These terms are an agreement between you and Ahmed Badawe, a sole trader in Victoria, Australia, trading as Observe (“Observe”, “we”, “us”). They apply to this website, the Observe app and everything Observe provides through them (together, the “service”). By creating an account or using the service you accept these terms. If you accept them for a business, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and “you” means that business as well as you.
Our privacy policy explains how we handle personal information, and forms part of these terms.
1. The service
Observe reads the public online catalogues of the stores you choose, matches their listings to your products, and shows you how your prices compare, how they change, and, on the Pro plan, your suppliers’ costs and stock. The service is for businesses, and you must be at least 18 to use it.
We keep improving Observe, so features change over time. We will not take away a significant feature from a plan you have paid for without telling you first.
2. Accounts and workspaces
Each shop uses Observe through a workspace, which has members, admins and an owner. You must give accurate details when you sign up and keep them current, keep your password to yourself, and tell us promptly if you think someone else has used your account. You are responsible for what happens under your account, and a workspace’s owner and admins are responsible for who they invite and for the workspace’s plan and billing.
Accounts are for people. Each person needs their own; you must not share a login.
3. Free trial
A workspace’s first subscription starts with a free trial of 14 days, which needs no payment method. If you add one before the trial ends, your subscription continues on the plan you chose and is billed from the end of the trial. If you don’t, or you cancel before then, the subscription ends with the trial and you pay nothing. Each business may have one free trial. Creating new accounts or workspaces to get further trials is not allowed.
4. Fees and billing
Plans and prices are shown on this website and at checkout, in Australian dollars. Subscriptions are billed in advance, monthly or yearly, through our payment provider, Stripe, and renew automatically at the end of each period until cancelled.
If you change plans, the change takes effect at once, and the difference for the rest of the period is charged or credited. If we change a plan’s price, we will tell you at least 30 days before it applies to you, and it will apply from your next renewal after that.
Observe is not registered for GST, so our prices do not include GST and no GST is charged. If we register, we will tell you before GST is added to your charges.
If a payment fails, Stripe will try again. If it still cannot be collected, we may suspend the workspace until it is paid.
5. Cancelling and refunds
You can cancel at any time from Settings, Billing. Cancelling stops your subscription from renewing; you keep access until the end of the period you have paid for. We do not give refunds or credits for part of a period, or for time you did not use, except where the law requires (see section 14).
6. No scraping of Observe
Observe exists to read the public web carefully on your behalf. The service itself is not public, and you must not harvest it.
You must not access, copy or extract any part of the service, including the app, its programming interfaces, its data, its exports and this website, by scraping, crawling, spidering, bots, scripts, headless browsers or any other automated means, or help anyone else to. The only exceptions are the features Observe provides for this, such as exporting a view to CSV for your own business’s use.
We may block, suspend or close any account or workspace that does, without notice or refund, and seek damages or an injunction for the harm it causes.
7. Acceptable use
You must also not:
- resell, sublicense, republish or share the service, or information from it, with anyone outside your business, or use it to build a competing product, data set or service;
- copy, decompile or reverse engineer the service, except as the law permits;
- get around plan limits, rate limits, security or access controls, or use another workspace’s data;
- probe or test the service for vulnerabilities without our written permission (if you find one, please tell us);
- overload, disrupt or interfere with the service or other customers’ use of it;
- upload malicious code, or information you have no right to use;
- use the service for anything unlawful, or in breach of anyone else’s rights.
8. Watching competitors
Observe reads only what stores publish for every shopper to see. It reads them at a modest pace, respects each store’s robots.txt, never signs in to a store, and never tries to get past a store’s bot protection. A store may still choose to block it, and when that happens, its prices cannot be shown.
You choose which stores you track, and you are responsible for how you use what Observe shows you. In particular, you must make your own pricing decisions independently. You must not use Observe, or anything it shows you, to agree on, coordinate or signal prices with a competitor, or in any way that breaches the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth). Observe does not share one workspace’s information with any other.
If you run a store Observe reads and have a concern, write to us.
9. Your suppliers
On the Pro plan, you can connect suppliers by giving Observe your logins to their dealer portals. By doing so, you:
- authorise Observe to sign in to those portals for you, solely to read the catalogues, prices, stock and related information available to your account, for your workspace;
- confirm that you are entitled to use those logins, and that letting Observe use them on your behalf is allowed by your agreement with that supplier, or that the supplier has agreed to it.
Your relationship with each supplier is your own. Observe takes care not to put your accounts at risk: it signs in at most once per run, puts a supplier on hold after a rejected login rather than trying again, runs scheduled reads overnight, and never runs two reads of one portal at once. Even so, suppliers control their portals and may change, restrict or suspend access. We are not responsible for what a supplier does with your account, and we may pause a supplier connection if we think it is at risk. You can remove your logins at any time.
10. Information, not advice
Observe works out its comparisons automatically, from information published by stores and suppliers. Matches are an automated first pass and can be wrong. Costs are derived from your suppliers’ listed prices and may not reflect what you actually pay, such as your own terms, discounts, rebates or freight. Prices and stock can change between reads. Observe flags what it is unsure of, and lets you confirm, reject or correct its matches, but it does not guarantee that any information is complete, accurate or current.
Observe gives you information to help you decide. It is not financial, legal or business advice, and your prices and purchasing are your own decisions. Check anything important before you act on it.
11. Your information
Your business information, such as your decisions, settings, dealer logins and the supplier catalogues read for your workspace, remains yours. You give us permission to store, process and display it as needed to provide the service to you, and we keep it confidential to your workspace. You can export what Observe shows you to CSV, and delete your information by deleting your workspace.
The public listings, prices and price histories Observe reads from online stores are not your information. Observe gathers them once for everyone who tracks a store and uses them to provide the service to all its customers. We may also use statistics about how the service is used, which do not identify you or your business, to run and improve it.
12. Our property
Observe, including its software, design, matching and the compilation of market information it gathers, belongs to us and our licensors. While you are subscribed, we give you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service for your own business, under these terms. If you send us suggestions, we may use them freely.
13. Availability
We work to keep Observe running and accurate, but we do not promise it will always be available, uninterrupted or free of errors. We may need to pause it for maintenance, and it depends on stores, suppliers and providers we do not control.
14. Australian Consumer Law
Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law or any other law that cannot be excluded. Where the law lets us limit our liability for failing to meet such a guarantee, our liability is limited to supplying the services again, or paying the cost of having them supplied again, at our choice.
15. Limits on liability
To the extent the law allows:
- we are not liable for any indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profits, revenue, sales, data or goodwill, however it arises, including from decisions you make using the service;
- our total liability to you for all claims arising from the service or these terms is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event that gave rise to the claim.
16. Your responsibility to us
You agree to compensate us for any loss, claim or cost, including reasonable legal costs, that arises from your breach of these terms or of the law, your use of supplier logins in breach of your agreement with a supplier, or your use of information from the service.
17. Suspension and closing
You can stop using Observe at any time by cancelling your subscription, deleting your workspace or deleting your account.
We may suspend or close your account or workspace if you seriously or repeatedly breach these terms, do not pay, use the service unlawfully, or put the service, its customers or a supplier account at risk. Where it is reasonable to, we will tell you first and give you a chance to fix the problem. We may also stop offering the service altogether, with at least 30 days’ notice and a refund of any fees paid for the period after it ends.
Sections 6, 7 and 10 to 19 continue after these terms end.
18. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. We will update the date at the top, and if a change significantly affects you, we will tell account holders by email or in the app at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you do not agree to a change, you can cancel before it applies; continuing to use the service after that means you accept it.
19. General
These terms are governed by the law of Victoria, Australia, and you and we submit to the courts of Victoria and those that hear appeals from them. If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we do not enforce a right straight away, we have not given it up. You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our agreement; we may transfer ours to someone who takes over Observe. We are not responsible for delays or failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control. These terms, with the privacy policy, are the whole agreement between us about the service. We will send notices to the email address on your account, and you can send them to contact@getobserve.com.au.
Contact us
Observe is operated by Ahmed Badawe, a sole trader in Victoria, Australia. Write to contact@getobserve.com.au with any question about this page, your account or your information.