Scope
This policy applies to everything you do with Mercentia: your storefront, the products you list, the content you publish, the messages you send through our infrastructure, and the apps you build for the marketplace.
Your payment provider applies its own restricted-business rules on top of ours. Passing this policy does not guarantee Stripe, PayPal or any other provider will accept your business, and their decision is theirs to make.
This is a floor, not a map of your local law. Mercentia is used in dozens of countries and what is lawful varies between them: alcohol, CBD, vaping, supplements, firearms accessories and adult products are all legal somewhere and banned elsewhere, and age thresholds differ. The prohibited list below applies everywhere. Beyond it, you must comply with the law of every country you sell into — including sanctions and export controls, which bar trade with certain territories regardless of what you are selling.
Prohibited businesses
Never allowed. The AI store builder refuses to create a store in these categories, creating one by hand is refused too, and an existing store is suspended when one is detected.
- Child sexual abuse / exploitation material — e.g. any sexual content involving minors, CSAM, child exploitation
- Illegal goods or services — e.g. stolen goods, goods that cannot be lawfully sold, fencing
- Controlled / illegal drugs & paraphernalia — e.g. narcotics, psychoactive substances, drug paraphernalia, nitrous oxide for misuse
- Weapons, firearms, ammunition & explosives — e.g. guns, firearms, ammunition, explosives
- Counterfeit, replica or IP-infringing goods — e.g. fake designer goods, replica watches, unauthorised brand reproductions, pirated media
- Hateful, extremist or terrorism-promoting content — e.g. hate speech merchandise, extremist propaganda, terrorism financing or promotion
- Sexual services, escorting & human trafficking — e.g. escort services, prostitution, human trafficking, mail-order spouses
- Fraud, scams & deceptive schemes — e.g. phishing, fake check cashing, get-rich-quick schemes, pyramid / Ponzi schemes
- Fake documents, identities & credentials — e.g. fake IDs, forged documents, fake diplomas, fake reviews/followers
- Malware, hacking & illicit surveillance — e.g. malware, hacking services, stalkerware, unauthorised surveillance devices
- Protected wildlife & prohibited animal products — e.g. ivory, endangered species, CITES-listed products, shark fins
- Unapproved drugs, devices & miracle health claims — e.g. prescription drugs without a licence, unapproved supplements with disease claims, miracle cures, fake COVID/cancer treatments
Restricted businesses
Allowed with conditions — usually a licence, an age gate, or extra checks before payments are enabled. Tell us at signup if you are in one of these, and we will tell you what is needed rather than suspending you later.
- Alcohol — e.g. wine, spirits, beer
- Tobacco, nicotine & vaping products — e.g. cigarettes, e-cigarettes, vapes, nicotine pouches
- CBD & cannabis-derived products — e.g. CBD oil, hemp products
- Gambling, betting & lotteries — e.g. betting, casino, lottery, prize draws
- Regulated financial services — e.g. lending, debt collection, crypto exchange, money services
- Knives, bladed articles & weapon accessories — e.g. kitchen knives, collectible blades, pepper spray (where lawful)
- Adult (18+) products & content — e.g. adult toys, lingerie, non-illegal adult content
- Pharmacy & regulated health products — e.g. over-the-counter medicines, supplements, medical devices
Platform conduct
Whatever you sell, you agree not to:
- Deceive, defraud or harass buyers, or misrepresent what an order includes
- Send unsolicited marketing through our email or SMS infrastructure. Consent must be real, recorded, and honoured when withdrawn
- Ignore an unsubscribe or a data subject request from one of your own customers — you are their data controller
- Reverse-engineer the platform, or probe, scan or bypass its security controls
- Attempt to reach another merchant's data. Tenant isolation is enforced in the database; trying to defeat it is grounds for immediate termination
- Resell or sublicense the platform without a written agency agreement
- Mine cryptocurrency or run unrelated compute on storefront infrastructure
- Handle raw card data on your own systems in a way that widens Mercentia's PCI scope — always use the hosted payment elements
- Publish content that infringes someone's copyright or trade mark, or impersonates a person or business
Using the AI features
AI writes drafts; you publish them. You are responsible for what appears on your storefront, including anything the AI produced. In particular, do not use the AI features to:
- Generate product claims you cannot substantiate — health, medical, financial or environmental claims especially
- Produce fake reviews, fabricated testimonials or invented endorsements
- Imitate another brand's identity, copy or imagery
- Generate content about a real person that they have not agreed to, or that misrepresents them
- Try to extract another tenant's data through prompts, or bypass the guardrails
Where you publish AI-generated imagery or copy that a reasonable customer might take for a photograph or a human-written claim, label it. That is your obligation as the trader, and from 2 August 2026 it is also an EU AI Act transparency duty for deployers.
How we enforce this
- When a store is created. Two passes run: a keyword screen against the list above, and — when you use the AI builder — a classifier that reads the description you gave it. Prohibited categories are refused; restricted ones are flagged for review. The keyword pass runs whether or not you use AI, because the rule is about what you sell and not about how the store was built.
- When you add a product. The same screen runs on the title and description, so a store that passed at creation cannot quietly become something else.
- While you trade. Reports, payment-provider notices and abuse signals trigger a review.
- When something is wrong. We contact you first and give you a chance to fix it, unless the risk is immediate — fraud in progress, illegal goods, or a live threat to buyers — in which case we suspend first and explain straight after.
- If we suspend or terminate. You keep your data-export rights and the 30-day window described in the terms. Suspension is not confiscation.
- Appeals. Reply to the enforcement notice, or email [email protected]. A person reviews it.
Reporting a store
If a store hosted on Mercentia is breaching this policy — selling something prohibited, infringing your intellectual property, or defrauding buyers — email [email protected] with the storefront address and what you have seen. Intellectual-property claims should identify the work and the infringing page.
We acknowledge reports within two working days and tell you the outcome.