Terms of service

Provider

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Address

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Register

{{REGISTRY_AUTHORITY}}, no. {{REGISTRATION_NUMBER}}

VAT number

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Contact

{{CONTACT_EMAIL}}

In this document, we and us mean that company. The service means the SoftSelect website and everything on it. A vendor is a company whose software is listed. A user is anyone using the service, with or without an account.

Using the service means accepting these terms. If you use it on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you are allowed to accept them for that organisation. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

SoftSelect is a directory of business software with user reviews, structured comparison data and editorial content. It exists to help you shortlist and evaluate. It does not do the deciding.

• We do not sell the software we list, and we are not any vendor’s agent.
• We are not a party to any contract you sign with a vendor. If a vendor pays us for a placement or a lead, that is between them and us, and it does not make us part of your deal.
• Reviews are the opinions of the people who wrote them, not statements by us.
• Nothing on the site is legal, tax, accounting or procurement advice. Confirm the facts that matter to you with the vendor before you sign anything.

• Give us accurate details and keep them accurate. Verification depends on it.
• One account per person. Do not share it, and do not let anyone else post from it.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account until you tell us it has been compromised.
• You must be at least 16, and using the service in a professional capacity.

You can close your account at any time from your settings. We can suspend or close it if you break these terms — with the reason, and with a route to appeal, unless a law requires us to stay silent.

You own what you write. Nothing here changes that.

By posting it you give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host it, display it, translate it into the languages the site runs in, and quote from it when we write about the platform — always with the attribution shown on the review itself. The licence runs for as long as the content is published, plus the time it takes for backups to age out.

You confirm that a review is your own genuine experience, that you are free to post it, that it breaks no confidentiality obligation, and that it contains nobody else’s personal data.

• How reviews are checked

• Post a fake review, buy one, sell one or arrange one.
• Manipulate a score or a ranking by any means, including multiple accounts.
• Impersonate anyone, or misrepresent who you work for.
• Harvest the site in bulk, crawl it beyond what our robots file allows, or use our content to train a machine-learning model without written permission.
• Probe, scan or test the security of the service without a written invitation from us.
• Upload malware, spam anyone, or use the service to advertise.
• Work around a rate limit, a block or a bot challenge.

Found a security problem? Tell us at {{CONTACT_EMAIL}} before you tell anyone else. We will not send lawyers after a researcher who acts in good faith and gives us reasonable time to fix it.

• A listing can be claimed by somebody who can prove they represent the vendor, and we check that.
• Keep the facts on your listing accurate and current. Materially wrong facts get corrected or removed.
• You may ask customers for reviews. You may not pick who gets invited based on how happy they are, offer anything of value for a positive review, or write one yourself.
• Your public responses are moderated for the same things reviews are: no personal attacks, no confidential data, and no attempt to identify the reviewer.
• You may never try to identify or contact a reviewer through us.

Breaking these has a ladder of its own: an undisclosed incentive gets disclosed, affected reviews come down, the listing loses features, and in the end the listing is removed and the account closed. Where a vendor has manipulated reviews at scale, we say so on the listing, because a buyer looking at that page deserves to know.

Statistics in the vendor dashboard are our best estimate from aggregated data. They are provided as they are, and they are not audited figures to report to anyone as fact.

Products are ordered by a computed score based on the reviews we hold, weighted so that a handful of glowing reviews does not beat a long record. How complete and how recent the data is counts too. Payment does not.

• A sponsored placement buys a labelled slot on a page. It never changes a score or a position in a ranked list.
• Sponsored editorial is labelled as sponsored, and its outbound links are marked so search engines treat them correctly.
• We disclose the main parameters of ranking here and in the review integrity policy, and we tell business users before we change them materially.

• Ranking, in detail

The service, its design, its code, its editorial content and the SoftSelect name are ours or our licensors’. You may read it, share it and link to it, and quote a reasonable extract with a link back. You may not copy the catalogue wholesale or republish our content as your own.

Vendor names, logos and trademarks belong to the vendors. We use them to identify the products we write about. That implies no relationship and no endorsement in either direction, and grants you no licence.

The service links out constantly — to vendor sites, documentation, pricing pages. We do not control any of it and we do not monitor it continuously, so we are not responsible for what is there. Once you arrive, their terms apply.

We work to keep the service up and fast, but we do not promise an uptime figure, and we may change, suspend or discontinue any part of it. Where a change materially affects a paid vendor service, we give notice before it takes effect.

Free features can be withdrawn. Paid features are governed by whatever we agreed with you when you paid for them.

The service is provided as it is. We do not warrant that a review is accurate, that a vendor’s claim is true, or that a product will suit you. The decision to buy software is yours.

We are fully liable for damage caused intentionally or through gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, and in every case where the law does not allow liability to be limited. Beyond that, our liability is limited to loss that was reasonably foreseeable when you started using the service, and we are not liable for lost profits, lost data or lost business.

Nothing here limits your rights as a consumer under the mandatory law of the country you live in.

If you use the service as a business and something you post leads to a claim against us — defamation, breach of confidence, infringement — you cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it, provided we tell you promptly and let you take part in the defence. This does not apply to consumers.

Tell us first, at {{CONTACT_EMAIL}}. We acknowledge a complaint within two working days and aim to resolve it within fourteen. A complaint about a specific review follows the process in the review integrity policy instead, which is faster.

We are not obliged to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration body, and we do not undertake to do so. That says nothing about your right to go to court.

• Disputing a review

These terms are governed by {{GOVERNING_LAW}}, and the courts of {{COURT_JURISDICTION}} have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer you keep the protection of the mandatory rules of the country you live in, and you can bring a case there.

We can change these terms. The new version is published with a new date, and for a material change we give notice before it takes effect — at least 30 days to anyone with a vendor account, by email where we have an address for you. Using the service afterwards means accepting the change; if you would rather not, close the account.