Square Online Store Affiliate Program Terms and Conditions

These Affiliate Terms and Conditions (the “Terms” or this “Agreement”) are by and between the Square Contracting Entity (hereinafter, “Square,” “we,” “our” or “us”) and each applicable affiliate , and its sub-affiliates, employees, agents and contractors (“Affiliate,” “you, “your”) and govern your participation in Square’s affiliate marketing program within the Territory (the “Program”). If you are participating in the Program on behalf of a business, you represent to us that you have authority to bind that business or entity to these Terms, and that business accepts these Terms.

1. Definitions

“Affiliate Interface” means the digital interface through which we moderate the Program.

“Affiliate Lead” means a customer prospect who clicks on the Affiliate Link.

“Affiliate Link” means the unique tracking link you place on Your Website or promote through other channels.

“Affiliate Profile” means your digital profile on the Affiliate Interface, and may include your name, Your Website(s), and demographic data.

“Commissions” means an amount described in the Payment section of these Terms.

“Customer” means an Affiliate Lead who becomes a customer of ours by purchasing our products or services.

“Other Affiliates” means affiliates that are part of the Program but are not represented under these Terms.

“Our Trademarked Terms” means any word, phrase, symbol, and/or design that identifies and distinguishes our products or services from those of others. Our Trademark Terms include but are not limited to Square, Square-formative trademarks (such as Square Online Store), and our domain names, such as square.com and squareup.com.

“Our Website” means properties located at squareup.com, square.com, square.ca, weebly.com, square.site and any other properties obtained and owned by us.

“Program” means the marketing affiliate Program as described in these Terms.

“Square Contracting Entity” means the Square entity that is the contracting party to these Terms. If you are a resident of the United States, the Square Contracting Entity is Square Inc. If you are a resident of Canada, the Square Contracting Entity is Square Technologies Inc. If you are a resident of the United Kingdom, the Square Contracting Entity is Squareup International Ltd. If you are a resident of Australia, the Square Contracting Entity is Square AU PTY, Ltd.

“Sub-Affiliate” means companies, individuals, or entities which are directly or indirectly under the control of the Affiliate.

“Territory” means the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia

“Your Website(s)” means any websites that you will link to Our Website.

2. Enrollment

After receiving your application, which should include all of the websites that you use in your Affiliate Profile, we will review Your Website(s) and notify you whether or not you are accepted into the Program. Please allow up to 48 hours for your application to be reviewed. We reserve the right to reject any application at our sole discretion, however we encourage you to contact us if you feel the decision is incorrect. We may rescind our approval and revoke your acceptance into the Program at any time.

3. Sub-Affiliate Networks

Promoting through a Sub-Affiliate network is permitted. However, you must notify us and be completely transparent with regards to where traffic from your Sub-Affiliates originated and who your Sub-Affiliates are. Sub-Affiliate are subject to the Program Terms and you warrant and represent that they will comply and agree to the Terms, which includes restrictions on advertising through toolbars, browser extensions, and through any paid placements such as PPC campaigns. You must receive approval prior to allowing any Sub-Affiliates to promote any coupons, and they must abide by the Coupon Guidelines below.

4. Website and Social Media Guidelines

A. Your Website

Your Website(s) will NOT:

1. Infringe on our or any anyone else’s intellectual property rights, rights of publicity, privacy or other rights.
2. Violate, or promote violations, of any applicable laws, rules or regulations.
3. Contain any content: (i) that promotes violence or discrimination (based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age); (ii) is threatening, harassing, defamatory, obscene, harmful to minors; or (iii) that contains nudity, pornography or sexually explicit materials.
4. Contain any viruses, trojan horses, worms, time bombs, cancelbots, or other computer programming routines that are intended to damage, interfere with, surreptitiously intercept, exploit, or expropriate any system, data, or personal information.
5. Contain software or use technology (including toolbars, browser plug-ins, extensions and add-ons) that attempts to intercept, divert or redirect internet traffic to or from any other website, or that potentially enables the diversion of Other Affiliate’s Commissions from another website.
6. Resembles Our Website or appear in a manner which leads viewers to believe you are Square or a business affiliated with Square.
7. Engage in cookie stuffing or include pop-ups, false or misleading links on Your Website. In addition, wherever possible, you will not attempt to mask the referring URL information (i.e. the page from where the click is originating).
8. Use redirects to bounce a click off of a domain from which the click did not originate in order to give the appearance that it came from that domain.
9. Use of any of Our Trademarked Terms as part of Your Website domain or sub-domain (e.g. www.square.yoursite.com or www.square-coupons.com), except as used as part of a subdomain associated with Our Website (e.g., square.site, weebly.com) offered by us to you.

B. Social Media, Blogs, Etc.

Promotion on social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) and blogs is allowed. However, you warrant and represent that you will comply with all Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) regulations and any other applicable laws, in addition to the following requirements:

1. You must include a disclosure statement within any and all pages, blog/posts, or social media posts where Affiliate Links are posted as an endorsement or review, and where it is not clear that the link is a paid advertisement.
2. Your disclosures should be clear, conspicuous and concise (8-point font and above) stating that we are compensating you for your review or endorsement. If you received the product for free from us or from the affiliate management team for review, this also must be clearly stated in your disclosure.
3. Your disclosures must be made at the beginning of the claims and may not appear solely in a “Terms of Use”, “Legal”, “About Us” or another linked page.
4. Your disclosures should be placed above the fold; scrolling should not be necessary to find the disclosure. (e.g. disclosure should be visible before the jump).
5. The use of pop-up, hover state and button disclosures is prohibited.
6. Youtube – Disclosure must be stated/displayed at the beginning of the video, and a listing in the video description is not enough.
7. When using Instagram - your disclosure should be present in the first three (3) lines before a user would have to click “more.”
8. When using Snapchat/Instagram Stories – the disclosure must be superimposed on the image and conspicuous (i.e. font must be on a contrasting background and must be visible for a reasonable amount of time for users to understand the relationship)
9. Reasonable hashtags/disclosures for social media platforms with limited characters are set forth as follows: “paid ad,” “sponsored”, “promoted”, “ad”, “#ad”, “#sponsored”. No other alternatives are permitted.

For more information about FTC disclosure requirements, please review the FTC’s “Dot Com Disclosures” Guidelines and the FTC’s Endorsement Guidelines. If you engage in so called “native advertising,” you further agree to comply with the FTC’s Enforcement Policy Statement on Deceptively Formatted Advertisements and the related guidelines and the related guidelines.

You are PROHIBITED from doing the following:

1. Posting your Affiliate Links on any of our social media pages or other company controlled community forums in an attempt to solicit Customers on your behalf.
2. Running paid ads with any of Our Trademark Terms, except as needed to describe the content of the landing page, e.g., “Read our review of Square point-of-sale hardware.”
3. Creating a social media account that includes Our Trademark Terms in the page name, handle, and/or username.

C. Linking to Our Website

Upon acceptance into the Program, links will be made available to you through the Affiliate Interface. Your acceptance into our Program means you agree to and abide by the following:

1. You will use, without manipulation of any kind, linking codes from the Affiliate Interface.
2. All website domains that use your Affiliate Link must be listed in your Affiliate Profile on the Affiliate Interface.

5. Pay-Per-Click Guidelines

If you are enrolled in our Program and participate in Pay-Per-Click (“PPC”) advertising, you will NOT:

1. Bid on any of Our Trademarked Terms or Square brands, including any variations or misspellings thereof for search or content-based campaigns on any search, news, or social network, including but not limited to Google, Bing, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
2. Use Our Trademarked Terms in sequence with any other keyword (e.g. Square Coupons) on content-based campaigns searches hosted on digital networks such as Google, Bing, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and/or any others.
3. Use Our Trademarked Terms in your ad title, ad copy, or display name, except as needed to describe the content of the landing page, e.g., “Read our review of Square point-of-sale hardware.
4. Direct link to Our Website from any PPC ad, or use redirects that yield the same result.
5. Use Affiliate Links to direct Customers or potential customers to a page not on Your Website.
6. Bid higher than Square for any search terms in position 1-5 in any auction style PPC advertising program.

If you automate your PPC campaigns, it is your responsibility to exclude Our Trademarked Terms from your marketing plan. As such, we strongly suggest you add Our Trademarked Terms as negative keywords.

6. Digital Marketing Guidelines

A. Use of Our Content

As part of your participation in the Program, we may provide you with certain promotional assets and content (“Our Content”) to facilitate your promotional activities. All of Our Content is protected by copyright. We hereby grant you a limited, non-transferable, revocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free right to display, reproduce, broadcast, publicly perform, distribute Our Content within the Territory for the sole purpose of fulfilling your obligations in connection with the Program. Your rights to Our Content will terminate when your participation in the Program ends. We reserve the right to terminate your rights to Our Content in our sole discretion.

B. Right to use Our Trademarked Terms

Subject to the restrictions set forth in these Terms, we hereby grant you a limited, non-transferable, revocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free right to use Our Trademarked Terms within the Territory solely for the purpose of fulfilling your obligations in connection with the Program. Your right to use Our Trademarked Terms will terminate when your participation in the Program ends. You also agree that we reserve the right to inspect your use of Our Trademarked Terms to ensure that such use is aligned with our Brand Guidelines (as may be provided from time to time). We reserve the right to terminate your right to use Our Trademarked terms in our sole discretion.

C. Review of Materials

We have the right to monitor Your Website at any time to determine if it complies with these Terms. Upon our review, we reserve the right to notify you of any changes to Your Website that need to be made in order to comply with these Terms. If you do not make the changes to your site that we feel are necessary, we reserve the right to terminate your participation in the Program.

D. Coupon Guidelines

We do not offer coupon codes or promotions through the sign-up and purchase flow. If you are enrolled in our Program and Your Website promotes coupon codes, you must NOT:

1. Promote us by requiring a click to reveal an offer (we consider this to be misleading).
2. Create a falsified promotion or use copy that alludes to a promotion in order to entice a potential customer to click.

Affiliates may only promote coupons and deals made available through the affiliate program through the network interface. Any existing coupons or deals posted to your site prior to this change should be removed. At no time may affiliates allow other coupons, deals or promotions to be posted to their websites, including but not limited to posts by the community.

7. Prohibitions

A. Solicitation for Resident Affiliates in Select States

Due to local state tax laws, we unfortunately are not accepting affiliates residing in Arkansas, Connecticut, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, Utah or Vermont (“Ineligible States”). If at any time following your enrollment in the Program, you permanently relocated to any of the Ineligible States, you MUST NOTIFY US, and this Agreement will automatically terminate.

B. Solicitation of Unsupported Industries

We prohibit the use of our payment services for certain unsupported industries listed in Section 3 of Square’s Payment Terms. We will deactivate account activations found to be in violation of Square’s Terms of Service and reverse orders in accordance with Reversal terms in Section 8 of this Agreement.

8. Commissions

A. Payout of Commissions

1. We will aggregate payments due to you from the Affiliate Leads, and facilitate payment on the Affiliate Platform. Payment calculations exclude any amounts paid by the customer for shipping, handling, taxes, duties, or similar charges.
2. Affiliates are not permitted to purchase our products through their own Affiliate Links. Such purchases will not qualify for any commissions, promos or bonuses run by our Program.
3. All product prices are at the sole discretion of Square and may change at any time.
4. All agreements relating to sales to customers will be between Square and the customer.

B. Reduction in Commissions

The following circumstances may result in a loss or reduction in Commissions (to be determined and verified in our sole discretion):

1. Your Website ranks on the first (1st) page of Google for terms related to Our Website or company name(s) combined with the words “coupon”, “coupons”, “coupon code,” “promo code,” etc.; and/or your conversion rate exceeds 25%.
2. You fail to comply with our Sub-Affiliate network terms in Section 3 of these Terms.

C. Reversal Policy

We take pride in our very low reversal rate, which we attribute to open communication with you. However, we reserve the right to reverse orders due to order cancellations, duplicate tracking, returns, disputed charges, fraudulent sign-ups or orders, account deactivations and Program violations as outlined in these Terms. Specifically, we have a strict no tolerance policy when it comes to violations of the following Terms:

1. Any of our Website and Social Media Guidelines. (Section 4)
2. Our PPC Guidelines. (Section 5)
3. Our Coupon Guidelines. (Section 6)
4. Violations of our Communications Policy. (Section 9)

9. Term and Termination

A. Term

These Terms will apply for as long as you participate in the Program, or until terminated in accordance with these Terms.

B. Termination

We may terminate these Terms or suspend your participation in the Program and/or your access to the Affiliate Platform, at any time for any reason. We may add or remove, suspend, stop, delete, discontinue or impose conditions on the Program or any feature or aspect of a Program.

C. Communications Policy

Should we ask you for clarification or more information on any orders or clicks that we suspect may be in violation of our Terms, we expect that you will respond in a timely and honest manner (the “Communication Policy”). Violations of our Communication Policy include but are not limited to the following:

1. You are not forthcoming, intentionally vague or are found to be lying.
2. You are not responsive within a reasonable time period and after multiple attempts to contact you with information listed in your Affiliate Profile.
3. You cannot substantiate or validate, with clear and demonstrable proof of the source of the traffic you generate for the Program.

We may terminate these Terms for any violation of our Communications Policy (as determined in our sole discretion)

D. Effect of Termination

After termination, you must cease all activity that violates any of these Terms or causes any damage or detriment to us and our brand in our sole opinion. The following sections of these Terms survive and remain in effect in accordance with their terms upon termination: Effect of Termination, Indemnity, Confidentiality, Representations and Warranties, No Warranties, Governing Law.

10. Confidentiality

“Confidential Information” will include, but will not be limited to, any and all information associated with our business and not publicly known, including specific business information, technical processes and formulas, software, customer lists, prospective customer lists, names, addresses and other information regarding customers and prospective customers, merchant data, customer data, product designs, sales, costs, price lists, and other unpublished financial information, business plans and marketing data, and any other confidential and proprietary information, whether or not marked as confidential or proprietary or that a reasonable person would deem to be confidential based on the surrounding circumstances.

You will use the Confidential Information solely as necessary for performing your obligations under these Terms. You will take all reasonable steps, at least substantially equivalent to the steps you take to protect your own proprietary information, to prevent the duplication, disclosure or use of any such Confidential Information, other than (a) by or to your employees, agents and subcontractors who must have access to such Confidential Information to perform your obligations hereunder, and who will treat such Confidential Information as provided herein, and are each subject to obligations of confidentiality to such you that are at least as stringent as those contained herein; or (b) as required by any law, regulation, or order of any court of proper jurisdiction the subject matter contained in these Terms, provided that, if legally permitted, you will give us prompt written notice and use commercially reasonable efforts to ensure that such disclosure is accorded confidential treatment. Confidential Information will not include any information that you can prove: (a) was already in the public domain, or was already known by or your possession, at the time of disclosure of such information; (b) is independently developed by you without use of or reference to the Confidential Information, and without breaching any provisions of these Terms; or (c) is thereafter rightly obtained by you from a source other than the us without breaching any provision of these Terms.

11. Representations and Warranties

You represent and warrant to us that: (a) you are at least eighteen (18) years of age; (b) you are eligible to register in the Program and have the right, power, and ability to enter into and perform under these Terms; (c) any information you provide in connection with the Program, including your business name, accurately and truthfully represents your business or personal identity under which you operate; (d) you and Sub-Affiliates will comply with all federal, state, and local laws, rules, and regulations applicable to you and/or your business; (e) you will not use the Program, directly or indirectly, for any fraudulent undertaking or in any manner so as to interfere with the operation of the Program; and (f) your use of the Program will be in compliance with these Terms.

12. No Warranties

THE PROGRAM AND AFFILIATE INTERFACE ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY, WHETHER IT IS EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY. WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, SQUARE SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT.

13. Limitation of Liability and Damages

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL SQUARE BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, PUNITIVE, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, GOODWILL, USE, DATA, OR OTHER INTANGIBLE LOSSES, THAT RESULT FROM THE USE OF, INABILITY TO USE, OR UNAVAILABILITY OF THE AFFILIATE INTERFACE. IN ALL CASES, SQUARE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE THAT IS NOT REASONABLY FORESEEABLE.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WILL SQUARE BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE, LOSS, OR INJURY RESULTING FROM HACKING, TAMPERING, OR OTHER UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS OR USE OF THE AFFILIATE INTERFACE OR YOUR SQUARE ACCOUNT, OR THE INFORMATION CONTAINED THEREIN.

14. Indemnification

You will indemnify and hold harmless Square against all claims, suits, costs, damages liabilities, expenses (including court costs and reasonable attorney’s fees), settlements and judgments incurred, claimed or sustained by third parties (“Claims”) for: (a) any actual or alleged breach of your representations, warranties or obligations set forth in these Terms; (b) breach of a third party’s intellectual property rights; (c) your wrongful or improper participation in this Program; (d) your violation of any law; and (e) any Sub-Affiliate’s participation in this Program through you.

15. Operations Outside United States

If you are conducting business in or taking orders from persons in other countries in the Territory outside of the United States, you will follow the applicable laws of those countries. For example, you will comply with the European Union’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive if you are conducting business in or taking orders from persons in one or more of the European Union countries.

16. Assignment

These Terms, and any rights granted hereunder, may not be transferred or assigned by you and any attempted transfer or assignment will be null and void.

17. Audit Rights

You agree to maintain adequate books and records relating to your compliance with these Terms for a period of one (1) year after the termination of these Terms. Copies of such records will be made available to us upon written request.

18. Governing Law

These Terms will be governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its choice of law or conflicts of law principles.

19. Merger Clause

These Terms are a complete statement of the agreement between you and Square regarding the Program. In the event of a conflict between these Terms and any other Square agreement or policy, these Terms will prevail and control the subject matter of such conflict. If any provision of these Terms or any additional term is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, then it will be changed and interpreted to accomplish the objectives of such provision to the greatest extent possible under applicable law, and the remaining provisions will continue in full force and effect. These Terms do not limit any rights that we may have under trade secret, copyright, patent, or other laws. No waiver of any term of these Terms will be deemed a further or continuing waiver of such term or any other term.