Acceptable Use Policy

What this covers, and who it binds

This page is the house rules. It says what may and may not be listed, sold, written, uploaded or done on Gloodoh, and what we do when someone breaks a rule.

It binds everyone who uses the service: people buying, business owners selling, and every member a business adds to its account — OWNER, ADMIN, MANAGER, STAFF or VIEWER. It applies in the Gloodoh Consumer app, the Gloodoh Supplier app, the Gloodoh Uploader app and the supplier console at supplier.gloodoh.com. (manage.gloodoh.com is our own staff console and is not open to users.)

Gloodoh is a place where businesses list and sell. It is not the seller. Every sale contract is between the buyer and the business named on the listing and on the order confirmation; that business owns the goods, sets the price, and owes the buyer delivery, quality and any refund. Gloodoh does not sell, does not act as any business’s agent in a sale, and does not hold itself out as either. The rules below are what we require of the businesses that do sell here, and what we enforce against them.

Gloodoh is operated by iTsitso Space LTD, a company incorporated in the Republic of Kenya and the developer of the Gloodoh Consumer, Gloodoh Supplier and Gloodoh Uploader apps. This policy is governed by Kenyan law. We serve Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi, and where the law of the country you live in gives you a right that cannot be signed away, you keep that right — nothing on this page takes it from you.

Gloodoh launches publicly on 30 October 2026. Until then the apps are in invitation-only testing, and these rules apply to testers in full.

What may not be listed or sold

The test is simple: what you sell must be legal to sell, where you are selling it, by you.

You may not list, advertise, sell or hand over through Gloodoh:

• Anything unlawful in the country of sale — including goods that are banned, restricted, smuggled or under embargo there.
• Prescription medicines and controlled substances — prescription-only drugs, narcotics, psychotropics, and anything sold as a cure or treatment for a disease.
• Firearms, ammunition and weapons — including parts, explosives and replicas that are hard to tell from the real thing.
• Live animals, protected wildlife and anything taken from them — ivory, horn, skins, bones, trophies, shells, eggs.
• Counterfeit and pirated goods — fakes, goods carrying someone else’s brand without permission, unlicensed copies of films, music, software or books, and anything sold as genuine that is not.
• Stolen goods, or goods you cannot show you are entitled to sell.
• Tobacco, nicotine products and alcohol, unless you hold a current licence to sell them where you are selling, and the sale is within its terms.
• Currency, financial instruments and financial services — cash for cash, foreign exchange, cheques, shares, crypto-assets, lending, savings and investment schemes, insurance, and anything else that would make you an unlicensed financial services provider.
• Human remains, body parts, organs, blood and bodily fluids.
• Hazardous materials — poisons, industrial and agricultural chemicals, compressed gas, fireworks, radioactive material and asbestos.
• Recalled goods — anything withdrawn by its maker or by a regulator, and anything past its expiry or use-by date.

Anything that needs a licence you do not hold

Some trade is lawful only with a permit, licence or registration — food handling, agrochemicals, veterinary medicines, fuel and gas cylinders, gold and precious stones, mobile-money agency work, and more, depending on the country. If a licence is needed, it must exist, be current, and be in the name of the business doing the selling. The same applies to services: do not offer work you are not licensed or qualified to do.

Listing honestly

A listing is a promise. Sell what you actually have, show what the buyer will actually get, and charge what the listing says.

Stock

• List only stock you hold. If you do not hold it yet, mark it as a pre-order with a release date you can meet.
• Keep quantities honest. Reservations and campaign locks hold a unit for one buyer — do not sell that unit to somebody else as well.
• If you run out, update the listing straight away rather than letting an order be taken for something you cannot supply.

Photographs and descriptions

• Use photographs of the actual item, taken by you or licensed to you.
• Say plainly if goods are used, refurbished, reconditioned, graded, repackaged or near expiry.
• Get size, weight, quantity and condition right. A listing is a sale by description, and the goods must match it (Sale of Goods Act, Cap. 31, s.15).

Prices and discounts

• The price shown is the price. Do not add a charge at handover that was not in the listing.
• A discount must be a real reduction from a price you were actually charging. “Was 3,000” has to mean you were selling at 3,000.
• Honour a campaign or bundle deal for everyone who qualifies, for as long as the campaign says it runs.
• Our service fee and the mobile-money charge are estimated in the basket and shown to the buyer, broken out and exact, on the checkout screen before they authorise the payment. Do not describe our fee as a tax, and do not tell a buyer they can avoid it by paying you directly.

Who you are

Your business name, contact details and payout details must be your own and must be current. If you pin your shop on the map, put the pin on the shop’s actual entrance, and move or remove it when you move — a shopper walking to it is relying on it, and a pin placed anywhere else, or on somebody else’s premises, is treated as a false listing. A buyer must be able to tell who they are buying from. If a buyer claiming for loss or injury from a defect does not know who made the goods and asks you in writing to identify the manufacturer, or the supplier you yourself bought from, answer within thirty days: a supplier who is asked and does not answer is taken, for the purposes of that claim, to have manufactured the goods (Competition Act, Cap. 504, s.65). Answer any buyer who asks, claim or no claim — it costs nothing, and an honest listing already implies it.

How people are treated

Trade here the way you would across a counter: civilly, and without leaning on anybody.

None of this is allowed, from either side of a sale:

• Harassment, threats and abuse — in messages, in notes on an order, or in a call or SMS that started with a Gloodoh order. That includes threats to a person’s safety, property or good name, sexual harassment, and carrying on contacting someone after being asked to stop.
• Insults and slurs aimed at who a person is — their ethnic group, religion, gender, disability, nationality or language.
• Discriminatory refusal of service — refusing to serve someone, or charging them differently, because of who they are rather than what the order is.
• Pressure selling — invented urgency, countdowns that never end, refusing to let a buyer out of a chat without ordering, or pushing an instalment plan on someone who has said they cannot afford it.
• Taking advantage of someone who cannot easily protect themselves — a buyer who cannot read the language of the listing, or who plainly does not understand what they are agreeing to. Kenyan law calls that an unconscionable representation and treats it as an unfair practice (Cap. 501, s.13).
• Using someone’s goods as leverage. Holding goods a buyer has paid for, reserved or brought in, and using that grip to demand more money or better terms, is an unfair practice under Cap. 501, s.14. There is no version of it that is acceptable here.
• Wasting the other side deliberately — ordering with no intention of paying or collecting, or accepting an order you have no intention of fulfilling.

Payments, fees and instalment plans

Pay for what was bought through Gloodoh at the app’s checkout, and do not use the service to move money that has no sale behind it. Gloodoh is not a bank and is not an authorised payment service provider. Payments are collected and settled by Viewtech Limited, trading as SasaPay, which is authorised by the Central Bank of Kenya; each supplier is paid to that supplier’s own payout number with the provider. Gloodoh initiates the instruction and reconciles the record — it never receives, holds or controls your money.

Do not pull the order off the platform

If a buyer found the item on Gloodoh, reserved it on Gloodoh, or is part-way through a Gloodoh instalment plan, take the payment at the app’s checkout, so that it is collected by the payment provider and settled to your own payout number with that provider. Asking them to send the money to a personal till or M-Pesa number instead — so that you keep our stock, reservation, campaign and instalment features while dodging the fee — is fee evasion. It also strips the buyer of the order record they would need if something went wrong.

Recording a walk-in sale, or a purchase made from a shop that is not on Gloodoh, is a different thing entirely and is exactly what those features are for. A counter sale that never touched Gloodoh is yours to record.

No fake trade

• No fake orders. Buying for your own business from another business is ordinary restocking and is what the B2B flow is for; placing orders on your own business, or having people acting for you place them, to inflate sales figures, unlock a feature or move a campaign, is not.
• No invented refunds, no splitting one sale into many to slip under a fee or a limit, and no re-entering the same sale to make the books say something else.
• Payout details must belong to the business being paid. Do not route another business’s money to your number, and do not lend yours out.

No money laundering

Gloodoh is for buying and selling goods and services. Do not use it to pass money between people with no real sale behind it, to break a large sum into smaller payments, or to disguise where money came from. Where we see it, we stop what we can, keep the records, and report it where the law requires.

Instalment plans are lay-away — keep them that way

A Gloodoh instalment plan is not credit. The buyer pays towards the price and collects once the price is paid in full. So, on every plan:

• no interest, no finance charge, no deferral fee and no late-payment penalty charged by the supplier for spreading payment — the price of the goods is identical whether the buyer pays once or six times;
• no releasing goods, or possession of goods, before the price is paid in full;
• the goods stay the supplier’s property until then;
• the unpaid balance is not a debt that can be enforced against the buyer — a buyer who stops paying owes nothing further, and the instalments already paid are returned on the terms set out in Cancellations & refunds. A supplier may not keep a buyer’s instalments as a penalty for abandoning a plan, and may not make forfeiture a condition of the plan.

One cost does move with the number of payments, and it is ours rather than the supplier’s. Our service fee is worked out on the balance still owing each time a payment is taken, and the mobile-money charge is charged per payment. A buyer settling a 10,000 order in four payments therefore meets our fee four times over a shrinking balance, and four mobile-money charges, instead of one of each. Every one of them is shown, broken out, before that payment is authorised. It is a charge for taking a payment, not a charge for time: it goes to Gloodoh and to the mobile-money operator, and the supplier receives exactly the same amount either way.

These are not house preferences. They are what keeps a plan a lay-away rather than regulated credit, and neither Gloodoh nor a supplier on it is licensed to lend. Charge for time, or hand over goods early, and you have broken this policy and stepped into a licence you do not hold.

Accounts, access and security

• One account per person. Your login is yours. Do not share a password or a one-time code — not with a colleague, not with a relative, not with us. If someone needs access to a business, add them as a member with the role that fits: OWNER, ADMIN, MANAGER, STAFF or VIEWER.
• No impersonation. Do not sign up as someone else, trade under another business’s name or logo, or present yourself as Gloodoh staff. We will never ask you for your password or for a one-time code.
• No automated access. No scraping, crawling, bulk harvesting of listings, prices or contact details, and no bots or scripts against the apps, the consoles or our servers. Bulk work belongs in Gloodoh Uploader, using your own data.
• No probing or interfering. Do not try to reach data that is not yours, test the service for weaknesses without our written permission, overload it, inject code, or tamper with a payment callback or a receipt.
• No getting around limits. Subscription limits, rate limits, checkout windows and suspensions are there for a reason. Opening a second account to escape action taken on the first is itself a breach.
• Tell us quickly. If you think an account has been taken over, or you find a security flaw, write to support@gloodoh.com before telling anyone else, and do not go further into the flaw than it takes to show that it exists.

Other people's information

A customer’s details are theirs. They are not a mailing list.

Selling on Gloodoh shows you a buyer’s name, their profile photo, their Gloodoh card number and what they ordered. A phone number reaches you only two ways: you typed it in yourself for a walk-in customer, or the buyer paid by mobile money and the paying number came back on the payment record. Use all of it for that order: fulfilling it, arranging collection or delivery, sorting out a problem, and keeping the records you are required by law to keep.

That data is yours to answer for. Selling here makes you a data controller in your own right, alongside us, for the customer data you hold — our registration does not cover you. Most businesses must register with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner before processing personal data at all; the only exemption is for a business with both an annual turnover below five million shillings and fewer than ten employees, and even an exempt business still owes the full duties in Parts IV and VI of the Act (Registration of Data Controllers and Data Processors Regulations 2021, regs 4(1) and 13(2)–(3)).

You may not:

• add a customer to a marketing list, a bulk SMS or a broadcast group because they bought from you. Using personal data for commercial purposes needs the person’s express consent (Data Protection Act, Cap. 411C, s.37), and marketing without it is an offence carrying a fine of up to twenty thousand shillings or six months’ imprisonment (Data Protection (General) Regulations 2021, reg 15(4));
• sell, rent, swap or publish customer lists;
• use a buyer’s name, photograph or messages anywhere else;
• contact a buyer about anything other than their order, simply because their number came through one;
• keep customer data after you no longer need it for the order or for records the law requires.

If someone asks you to stop messaging them, stop. There is no “one more message”.

Both Gloodoh and the business you buy from are responsible for the personal data each of them decides what to do with. What we do with yours, who else sees it, and the rights you have over it are set out in the Privacy Policy.

Photos, files and messages you upload

• Upload only what you have the right to upload. Someone else’s product photographs, brand marks, catalogue text and designs belong to them.
• Nothing unlawful, hateful, obscene, sexual, violent or built to mislead — in a product photo, a business logo, a description, a chat message or an attachment.
• No malware, no files pretending to be something they are not, no links to harmful sites.
• Nothing about a person who has not agreed to it — a photograph of a customer, a copy of an identity document, a screenshot of somebody’s private chat.

The in-app assistant is not inside Gloodoh. What you type into it is sent to an outside language-model provider to be answered, and is held under that provider’s terms, not ours. Your name, number and email are never sent with it — the words are. Do not type anything into the assistant, about yourself or anybody else, that you would not send outside Gloodoh, and do not use it to draft a listing you could not post here yourself. The Privacy Policy names the providers.

Deleting a chat message clears that message’s text, but not everything about it. The record that you sent a message, when, and to whom remains. If it was the most recent message in the conversation, the preview line — its first 120 characters — is not cleared. And a file attached to a deleted message stays uploaded and stays reachable at its own web address; deleting the message does not delete the file. Write, and attach, with that in mind.

Reporting something

If you see something on Gloodoh that breaks these rules, tell us. A report reaches a person by any of these routes:

• support@gloodoh.com — listings, orders, conduct, and anything you are unsure about;
• legal@gloodoh.com — counterfeits, copyright and trade-mark complaints, and formal legal notices;
• privacy@gloodoh.com — misuse of somebody’s personal information;
• or the contact form on gloodoh.com, which needs no account.

What helps us act fast: the order reference (it looks like GLDO-A00529), the business name, a screenshot, and what actually happened. If anyone is in danger, call the police first.

What we do with a report

We read it. Then, depending on what it says, we look at the records behind it — the listing, the order, the payment, and where it is genuinely necessary to understand a complaint, the message thread. Those reads are not casual: opening a message thread or revealing a masked phone number or email address is logged against the staff member who did it. We will usually ask the other side for their account before deciding. We tell the person who reported it that the matter has been dealt with, though we will not normally say what was done to somebody else’s account.

We are a small team and we will not pretend to a call centre we do not have. We answer as quickly as we can, and we would rather tell you where a complaint has got to than leave you in silence.

What happens when a rule is broken

We match what we do to what happened. A shopkeeper who photographed the wrong box is not a counterfeiter, and we do not treat them as one.

What we weigh: how serious it is, whether anyone lost money or was put at risk, whether it looks like a mistake or a pattern, whether it has happened before, and what you did once it was pointed out.

We can go straight to suspension or closure when something is serious enough — unlawful goods, fraud, a threat to somebody’s safety, or an attack on payments.

You will be told

When we act on your account we will tell you which rule we say you broke, what we have done, and how to reply. The notice arrives as a Gloodoh notification, sent before the action takes effect wherever we can and immediately after where we cannot, and a copy is available on request from legal@gloodoh.com. We will not close an account in silence.

Appealing

Reply to the notice, or write to legal@gloodoh.com, and say what you think we got wrong. Someone who did not make the first decision looks at it again, and we tell you the outcome in writing. If we got it wrong, we say so and put it back.

Orders and money already in progress

Action against an account does not cancel what a buyer has already paid for.

• An order that has been paid for still has to be delivered or refunded by the business that sold it. The sale is between the buyer and that business; suspending or closing its account does not make its obligation disappear, and it does not transfer that obligation to us.
• A part-paid instalment plan is not forfeited because we acted against a business. We will require the business to deliver or to refund, and where the money has not yet settled we will ask the payment provider to return it to the buyer.
• Where a complaint concerns a specific order, we may ask our payment provider — Viewtech Limited, trading as SasaPay, authorised by the Central Bank of Kenya — to hold that order’s settlement to the supplier while we look into it. We tell the supplier which order and why. Gloodoh does not receive, hold or control buyers’ money and has no beneficial interest in it: the provider settles to the supplier, or returns the money to the buyer, once the matter is decided.
• We never ask for a settlement to be held as a punishment, and we never use a hold to extract anything from a supplier — using control of somebody’s money or goods to force better terms is itself an unfair practice (Cap. 501, s.14).
• Settlement is not instant and is not always automatic. Where a business has given us payout details, its share is sent to those details after the buyer’s payment clears. Where it has not, the money is held in our collection account until we pay it across on the schedule set out in your supplier terms. Neither of those is a hold under this policy; a hold is something we tell you about, on a named order, with a reason.
• A closed business can ask us for its own order and payment history, so that it can settle what is outstanding and keep its books. Write to legal@gloodoh.com.

How a cancellation or a refund is actually worked out — including what happens to our service fee and to the mobile-money charge — is set out in Cancellations & refunds.

Changes, and who to ask

This page will change as Gloodoh grows, because new features bring new ways to misuse them. The date at the top is the last time it changed, and the current version always lives at gloodoh.com/acceptable-use.

If a change matters to you — a new prohibition, or a change to how we enforce — we will say so in the app rather than quietly editing the page. A change applies to orders you place after we have told you about it. We will not treat your silence, or the mere fact that you have carried on using Gloodoh, as agreement to a material change: under the Consumer Protection Act (Cap. 501, s.9(3)–(5)) consent cannot be inferred from inaction or the passing of time, and the burden of showing that you agreed is ours, not yours. If you do not accept a change, stop placing new orders; if you hold a paid subscription, tell us and we will settle what is outstanding rather than hold you to the new terms.

Questions about these rules go to legal@gloodoh.com. Anything else, info@gloodoh.com. Gloodoh is operated by iTsitso Space LTD, a company incorporated in the Republic of Kenya.