Legal

Terms of Service

Effective 14 July 2026 · South African law · Amounts in rand

This is the agreement between you and LotMaster. It says what we do for you, what you must do, what we charge, and what happens when something goes wrong. We have tried to write it so that you can actually read it — and to put the two things that usually hide in the fine print, our commission and the fact that we never hold your money, in plain sight where they belong.

1. Who you are contracting with

• Kelvin Raath, trading as LotMaster
• Email: hello@lotmasterhq.com
• Website: lotmasterhq.com
• Country: South Africa

These details are given as the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, 2002 requires. By creating an account, or by using LotMaster in any way, you agree to these terms, to ourAcceptable Use Policy and to ourPrivacy Policy. All three form one agreement. If you do not agree, do not use LotMaster.

2. What LotMaster is

LotMaster is software that runs an auction inside a WhatsApp group you already have. Once you register a group with us, our bot:

• reads the bids your buyers post, and ignores anything it cannot read with confidence rather than guessing;
• ranks those bids on WhatsApp's own server timestamp, not on our clock or your device's, and records every one in an append-only audit trail;
• closes lots, handles soft-close and last call, and announces the winner;
• sends the winner an invoice, and a payment link if you have switched payments on;
• publishes a results page for the auction, reachable only by a link that carries an access key.

That is the whole product. LotMaster is a tool you point at your own auction. It is not an auction house, not a marketplace, not a broker, and not an escrow agent.

3. Your account

You must be at least 18 and legally able to contract. You must give us accurate details and keep them current — including your business name, your banking details and what you sell. Sign-in is by a one-tap link emailed to you; anyone with access to your email can get into your account, so treat it accordingly. Give your team their own seats rather than sharing yours. Everything done under your account is treated as done by you.

We may ask you to verify your identity, your business, or your licence to auction what you auction. Where we ask and you do not answer, we may suspend payments or the account. See §2 of the Acceptable Use Policy.

4. You are the auctioneer. We are not.

You are the seller of record. You own the goods, set the reserve, admit the bidders to your group, describe the lots, honour the winning bid, deliver the goods, and answer for them afterwards. The contract of sale is between you and your buyer. LotMaster is not a party to it, does not take title to anything, and does not sell anything.

Consequently the law that governs auctions in South Africa governs you, not us — the Consumer Protection Act, 2008 and the Auction Regulations, 2011, and whichever licence or registration your category requires. You are responsible for holding it. The Acceptable Use Policy sets out the common ones and forms part of these terms.

You warrant that you have the right to sell every lot you list, and that every listing is accurate.

5. WhatsApp, and the number the bot runs on

LotMaster is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to WhatsApp or Meta. WhatsApp does not officially sanction automation of this kind, and we will not pretend otherwise: a number running a bot can be restricted or banned by Meta at any time, for reasons they do not disclose and we cannot appeal. We pace every message to stay inside normal usage patterns, and that is genuine engineering rather than a slogan — but the risk is never zero, and you accept it as a condition of using the product.

Where we supply the WhatsApp number your auctions run on, that number belongs to us and is licensed to you for as long as your account is open. It is not yours to keep, port, or take with you. Where you supply your own number, the risk in the preceding paragraph is yours, and we will help you migrate if it is lost.

Your use of WhatsApp is governed by WhatsApp's own terms, between you and them. We cannot vary them and are not responsible for what they do.

6. The record, and what it is worth

The audit trail is the product. We keep it append-only, we rank on Meta's server time so that a result does not depend on our bot being awake, and we will produce it, unedited, to either side of a dispute. If our bot is offline when a bid lands, that bid still counts and still lands in the right place when we reconnect — lots pause rather than mis-award.

What we vouch for is the record of the bidding. We do not vouch for you, for your goods, or for your buyers, and nothing in a results page should be read as us doing so. We keep auction records, bids and invoices for five years, as tax law requires.

7. What we charge

There are two charges, and this section exists so that neither can surprise you.

(a) A subscription, if you are on a paid plan. Free is free — no card, no trial clock. Paid plans are billed monthly or annually in advance in South African rand at the rates published on ourpricing section. Annual plans are billed at ten times the monthly rate. Prices include VAT at 15% where we are registered for it. We may change plan pricing on 30 days' notice by email; if you do not like the new price, cancel before it takes effect.

(b) A commission on each lot sold through our payment links.When a buyer pays through LotMaster, we take a percentage of the hammer price. It depends on your plan:

• Free — 3% of the hammer price
• Pro — 1.5% of the hammer price
• Auction House — 0.5% of the hammer price

That is how the Free plan is paid for. The commission is calculated on the hammer price only, never on your buyer's premium, and it is taken at the moment the payment is processed. If you do not use our payment links, we take no commission at all — invoice your buyer with your own banking details and you owe us nothing beyond your subscription.

Our payment processor charges its own fee on top of ours. You may choose to absorb both fees, or to pass them to the buyer as a buyer's premium. If you pass them on, that premium is a charge your buyer pays, and the Consumer Protection Act requires you to disclose it in your rules of auction before the bidding starts. We show it as a separate line on the invoice; we cannot disclose it in a group we do not speak in on your behalf.

Subscription fees already paid are not refundable, and cancelling stops the next renewal rather than the current one. You keep your plan until the paid period runs out.

8. How money reaches you — and why we cannot hold it

This is the most misunderstood part of the product, so it gets said plainly. LotMaster never takes possession of your money.

When you switch on payments, we create an account for you with our payment processor, in your business's name, pointing at your bank account. When a buyer pays, the processor settles the hammer price directly into your bank account and deducts our commission in the same movement. The money never passes through us, and it is never ours to route, delay, or hold. This is deliberate: it is what keeps LotMaster out of the payment chain and out of the business of holding other people's funds.

The honest consequence, which you should understand before you rely on us:

• We are not an escrow agent. We do not hold the buyer's money until they receive the goods, and we cannot offer either of you that protection.
• We cannot reverse a settled payment. Not for you, not for your buyer, not for ourselves. Once it has settled it is in your bank and out of our reach.
• Refunds are yours to make, from your own account, and chargebacks are yours to answer. Where a buyer charges back, the processor recovers it from you, not from us.
• What we can do is stop the next payment — suspend your payment links — and produce the record.

Your relationship with the payment processor is also governed by their terms, and they may refuse or discontinue service to you on their own compliance grounds. That decision is theirs and we cannot overrule it.

9. Your data

What we collect, why, and what you can make us do about it is set out in the Privacy Policy. The short version of the part that matters to you: for your own account information we are the responsible party, and for the bidders in your group you are the responsible party and we are merely your operator. POPIA duties toward your bidders are yours. Your data is yours; export it at any time, and we will not sell it or use your member list for anything but your auctions.

10. Who owns what

We own LotMaster — the software, the bot, the dashboard, the name and the brand. You get a licence to use it while your account is open, and nothing more; you may not copy it, resell it, white-label it or reverse-engineer it.

You own your content — your lots, your photos, your descriptions, your customer list. You give us only the permission we need to run your auctions: to store that content, to display it in your group and on your results pages, and to put it on an invoice. If you send us feedback, we may act on it freely and owe you nothing for it.

11. Availability

We do not promise that LotMaster will be available without interruption. It depends on WhatsApp, on our hosting, and on the internet, and any of those can fail. We offer no service level agreement on any plan.We will do maintenance at quiet hours where we can, and we will tell you about anything major.

What we do promise is that an outage will not corrupt a result. Because winners are ranked on WhatsApp's timestamps rather than on ours, a bot that was asleep when your buyers were bidding still awards the lot correctly when it wakes.

12. Suspension and termination

You may cancel at any time from the dashboard. No notice period, no exit fee, no phone call to talk you out of it.

We may suspend or close your account, or switch off your payments, if you breach these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, if you have not paid, if you will not verify what we have reasonably asked you to verify, or if we are required to. For serious abuse — the money-laundering and stolen-goods end of the Acceptable Use Policy — we may act immediately and without warning. For anything less, we will tell you what is wrong and give you a fair chance to fix it.

When an account closes, you may export your data. We keep the audit trail, invoices and payment records for five years, because tax law requires it and because a result nobody can check afterwards was never worth much. Anything else goes as set out in the Privacy Policy.

13. Warranties, and the limits of what we owe you

LotMaster is provided as it is. Beyond what this agreement says and what South African law requires of us, we give no warranties — not that the software will be free of defects, not that WhatsApp will keep working, not that your auctions will make money.

Subject to the paragraph below, our total liability to you, for everything, in any twelve-month period, is limited to the fees you actually paid us in the three months before the claim arose — and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profit, for lost auctions, or for a WhatsApp ban.

We do not exclude what may not lawfully be excluded. The Consumer Protection Act does not permit anyone to contract out of liability for gross negligence, and we do not attempt to. Nothing in this agreement limits our liability for gross negligence, for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by us. If a court finds any part of this section unenforceable, the rest of it still stands.

14. Indemnity

If someone brings a claim against us because of what you auctioned — the goods, your listing, your buyer, your licence, your group, your breach of the Acceptable Use Policy — you will cover us for it, including the reasonable legal cost of dealing with it. We will tell you promptly if such a claim arrives and we will not settle it behind your back.

15. Disputes with your buyers

A dispute about a lot is between you and your buyer; we did not sell it. What we will do is produce the record — the bid trail with WhatsApp's own timestamps, the invoice, the payment reference — to either of you, and the same record to both. We will not edit it to favour whoever asks first. Buyers may also approach their bank, the National Consumer Commission, or the SAPS, and we will support a lawful request from any of them.

16. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. If a change is material we will change the effective date at the top and email account holders before it takes effect. Continuing to use LotMaster afterwards accepts the change; if you do not accept it, cancel. We will not quietly rewrite what you agreed to and hope you do not read the diff.

17. The legal fine print that actually is fine print

• Governing law — South African law governs this agreement, and the South African courts have jurisdiction.
• Whole agreement — these terms, the Acceptable Use Policy and the Privacy Policy are the whole of what is between us, and replace anything said before.
• Severability — if a clause is struck out, the rest survives.
• No waiver — if we do not enforce something once, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• Assignment — you may not transfer this agreement without our consent. We may transfer it if the business is sold, and will tell you.
• Notices — we write to the email on your account; you write to hello@lotmasterhq.com.

18. Talk to us first

If you have a complaint, emailhello@lotmasterhq.comand give us a fair chance to fix it before you escalate. We would rather hear it from you than from a lawyer, and most things are a misunderstanding that a reply can solve.