitted through lowaire.com are secure and protected through SSL (secure socket layer) protection, ensuring that your payment details are never disclosed to third parties during the submission and delivery process.

b) Invoices will be paid by you (without any deduction) by way of set-off or counterclaim or otherwise as follows:

c) Service initiation (setup) – immediately payable upon receipt of invoice.

d) On-going service management fees – immediately payable upon receipt of invoice or up to 14 days from date of invoice if credit terms are made available.

e) For any services where a contractor or supplier requires payment before work commences, our invoice covering the same shall be paid in full 10 workings days before work commences.

f) For software development projects we will issue invoices for stage payments of the total project cost and the payments to be made will be referred to as The Payment Schedule. The initial Project Mobilisation invoice is subject to immediate payment. Subsequent stage payments shall be payable up to 14 days from date of invoice.

g) Exceptional out of pocket expenses will be charged at cost. These include air and rail fares, hotels and living expenses. Car travel will be charged at AA rates (but agreed with you beforehand). Normal office disbursements such as post, telephone and fax will not be charged.

h) You will remain wholly responsible for paying all advertising costs (Google AdWords, etc) directly with suppliers.

i) You may be charged for other third-party costs eg call tracking, reporting etc. A deposit equivalent to a month’s fees is required to cover the cost of all other third-party charges. You will be invoiced the actual amount at the end of each month and this must be paid immediately. No credit terms are available for third-party fees and a handling charge will normally be applied.

j) Graphic design costs are charged prior to each piece of work (or amendments) are completed. You will be provided with an estimate of the number of hours and cost in advance, which you must agree in writing (by email) before the work can commence. Once you have paid for the design (in full), the IP will be transferred to you.

k) It is a policy of the company that all payments under the amount that of £50.00 should be taken via Direct Debit using our secure payment provider (GoCardless).

l) Missed and failed hosting related payments should be resolved as quickly as possible. When payments are missed or fail to process successfully, we will carry out the following actions prior to the suspension of any hosting services. Send an email notifying the client of the issue and ways they can resolve it. After 3 days, we’ll send a 2nd email notification. The following day, we’ll make a call to reinforce the previous emails. After 5 days, we will send a second email notifying of the payment issue and a possible account suspension. After 7 days, we will suspend the services temporarily and notify the client via email. After 15 days, we will remove the website from our server and notify the client of the (£79.00 reactivation fee, which applies)

m) The initiation of a web design or development project requires a signed or electronically submitted signup form, payment of half of the initial web design/development fees (or payment in full if the entire project is £500 or less), plus the client logo or any other element that is required to be used in the design.

n) If a billing error is noticed, the client should immediately contact Lowaire Digital. Refunds of overpayments will be made for up to a maximum of three months, so clients are urged to check billing statements regularly. Refunds of more than three months will not be processed. Additionally, Lowaire Digital reserves the right to bill clients for accidental undercharges for a maximum of up to three months.

3. credit insurance

We reserve the right to take out insurance against perceived credit risks and all our clients must be acceptable to our insurers. In the event of our insurers revising or withdrawing the normal insurance cover in respect of you, we may revise our terms of payment and may require payment in advance.

4. overdue accounts

a) If payment of invoices is not made when due, we reserve the right to charge late payment fees on overdue amounts, these fees are calculated at the following banded rates. These fees will accrue daily from the due date until payment is made:

For invoices up to £1,000 ex VAT – £3.30 per day
For invoices from £1,001 up to £2,500 ex VAT – £6.85 per day
For invoices from £2,501 up to £5,000 ex VAT – £13.70 per day
For invoices from £5,001 up to £10,000 ex VAT – £27.40 per day
For invoices above £10,000 ex VAT – 5% per day

b) If payment of invoices are not made when due, we reserve the right to terminate or suspend performance of the services provided under this contract, at our absolute discretion. This includes suspension and locking of all supplier accounts within our control until full payment is made and an on-going payment plan is agreed. If the payment plan is not adhered to, then we reserve the right to terminate your account(s) and/or the hosting of your website. We will also undertake legal proceedings to recover any outstanding debts.

c) We reserve the right to retain all work, materials, account login details, intellectual property and any other items in our possession relating to any matter until all invoices are paid in full.

d) Any queries in respect of an invoice must be raised within 7 days of the date of the invoice. After this date, it will be deemed that the invoice has been accepted by you.

e) If the balance on a completed project has not been paid within ten business days, a 10% penalty will be added. For example, if the remaining balance on a completed project is £1,000, and that balance has not been paid within ten business days, the new balance on the complete project will automatically be increased to £1,100. Balances that are not paid within 30 days will be reported to a credit referencing agency. Balances that are not paid within 60 days will be passed on to a debt collection agency and additional collection fees will apply.

f) After 30 days of non-payments, we reserve the right to appoint a debt collection agency in order to recover any money owed to us. In addition to this, any fees related to the collection of overdue invoices will be passed on to you and added to any outstanding amount owed.

g) After 60 days of non-payment we reserve the right to add an additional £50.00 (excluding VAT) for each month the amount has been overdue.

5. changes and/or cancellation of agreed projects

In the event of change or cancellation, we reserve the right to charge you for all costs of complying with your request, which may include our expenses, production costs, cancellation fees, and our fees in respect of such plans, schedules and any work-in-progress. In cases where the cancellation was not due to any fault on the part of Lowaire Digital (for example where you changed your mind); we also reserve the right to charge you for our time in preparation of audits, proposals, invoices and meetings that were incurred prior to the cancellation date.

6. intellectual property (including copyright) and use of logos/client details in marketing materials or case studies

a) Existing PPC accounts will be linked to our MCC (My Client Centre) these will remain your property. However, any new campaigns or restructuring of the account will remain our property until the end of the contract and full payment is received. You can then take back the ownership of the account and run the account in-house; alternatively, you can opt for us to continue the management of the account.

b) New PPC accounts will be set up in our MCC (My Client Centre) and will remain the property of Lowaire Digital. At the end of the project, you can end the contract or opt for us to continue the management of the account. Subsequently, ownership of the account will be transferred to you if you provide us with one month’s notice that you wish to terminate the contract and subject to clearing the transfer fee outlined within our terms.

c) The intellectual property rights (including, where appropriate, copyright and design rights) in all works created or commissioned by us and used under this agreement shall be vested in us until full payment is made. The IP will then pass to you in full except where identified in the following sub-clauses.

d) Any Content Management System (CMS) software developed by us remains the property of Lowaire Digital but you are granted unlimited and unrestricted lifetime use of the system.

e) Where Software development, CMS configuration and customisation is undertaken and all other such work carried out under this contract becomes wholly-owned by you on receipt of full payment for the work done. This includes but is not limited to designs, images, content, etc.

f) All third party software systems and utilities including any Open Source products such as Magento or WordPress, etc., used to provide your solution remain the property of their respective owners and creators and as such are subject to their own licensing and intellectual property terms & conditions to which you must fully agree.

g) We reserve the rights to use your logo in our marketing material, PR, website or portfolio; unless we have agreed a mutual NDA. For any websites that we build we will include a link back to our site with a link identifying that we have designed or developed the site. We will request separate permission to include your results in our case studies. We will provide a copy of the any text or results for you to approve prior to publishing. If preferred we are happy to present case studies results anonymously. Where relevant we will provide an online link back to your site so you can get the SEO benefit from our site authority.

7. performance guarantees

a) Please note that we cannot guarantee any improvement in the performance of your PPC (or other paid advertising), due to many variables including your website and its ability to convert and competitor activity, amongst many, which may also affect the Cost per Click and/or the performance of your campaign. We cannot accept responsibility for any variation in the performance of your website due to seasonality competitor activity, design and usability and other marketing conditions outside our control.

b) Whilst we cannot guarantee any specific improvement of rankings or traffic, from organic search traffic we do use techniques in line with industry best practice as approved and/or advice by Google.

c) It must be understood that we have no control over future algorithm or policy changes by Google or other search engines, but we do undertake various checks and techniques to try to ensure that the risk of a future penalty is minimised. It is essential that you inform us of any link building or digital advertising that you may carry out independently; as these may carry risks of a manual penalty if the source of the link is from a site that is known for using spammy techniques or accepting payments for links.

d) The performance of an SEO project relies on you (or your developer) implementing any technical recommendations and/or uploading new optimised content within a timely manner (typically 2-4 weeks). Any delay in carrying out these tasks may seriously impact the effectiveness of a project and could even result in drops in rankings e.g. if duplicate content or spammy links are not removed. Delays may also hold up later phases of the project. In such cases when you or your developer have held up the progress of a project; you will continue to receive monthly invoices according to the agreed schedule, but if required the days will be banked and used at a later stage of the project i.e. once all the changes have been made.

e) For PR and/or social media projects; the timing and placement of your content on third-party and media sites cannot be guaranteed. Therefore the performance of the project will be judged against the agreed plan of activities to create and place content, (as well as our knowledge of the journalists and influencers in each sector). We will provide estimates of the likely hit rate from the planned activities and then report on the actual amount of content placed and the engagement with the published content (with regard to audience reach, social shares, click-throughs and traffic to your site, links generated etc.). If applicable we will also determine the commercial value and ROI of the coverage (as compared to buying the equivalent media space through advertising).

f) Our Social Media Management services may include:

Social media review, analysis and strategy development;
Social media campaigns, blogs, content creation, client engagement and/or profile management for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media platforms;
Social media analytics;
Social media policy.

The following applies to social media management

As part of our social media management services we provide, you agree to provide unrivalled access to your social media accounts or permission for us to set up accounts on your behalf.

Lowaire Digital will not be held responsible for the repercussions of any negative feedback provided on social media by third parties.
Should a client fail to approve scheduled posts in a timely manner or communicate post requirements effectively to our team members via our project management system (Buffer), Lowaire Digital will not be held responsible for any lack of social media posts or PR.
In order to provide effective social media management to our clients, we use industry-leading and secure post scheduling systems and post engagement systems. As a result, we log into these systems using your social media login details. We do this in accordance with our privacy policy.
As service provisions change, we reserve the right to amend our social media packages and costs, unless you are signed into a long-term agreement with us, in which case we will honour this until the renewal date of your services. In-line with these terms and conditions, we will provide you with at least 30 days advanced notice of any changes in relation to costs.
We use a secure project management platform, namely, Buffer which allows us to submit social media posts to clients for approval prior to publishing. It’s a client’s responsibility to approve posts for publishing within a good amount of time for our team to schedule them live (at least 24 hours). If a client fails to approve a social media post without providing feedback to our team or revision suggestions, this will be counted towards the monthly quota in regards to social media posts.
If a social media post is scheduled for the following day, it must be approved prior to 4:30 pm, the previous day. We cannot be held liable for social media posts which are not scheduled on-time if we don’t have the required approval from assigned third-parties or allocated representatives.
As part of our social media management service, we provide access to our social media post management platform. With this said, the client is responsible for the overall approval of social media posts in order for them to be published on-time according to our agreed scheduled. Therefore, we cannot be held liable for any impact in regards to performance should a client fail to approve social media posts or accurately review.
Our social media management services are based on pre-defined social media packages which vary in relation to social media post counts, analytical reporting and additional extras. Should a client exceed these pre-defined limits, we reserve the right to charge £7.50 per additional social media post, on the following month of invoicing.

8. Legal liability

a) You shall be responsible for checking any material submitted by us to you for approval with any product or service delivered and you shall approve such material or notify us if any such material is false or misleading or is in any way contrary to law or any applicable UK or EU regulation or law. If no approval or notification is given by you within any required time limit (or in the absence of any time limit within a reasonable time) following submission of any material in connection with this clause that material shall be deemed to have been approved by you in connection with this clause.

b) We shall not be liable for any delay in or omission of publication, transmission or any error in any advertisement in the absence of any serious default or neglect on our part.

c) You shall indemnify us in respect of all costs, damages, or other charges falling upon us as a result of any legal action or threatened legal action brought against us arising from the publication of any promotion or advertising campaign prepared for you by us and approved or deemed approved by you before publication.

d) We shall not be liable for any costs, loss or damage arising from our failure to fulfil our obligations where failure results from circumstances wholly or in part beyond our control including, for example, inclement weather, industrial action, power failure, etc. We advise you to take out appropriate insurance cover when necessary.

e) We shall not be liable for any (i) loss of profit (whether direct or indirect); (ii) loss of business (iii) depletion of goodwill and/or similar losses; (iv) loss of contract (v) loss or corruption of data or information; or (vi) special, indirect consequential or pure economic loss, costs, damages, charges or expenses.

f) Our entire liability in contract, tort (including negligence and breach of statutory duty), misrepresentation, restitution or otherwise arising in connection with this contract shall not exceed the associated fees and/or charges received by us under this contract.

9. duration and termination

a) This project or engagement will run for the full duration agreed at the outset, i.e. in our Order Confirmation document. Between signing the order confirmation and prior to starting work on the project, either party may terminate the contract for any reason upon 1 month notice except where this duration is modified and mutually agreed (see clause 5 above).

b) If you request to terminate this contract prior to its full contracted duration, the full contract cost including all setup costs and contracted monthly fees and notice period will become payable immediately. In this circumstance, all pre-agreed discounts will be lost.

c) We may terminate this contract forthwith on written notice in any of the following circumstances:

i) You make any voluntary arrangement with or convene a meeting or make or propose to make any arrangement or composition with your creditors or become subject to an administration order or (being an individual or firm) become bankrupt or (being a company) go into liquidation or pass a resolution for winding up or a court makes an order to that effect;

ii) A receiver, administrator, administrative receiver, manager, trustee or similar officer is appointed over any of your assets;

iii) You cease or threaten to cease to carry on business;

iv) You are in material breach of any of the terms of this client contract and, in the case of a breach capable of remedy you fail to remedy such breach within 10 days of written notice from us requiring the remedy of such breach.

d) All clauses which expressly or by implication have effect after termination shall continue in full force and effect.

e) Without prejudice to any other rights we may have, we shall on termination be entitled to turn off and take down any website which we may be hosting for you as part of the services which we supply to you.

f) Ownership of all supplier accounts, including PPC and Hosting, will remain the property of us until the project, service or engagement is terminated and all monies owed are paid in full.

g) Should you wish to transfer your services to another provider i.e. hosting, domains or your website, we reserve the right to charge the following;

Websites or web-based applications designed and developed by ourselves are subject to a transfer fee of £149 per website (which also allows you to remove our credits from the footer)
Mobile applications designed and developed by ourselves are subject to a transfer fee of £500 per mobile platform i.e. iOS or Android (which also allows you to remove our credits from the app)
Domain names which have been registered under ourselves are subject to a transfer fee of £79 per domain name (plus any administration costs for transferring the domain to your new provider)

10. data protection

a) You shall ensure that any mailing list, database or other personal data supplied to us by you shall comply with all legislation in force from time to time including without limitation the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. You shall ensure that such mailing list, database or other personal data shall include only data which may be used (in accordance with all relevant legislation) for the purpose for which such mailing list, database or other personal data has been supplied.

b) You shall indemnify us in full against any claim that the passing to us or our use of any mailing list, database or other personal data supplied by you in accordance with clause 10a) above is in breach of any legislation in force from time to time.

11. confidentiality

a) Both parties shall keep in strict confidence all ideas, concepts which are proposed in connection with our engagement or project together with all technical or commercial know-how, specifications, processes or initiatives which are of a confidential nature and which either party has disclosed to each other, and any other confidential information concerning either party’s business or services.

b) Nothing in this agreement shall affect either party’s right to use as they see fit any general marketing or advertising intelligence which is gained in the course of the engagement or project.

12. non solicitation

You agree that you will not either on your own account or in association with any other person, firm, company or organisation or otherwise and whether directly or indirectly solicit or entice away or attempt to solicit or entice away any employee of ours who has worked on any project or service delivery for you in the previous 24 months.

13. choice of law and jurisdiction

a) The construction and performance of this agreement shall be governed by the laws of England and Wales and the parties submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales to resolve any disputes between them.

14. general

a) Force majeure: If a party is obstructed in performing any of its obligations by an event outside its reasonable control, then performance to the extent obstructed is suspended for so long as the obstruction continues. Whilst performance has been suspended for more than 7 days, either party may terminate the Contract by immediate written notice without prejudice.

b) Waiver: Failure to enforce any of these terms is not a waiver of a party’s rights and shall not prejudice its rights to take action in respect of the same or any later breach.

c) Severability: Any part of a Term which is wholly or partially void, invalid, or unenforceable shall be severed from the remainder (which remains enforceable).

d) Notices: Any notice to be given by either party to the other shall be in writing, may be sent by recorded delivery and shall be deemed served 2 days after posting.

15. Paid CAMPAIGN(s)

Lowaire Digital provide expertise paid media management services across various paid media platforms and as part of our management service we craft paid media campaigns to ensure you gain conversions. As part of our agreement and terms of engagement if you wish to move paid media campaigns created by Lowaire Digital to yourself or a third-party provider your account will be subject to a transfer fee which will be equivalent to three (6) months of your paid media management fee(s).

16. WEBSITE MIGRATION FEES

– Static Website – £779.00

– External migration – £1229

– eCommerce Migration / backup – £1695

The above fees are subject to VAT.

17. Handover processes & Documents

As per our service agreement, handover documents or processes are not included within our general scope of services. Therefore, we reserve the right to charge a fee for handover document creation or process which fall outside the general scope of our services. Our hourly rate for handover processes and creation is £67.50 (subject to VAT).

If you request a handover document or process, we will calculate the amount of time required to put together the handover/process and charge you accordingly, and as per our terms and conditions and this will be subject to VAT.

18. Website design and development

Website design projects are carried out by a team of website developers at our Leicestershire based office, which means our scheduled projects are planned carefully. Therefore, a reasonable amount of time and resources will be allocated to the client’s project in order to complete it to a high standard, in line with the agreed website design specification.

Projects can be hindered if the client does not provide feedback or required elements in a timely manner, such as feedback on a design mockup, requested sitemaps, text to be used as content on the web pages, photos for either the design or for the content.

For that reason, if Lowaire Digital is waiting for content or other pieces of information, the client will be notified. If the client fails to handle the requests within ten business days, then Lowaire Digital will request the remaining 50% of the total project fee in order to place the project on hold until the client is ready to proceed with the project.

19. design credits

a) Lowaire Digital reserve the right to include credits within both websites and mobile applications designed and developed by ourselves;

b) This credit: shall be in the following form – “Designed by Lowaire Digital”; shall be included in the website footer only; and shall include a hyperlink to the website of the Designer.

c) The Customer must: not without the prior written consent of the Designer alter, edit or remove the credit from the Website; and ensure that no other person authorised by the Customer to change the Website alters, edits or removes the credit from the website.

d) In rare cases where a client removes our design credits from work designed and developed by ourselves or instructs/authorises a third – party to remove our credits, without prior permission from ourselves, a discreditation fee will be charged to the client directly, which will be calculated at 50% of the total project cost in addition to any administration or debt collection costs incurred.

20. Refunds

– If the refund was caused by your own error or failure to supply adequate notice in regards to your service agreement with ourselves, we will be unable to provide a refund.

– If your issue is in regards to a mistake we have made we will provide you with a full refund subject to our terms and conditions. If you would like to request a refund, please submit a complaint to support@lowaire.com further information.

Please note that refunds are subject to transaction fees.

21. TERMINATION PAYMENTS

If you terminate your service(s) prior your agreement renewal date, we reserve the right to charge any outstanding services fees for the outstanding duration of the agreement.

22. Website design and development

Website design projects are carried out by a team of website developers at our Leicestershire based office, which means our scheduled projects are planned carefully.

Therefore, a reasonable amount of time and resources will be allocated to the client’s project in order to complete it to a high standard, in line with the agreed website design specification.

Last amended: 06/02/2017