Merchant Agreement

This agreement is between your business (“you”, “the shop”) and Sekhar Mridha, sole proprietor, trading as Pados, which operates Pados. It applies from the moment you create a shop on Pados, and it sits on top of the Terms of Use, which also apply to you.

You are the seller. Pados is not. Every sale you make through Pados is a contract between you and your customer. That is the arrangement, and most of what follows comes out of it.

1. What Pados gives you

Pados is software, licensed to you. It is not your partner in the business, not a buyer of your goods and not a reseller of them. You remain the seller in every sale: you own the stock, you set the prices, you accept or refuse each order, you take the money into your own account, you fulfil it, and you choose and pay anyone who delivers for you. Pados gives you the tools and the shopfront; the shop is yours to run.

• Your shop page, your products and your orders — free to start. Joining is free, with free credits every month (section 3). Pados is an online-orders platform: it is not a billing or accounting product, and it does not manage your till.
• Zero commission. Pados takes no percentage of any sale, or order. The money a customer pays is your money and it goes to you.
• A listing — your shop shown to customers nearby, with pickup and, where you offer it, delivery, paid for with credits as you take orders.

2. What you undertake

Rule 5 of the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 requires a marketplace to obtain an undertaking from every seller on it. By listing on Pados you give it. You undertake that:

• Your descriptions are true. The name, weight, quantity, price, photograph and description of everything you list correspond to the actual thing you will hand over. A photograph of a product you do not stock is a false description.
• Your prices are your real prices. The total shown to a customer is what they pay. You will not add a charge at handover that was not shown at checkout.
• You hold the licences your trade requires — an FSSAI registration or licence if you sell food, a drug licence if you sell medicines, GST registration if your turnover requires it — and you will keep them current.
• You will not list anything you may not lawfully sell,or anything restricted under any law applying in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands.
• You will not list alcohol, tobacco, nicotine in any form, or prescription medicines on Pados — at all. This is a Pados rule and not a question of your licence: a shop licensed to sell any of them may sell them in its shop, and may not list them here. The same goes for e-cigarettes and vapes, chewing tobacco, gutkha and pan masala containing tobacco, weapons, and anything else Pados names in writing. Listing one is grounds for removing the listing and closing the shop, without notice.
• You will honour orders you accept, at the price and quantity accepted, or cancel promptly and tell the customer why.
• You will handle your customers’ grievances, including refunds and replacements, as set out in section 5.
• Your business details are accurate — legal name, address, phone number, and GSTIN where you have one — and you will keep them updated. Pados displays them to customers because the E-Commerce Rules require a marketplace to.

3. What it costs

Joining Pados is free and there is no joining fee. Your listing, your storefront and your catalogue are free. Online orders are paid for with credits. One credit is ₹1.

How credits are used

Credits are used when an online order is completed: collected by the customer (pickup) or delivered (delivery). The charge depends on whether the order is a pickup or a delivery. An order that is declined, cancelled or expires is not charged. When you accept an order, you need enough credits to cover it and any other orders you have accepted and not yet completed; if you do not, you cannot accept it until you add more, and nothing is charged. If a completed order is later returned, the credits used for it are put back. An order cannot be switched between pickup and delivery after it is accepted. Sales you make in your shop in any other way are not counted, and if you never take an online order you never pay us a rupee. The delivery fee a customer pays for a delivery is separate and is not taken from your credits.

Free credits

Every live shop receives 100 free credits each month. Free credits are used first. Unused free credits expire at the end of the month and do not carry over. Credits a shop has paid for do not expire.

Buying credits

When you need more, you buy a credit pack: 100, 500, 1,000 or 5,000 credits, at ₹1 a credit. Credits you buy never expire. There is no monthly plan, no renewal and no tie-in; you buy only when you want to. Prices are in Indian rupees and include any tax unless the invoice says otherwise. If the prices change, credits you have already bought keep their value, and we will give notice before a new price applies to your next purchase.

If you run out of credits, new online orders are paused until you add more. Your storefront stays open and your free credits continue each month. We do not delist a shop for not buying credits.

While your account is open, bought credits are not refunded, because they do not expire. When you close your account with Pados, the credits you bought and have not spent are refunded, through the payment provider, to the account you paid from. Free monthly credits, free credits that have expired, and credits already used for orders are not refundable. A refund is complete only when the payment provider confirms it, which can take several working days. Credits charged to you in error are corrected or refunded in full. Refunds on credit purchases are covered by the Cancellations & Refunds policy.

4. How you get paid

Directly. A customer pays you in cash at handover, or by UPI to your own UPI ID, which is why Pados asks you for it. No payment passes through Pados and Pados holds no settlement account, so there is no payout cycle, no reserve, and nothing to withhold.

You are responsible for your own taxes, your own invoices where the law requires one, and your own books. Pados generates GST invoices when you ask it to; it does not file anything on your behalf and is not your accountant.

4A. Who delivers

Customers can always collect from your shop. If you offer delivery, you deliver: Pados has no delivery fleet of its own. You, or your own staff, make the delivery. You are responsible for the delivery, for the person who makes it, and for what happens on the way. You may add your own riders in Settings. Each gets a unique code to link their account in the Rider app; a neighbouring shop in your district may assign the same rider, so one rider can deliver for several shops, and a rider is only ever attached to your shop if they accept the request themselves.

A rider is verified before they can ride.A rider you add starts as pending and cannot take an order until Pados, or the Growth Partner for your area, has confirmed they are a real, identifiable person. That check is an identity check and nothing more. It does not make the rider Pados’s worker, does not put Pados between you and them, and does not make Pados responsible for the delivery. You assign the work, you decide what the rider is paid, and you pay them directly: Pados does not pay them and takes no cut. The delivery fee a customer pays goes to your rider, not to Pados as commission and not to your Growth Partner.

A rider is given the customer’s name, phone number and delivery address for that order only, and hands the order over against a four-digit PIN the customer reads out.

Confirming payment.Pados never receives the money. If a customer pays at the door, your rider may show your own payment QR and photograph the customer’s payment confirmation for you. You check that photo against your own bank or UPI app and confirm in your dashboard; the photo is deleted when you do. An order counts as paid only when you confirm it.

4B. Your Growth Partner

You register under the code of the Growth Partner who covers your area. They are an independent local partner, not an employee or agent of yours or of Pados’s customers. They may help you set up and may approve your shop; Pados may overrule them. You can change your Growth Partner in Settings to another partner whose area includes your pincode. A Growth Partner earns a share of what Pados receives when shops buy credits; none of it is taken from your sales.

5. Your customers’ complaints are yours

You sold the goods, so you answer for them. Under Rule 6(5) of the E-Commerce Rules you must appoint someone to handle consumer grievances and respond within the timelines the law sets.

• Wrong, missing, damaged, short-weight or spoiled goods: you put it right.
• Refunds are made by you, by the route the money came — cash back at the counter, or a UPI transfer back to the payer.
• A customer may complain to Pados if you do not respond. Pados will pass it to you and expect an answer. Repeatedly ignoring customers is grounds for delisting.

6. Your data stays yours

• Your catalogue, your stock records, your bills and your customer address book belong to you. Pados stores them for you; it does not own them.
• No other merchant can see them, with one exception you control, set out in section 6A. This is enforced by the database on every query, not by the app, so a modified app cannot get around it.
• Pados does not sell your business data, does not share it with your competitors, and does not use it to compete with you. Pados does not sell goods.
• You can export your data, and you can leave. Closing your account takes your shop off the map immediately; your books stay in your records for the retention period the law sets.
• When you handle your customers’ personal data through Pados, you are responsible for handling it lawfully under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

6A. What you may list, and who approves it

Your trade decides your shelves. When Pados approves your shop it settles which kind of shop it is — grocery, bakery and sweets, restaurant, fast food, cafés and beverages, meat and poultry, fruits and vegetables, personal care — and you get the categories that belong to that trade. A restaurant is not offered the grocery shelves, and the other way about. Ask us if your trade is wrong or your shop sells across two of them.

A product is approved before a customer sees it. If you add an item that is already in the shared Pados catalogue, it is approved and goes live at once: somebody has already checked that packet. Anything you type in yourself is reviewed first — by Pados, or by the Growth Partner for your area — and appears to customers once it passes. You will see it in your own list either way, marked as waiting, so nothing you entered disappears.

What the review is for. Keeping goods that are banned, restricted or unlawful off the app, and keeping items in a category that makes sense to a shopper. It is not a check of your weights, your prices, your freshness or your quality: Pados never sees the goods. Those stay yours, and so does the responsibility for them. A product may be refused or taken down at any time if it breaks the law, breaks these terms or breaks the rules of the app stores Pados is distributed through — tobacco, alcohol, drugs, weapons, live animals and prescription medicines among them. A refusal is not a judgment on your shop.

The shared product catalogue

Pados keeps a catalogue of products that every shop can pick from, so a new shopkeeper can stock their shelf by tapping rather than typing four hundred items. When you add a product, four things about it join that catalogue:

• the product name;
• the brand;
• the pack size — 500 g, 1 litre; and
• the photograph, if you added one.

These are facts about a manufacturer’s packet. “Parle-G Glucose Biscuits, 250 g” is the same packet in Junglighat and in Diglipur, and it is not a secret of your business.

What is never shared, with anybody, for any reason:

• What you paid for it. Your cost price is never copied, never shown, and never inferred.
• What you sell it for. Your selling price is yours. Another shop cannot see it, and Pados does not publish it.
• The MRP you recorded.
• How many you have, or anything else from your stock records.
• That the product came from your shop. The catalogue does not name the contributing shop to other merchants, and a shared photograph is copied to a neutral location first, so its web address cannot identify you either. Nobody can read the catalogue to work out what you stock.

This is built into the database rather than promised in this paragraph. The shared catalogue has no column that could hold a cost or a selling price, and the migration that creates it fails to apply if anybody ever adds one.

You can switch it off.Settings → The shared catalogue. It is on by default, because a catalogue nobody contributes to helps nobody; turning it off stops future products being shared and costs you nothing else. You keep full use of the catalogue either way.

A photograph you contribute may be shown to other merchants and, where they list the product, to shoppers. You confirm you have the right to share any photograph you upload. Ask us to remove one at any time and we will.

7. Delisting and suspension

Pados may take your shop off the customer-facing listing if:

• you list something you may not lawfully sell;
• your descriptions or prices are persistently false;
• you take orders and repeatedly fail to fulfil them;
• you ignore customer grievances; or
• a court or a competent authority requires it.

Except where the law or an immediate risk to customers requires otherwise, you will be told what the problem is and given a fair chance to fix it. Delisting removes the public listing. It does not delete your records.

8. Ending it

There is nothing to cancel: credits are bought only when you choose to, and your free monthly credits continue either way. Either side may end this agreement on 30 days’ notice, and Pados may end it immediately for the reasons in section 7.

9. Liability

You indemnify Pados against claims arising from what you sold — its quality, safety, description, legality, or a licence you did not hold. This is the natural consequence of being the seller: Pados cannot answer for a product it never saw.

Pados’s liability to you is limited to the amount you paid Pados for credits in the three months before the claim, and Pados is not liable for lost profits or lost sales. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

10. Law

Indian law governs this agreement. Courts at Port Blair, Andaman & Nicobar Islands have jurisdiction.

11. Reaching us

pados.andaman@gmail.com, or the grievance officer for a formal complaint.

Sekhar Mridha, sole proprietor, trading as Pados
Harinagar, Billiground, North & Middle Andaman, Andaman & Nicobar Islands 744201