Terms of service

Bling Marketing is a lead marketplace for service providers in the United States. It is operated by the United States business trading under that name, whose address and telephone are given below.

Business address: 456 Raintree Dr, Oswego, IL 60543, United States.

In these terms, “we”, “us” and “our” mean that business. “You” means the business that holds the account. Our website is theblingmarketing.com and you can reach us at [email protected].

These words have one meaning throughout our terms, our website and our emails. We use them consistently because the difference between two of them — an order and a lead purchase — decides whether money or credits moved.

Bling Marketing is for businesses. You may open an account only if you are a business established in the United States, acting for purposes related to your trade or profession, and you are at least 18 years old. We do not sell to consumers.

You must give accurate registration details and keep them up to date. You must verify your email address before you can use the marketplace. Choose a password of at least 12 characters, keep it to yourself, and turn on two-factor authentication if you handle money on the account.

You are responsible for everything done under your account, including by colleagues you invite. Tell us straight away at [email protected] if you think someone else has access. You can see and end your active sessions yourself on your security page.

One account per business. Opening a second account to get around a suspension, a spending limit or the fair-use controls in our refund and credit-return policy is a breach of these terms.

We source enquiries from end customers, check them, and list them for sale. You buy credits, browse the listings, and spend credits to unlock the contact details of the enquiries you choose. That is the whole of what we do.

What we are responsible for

• Listing each lead honestly: the preview describes the enquiry we received, and the badges tell you what we did or did not verify and who verified it.
• Releasing the contact details we hold as soon as your purchase completes, on your dashboard and by email, and keeping a record that proves what we released and when.
• Putting your credits back when a lead turns out to be defective, on the terms in our refund and credit-return policy.

What we do not promise, and cannot

• We do not promise you will win work. We sell you the opportunity to make contact. Whether the customer answers, whether they still want the job, whether they choose you and whether they pay you are outside our control.
• We are not a party to the contract between you and the customer. We do not introduce you as an agent, we do not vouch for you to the customer, and we take no part in your quote, your work, your invoice or any dispute between you. Equally, we are not your customer’s agent.
• We do not guarantee volume. The number of leads in your categories and areas depends on what customers enquire about. Buying credits does not reserve inventory.
• We do not check you out for the customer. We do not verify your qualifications, insurance, licences or workmanship, and nothing on our site should be read as a recommendation of you. You are responsible for holding whatever registrations and insurance your trade requires.
• A verification badge is a check, not a warranty. Where we say a phone number or email address was verified, we mean it passed a technical check at a point in time, and the badge names who asserted it. A number that worked yesterday can be unobtainable today.

Credits are a prepaid entitlement to unlock leads on this platform. They are the only thing you spend on a lead, and a credit pack is the only thing you spend money on.

• Credits are not money and have no cash value. They cannot be redeemed for cash, exchanged, sold, transferred to another account or given to another business, and they are not a deposit, a stored-value instrument or a claim on us for money.
• Credits are whole numbers. There is no such thing as a fraction of a credit anywhere in our system.
• Each purchase creates a batch with its own expiry. Paid credits currently last 12 months from the moment they are granted and bonus credits 3 months. The term is applied as 30-day months, so 360 and 90 days respectively, and the exact expiry date is fixed when the batch is created and shown on your credits page. We tell you before credits expire.
• The expiry that applies is the one in force when you bought. If we change the expiry term later, your existing credits keep the term they were granted under. A change can never be applied backwards.
• We spend your soonest-expiring credits first, and free credits before paid ones, so you lose as little as possible to expiry.
• Expired credits are not refunded. They are gone, and the money you paid for them is earned by us at that point.

Buying a pack

Prices are shown in US dollars, and we charge no sales tax on a credit pack: the price you see is the price you pay, and your invoice shows the same figure with nothing added to it. Payment is taken by a third-party payment provider; we never receive or store your card number. Credits are granted when the payment provider confirms the money has actually been taken, never when you approve a payment, so a failed or abandoned checkout costs you nothing.

An invoice is issued automatically when an order is paid, and you can download it from your invoices page. An issued invoice is never edited. If something needs correcting we issue a credit note against it, which is what our records physically enforce.

Money back

We may refund money in exceptional circumstances — duplicate payment, a charge you did not authorise, or our own error — and where we do, we take back the corresponding credits, which can leave your balance negative until you buy more. The everyday remedy for a bad lead is a credit return, not a refund. Our refund and credit-return policy explains the difference and is part of these terms.

Buying a lead does not make it yours alone. Please read this section before you spend a credit.

Every lead has a fixed number of seats, and one seat is one buyer. By default a lead has 5 seats, so up to that many providers can buy the same enquiry and contact the same customer. Some categories are set lower or higher. A lead with one seat is exclusive to whoever takes it. The number of seats and the number still free are shown on the lead before you buy, and the lead closes to further buyers once every seat is taken.

You are therefore likely to be competing for the job, and the customer may be contacted by other providers who bought the same lead. If you want exclusivity, buy only leads offered with a single seat.

How a purchase works

• The price in credits is shown before you confirm, along with your balance and what your balance will be afterwards. The price is fixed at the moment you buy.
• We take the credits and release the contact details in one operation. If we cannot release the lead, you are not charged. If two providers go for the last seat at the same instant, exactly one of them gets it and the other is not charged.
• You can buy one seat on a lead once. If a purchase is later returned or refunded, that lead does not become available to you again.
• Declining a lead you do not want (“not interested”) is free and costs no credits.
• The contact details are delivered twice: to your dashboard, which is the authoritative copy, and by email as a backstop. Each delivery leaves a signed record of what was released, to whom and when.

How long the details stay on your dashboard

We show unmasked contact details for a purchased lead on your dashboard for 90 days from purchase, then we hide them. This is a data-protection measure, not a withdrawal of what you bought: your purchase, the credits you spent, your invoice, your notes and the delivery record all remain. Export or record what you need within that window. The delivery email we sent you is your own copy, and how long you keep it — and whether keeping it is lawful under the next section — is your responsibility.

This is the most important obligation in these terms. The details you unlock are another person’s personal data, and the customer trusted us with them for one purpose.

When we release a lead to you, you become an independent controller of that personal data in your own right. You are not our processor and we are not yours. From that moment you carry, in your own name, every obligation the law places on a business that holds another person’s contact details — including the rules that govern calling, texting and emailing them — for everything you do with the data.

You may

• Contact the customer about the enquiry they made, to discuss the job, quote for it and carry it out.
• Keep the data for as long as you genuinely need it for that enquiry and for your own legal and accounting obligations, and no longer.

You must not

• Sell, licence, share or otherwise pass the data to anyone else, including another provider, a lead broker, a marketing agency, a data aggregator or a parent or sister company.
• Add the customer to a marketing list, a newsletter, a bulk SMS campaign, an audience upload to an advertising platform, or any other marketing use. The customer asked one company for one job; they did not opt in to your marketing.
• Use the data for anything other than the enquiry. Not other services you offer, not market research, not enriching your own database, not training a model.
• Keep contacting a customer who has asked you to stop, or who has told you they have chosen someone else.
• Scrape, bulk-download or automate access to previews or to purchased leads, or try to reconstruct contact details from a preview.

What you must do when we tell you to delete

A customer can ask us to erase their data, and can object to it being processed at all. If they do, we will withdraw the lead and notify you that the record must be deleted. You must delete it — from your systems, your CRM, your phone, your spreadsheets and your mailbox — without undue delay, and confirm to us that you have. Where you bought the lead recently, we return your credits automatically; you do not need to ask.

You must also tell the customer who you are and why you are contacting them, and give them your own privacy information, as the law requires of you and not of us. If a customer complains to us about how you used their details, we may share your identity and your purchase record with them, with a regulator or law-enforcement authority, or with both.

Breach of this section is a serious breach of these terms. We may suspend or close your account immediately, without refund of unspent credits, and we may report it.

If a lead is defective, we put the credits back. We do not return money, because you did not spend money on the lead — you spent credits. The returned credits go back into the same batch you spent them from, with that batch’s original expiry date, so a return never shortens or extends the life of your credits.

You have 14 days from purchase to open a claim. Filing is free, you do it yourself from the lead in your dashboard, and we publish both what counts and what does not.

Reasons we accept

• The phone number was not valid
• The email address was not valid
• The enquiry is for a different service
• The job is outside the advertised area
• I already bought this enquiry
• Key details in the lead were wrong
• The enquiry misuses the platform
• The customer says they never enquired
• The contact was looking for work, not hiring
• The contact behaved inappropriately
• I bought this lead by mistake
• I could not reach the customer

Reasons we do not accept

These are the ordinary risks of competing for work, and they are shown to you before you spend a credit as well as here.

• The customer did not answer
• The customer hired someone else
• The scope changed after contact
• I changed my mind
• Too much competition on the lead

The evidence we need, how long a decision takes, what happens on partial approval, and the fair-use limits that apply if a very high proportion of your purchases are claimed, are all in the refund and credit-return policy, which forms part of these terms.

You agree not to:

• use the platform for anything unlawful, or to offer services you are not lawfully able to provide;
• misrepresent who you are, what you do, where you work or who you work for, on your profile or to a customer;
• interfere with the platform — probing, scanning, load-testing, bypassing rate limits, reverse-engineering, or trying to reach data that is not yours;
• use automated means to browse, buy or extract from the platform, other than through an interface we have given you for that purpose;
• submit malicious files, or content that is abusive, harassing, discriminatory or defamatory, in a claim, a note or a message to us;
• file credit-return claims you know to be unfounded, or manufacture evidence for one;
• share your login, or resell access to the platform or to lead previews.

We monitor for these things because a marketplace where the seats are taken by bad actors is worse for everyone in it. Every action our staff takes on your account is recorded.

Steps we can take

Depending on what has happened, we may restrict what your account can do, suspend it, close it, or ban it. We will tell you which, and why, and — except where the breach is serious or we are legally obliged not to — we will give you a chance to put it right first. We may place a hold on some or all of your credits while we investigate a payment dispute or suspected fraud; held credits are not removed, only made unavailable.

Your unspent credits

• If you close your account, unspent credits are not refunded. Spend them first.
• If we suspend you while we investigate and then reinstate you, your credits are untouched and keep their original expiry.
• If we close or ban your account for a breach of these terms, unspent credits are forfeited.
• If we withdraw the service altogether, or close your account for a reason that is not your fault, we will refund the money value of your unspent paid credits. Bonus credits have no money value and are not refunded.

If you want to leave

You can close your account at any time by asking us at [email protected]. Some records — invoices, the credit ledger, delivery evidence and the audit trail — we are required to keep after closure; our privacy notice says for how long and why.

Appealing

If you think we have got a suspension, a closure or a credit-return decision wrong, reply to the message we sent you or write to [email protected]. A different person from the one who made the original decision will look at it.

Our staff can see your account records — your profile, your orders, your credit history, your purchases and the emails we sent you — in order to support you and to run the marketplace. What each member of staff can see is controlled by their role, and some roles are deliberately blocked from customer contact details altogether.

Every staff action on your account is written to an audit trail that cannot be edited or deleted, and every occasion on which a member of our staff reveals a customer’s contact details is recorded individually. Where a support agent needs to view the application as you in order to reproduce a problem, the record of that session is kept against their identity, not yours, and we will not use it to spend your credits or buy leads on your behalf.

The platform, its software, its design, its wording and the Bling Marketing name and marks are ours or our licensors’. Your account gives you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use the platform for your own business while your account is in good standing, and nothing more. You may not copy, adapt, republish, frame or create a competing product from any part of it.

The lead data we release to you is licensed to you, not assigned. The licence is limited to the purpose in the section on contact details, is non-transferable, and ends when you no longer need the data for that purpose or when we tell you to delete it.

Anything you upload — your profile, your logo, evidence with a claim — stays yours. You give us the right to store it, display it where it belongs on the platform, and use it to run the service and to decide your claim. You confirm you are entitled to give us that right.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited. That includes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and any other liability which the law does not allow us to exclude or restrict. If you are dealing with us as a consumer rather than as a business — which our eligibility rules do not permit, but which we cannot rule out — nothing here affects your statutory rights, and this section applies only to the extent the law allows.

Subject to that:

• We are not liable for the outcome of a lead. Not for a customer who does not answer, changes their mind, hires someone else, or turns out not to have the budget they indicated; and not for work you do or do not win.
• We are not liable for what you or the customer do with the introduction, or for any contract, dispute, loss or injury arising between you.
• We are not liable for business losses of an indirect kind: lost profit, lost revenue, lost business, loss of goodwill, or wasted expenditure, however caused.
• We are not liable for a failure caused by something outside our reasonable control, including the failure of a payment provider, an email provider or a hosting provider.
• Our total liability to you for all claims in any 12-month period is limited to the money you actually paid us for credit packs in that period. Where a claim concerns a specific lead, our liability for it is limited to returning the credits you spent on it.

You are responsible for your own compliance — your data-protection obligations, your marketing consent position, your trade registrations and your insurance. If we are held liable because of something you did with a customer’s data, you will cover our losses.

We provide the platform with reasonable skill and care, but not as an uninterrupted service. We may take it down for maintenance, and we will give notice where we reasonably can.

We may change these terms — for example when the law changes, when we add a feature, or when we change a policy value such as the credit expiry term or the number of seats on a lead. Each version of this document carries a version identifier and an effective date, both shown at the top of this page, and we keep a record of which version you accepted and when.

For a change that materially affects you, we will tell you by email at least 30 days before it takes effect, and if you do not want to accept it you may close your account before then. Continuing to use the platform after the effective date means you accept the new version. A change to the credit expiry term never applies to credits you already hold.

No version identifier has been assigned to this document yet. Until one is, an acceptance is recorded against it as unversioned rather than against an invented number, so that the record says what is true: you agreed to the wording published on the date shown on your account, at a point when the document carried no version.

These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of the platform, are governed by the law of the State of Illinois, United States.

The courts having jurisdiction over such a dispute are the state and federal courts located in the State of Illinois.

Before going to court, please raise the matter with us at [email protected]. Most disagreements are quicker to settle that way, and we would rather fix the problem than argue about it.

The usual small print

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later. You may not transfer your account or your rights under these terms without our written consent; we may transfer ours as part of a reorganisation or sale of the business, and will tell you if we do. Nobody other than you and us can enforce these terms. These terms, the refund and credit-return policy, and the privacy and cookie notices are the whole agreement between us about the platform.

About your account, an order, a lead or a claim: [email protected].

About personal data, including a request from a customer whose enquiry we hold: [email protected]. Our privacy notice explains what we do with personal data and how to exercise your rights.

By post: 456 Raintree Dr, Oswego, IL 60543, United States.

By telephone: (318) 498-6750.