Rules

What this is

Every board on Horizon West Guide is an auction: the Home Page and every category page. Businesses pay to stand above each other, and the order is decided by one thing: how much each of them has paid on that board, ever. Nothing else moves a row up.

Every amount on the board is public. So is the price of passing the business above you. If you can see the board, you can see exactly what it would cost to be first on it.

The boards

Every board works the same way. One auction, one set of prices, one rule about what a payment buys. What changes between them is who you are standing next to.

The Home Page is the front page of Horizon West, and every business in the guide is bidding for it. That makes it the hardest board to lead and the most valuable one to be near the top of.

A category page is the same auction for one trade. Restaurants bid against restaurants and roofers against roofers, so the money it takes to lead is the money that trade is spending rather than the money the whole town is spending. Quieter, and the same mechanism exactly.

Winning one costs nothing on another, and nobody holds the same position across the site. Bid on as many as you trade in.

There is no limit on how many businesses a board holds. Nobody who wants to pay is turned away, and bidding under the top bid still puts you on, at whatever rank the amount takes. Long boards are paged, so a rank always means the same thing: your position among everybody paying, not your position on a page.

What a payment buys

Two separate things, and keeping them apart is the whole rule.

Your standing is every payment you have ever made on that board. It adds up and it never expires. Pay $30 today and $30 next month and you stand at $60, then $90 the month after. Rank is decided by standing, so the number you are building is the number that ranks you.

Your placement stays on the board for 30 days after your last payment. Every payment resets that, in full, from the day it clears. Pay on the 10th and you are up until the 9th of next month; pay again on the 20th and you are up for 30 days from the 20th, at the higher standing.

If 30 days pass with nothing paid, your row comes off the board. That is the only thing that happens. Your standing is untouched, and a payment of $30 at any point afterwards puts you straight back on with all of it, plus the new amount. A month later, a year later, the same $30.

So a business that paid $300 and went quiet does not start again from zero. They pay $30 and stand at $330. There is no renewal price and nothing to buy again, only the next payment.

Nothing recurs and nothing is cancelled. There is no card on file, no renewal to forget, and no subscription to argue your way out of. Staying visible means paying again, and stopping means coming off the board with everything you have paid still on your side of it.

What it costs

Bids are whole dollars. There is no cap, no reserve, and no price we set per category. If more roofers bid, roofing gets expensive. The two numbers we do set apply everywhere equally, so no category is priced against another.

• $30 is the minimum on every payment. Joining, boosting, coming back: all the same floor. That is $1 a day for the 30 days it keeps you up, and the money itself stays on the board after that.
• $1 more than a rival passes them. Matching an amount ties, and a tie is not ahead.

Raising pays the gap, never the whole amount. To reach first place you pay the top standing plus $1, minus what you already hold. Hold $100 against a rival on $200 and you pay $101, not $201. When the gap is smaller than $30 you pay $30, and the extra is yours: it goes on your standing.

A business coming back is a business you have to outbid again. Somebody who paid $400 over the spring and stopped is not gone. If they come back they arrive at $400 plus whatever they pay, so the rank you took from them is only as safe as the difference.

Watch the increment. Adding exactly the rival's amount ties, and a tie is not ahead. The price the board quotes you is always the gap plus $1, so the quoted number is the one that works.

A partner code discounts the payment and never the standing. A $30 bid with a $15 code charges your card $15 and puts $30 on the board. You rank level with everybody who paid in full. The rest is ours to spend on getting a board started.

Bid, then boost

Two words for two different acts. You bid when you are not on that board, because the payment puts you on it. You boost when you are already up there, because the payment adds to a position you can see.

Which word you see is decided by whether your row is on that board today, not by who owns the business and not by what you have spent. A business that has come off the board bids to return, and the bid restores everything it had.

Being outbid

There is no hold and no grace. The highest standing is first at every moment, and the board reorders the instant a payment lands. Somebody can pass you thirty seconds after you pay, and that is the market you are buying into.

What you cannot lose by doing nothing is the money. Standing only ever goes up, so nobody passes you because your own payment stopped counting. What doing nothing costs is the row, after 30 days, and the date is on your dashboard from the moment you pay. We write to you a week before, three days before and the day before, and once more when the row has come off, with the price of putting it back.

When a payment passes you we email you, with the price of taking the rank back. We only write to holders who land within twice the slots that surface sells, which is the top 6 on the Home Page and a category page. Below that the gap is too large to close on impulse, and a message nobody acts on is a message nobody reads.

Who may bid, and for what

Anyone may bid on any board, with no verification step in front of the payment. You do not have to have claimed a page first. Paying authorises placement; a verified claim is a separate thing that authorises editing a business page.

What we ask is straightforward. Bid for a real business that operates in or serves Horizon West, and bid in a category it actually trades in. No plumber in the dentist slot.

What you supply is an amount, a business name, a street address, a link, an email and a phone number. A business with no premises, a web developer or a photographer who works on location, says so instead of typing an address and gets everything except a pin on the map. Nothing checks the name against our directory before you pay, which is deliberate: searching a dataset was the heaviest step in the way of a business that wanted to spend. The cost of that is handled after the fact rather than by a queue in front of everybody.

We may refuse, edit, recategorise or remove a placement that names a business you do not represent, sits in a category it does not trade in, or is unlawful or misleading. Removal for any of those does not earn a refund.

Placement is not the page

Two things are for sale here, and they are different products. Placement is a rank on a board, bought one payment at a time. Your business page is the page a resident lands on when they look you up, and the claim is what puts it in your hands.

A claim is a subscription, $99/mo or $990/yr, and it buys the page in your own words: the description, the hours, the phone and the website you choose, your logo, and the Verified mark from the moment you claim. It does not touch the board, and no placement touches the page. Paying for one never buys the other.

The page is public whether or not you claim it, and it stays public if you stop. What you wrote is set aside rather than deleted, and the page returns to the public data until you claim again.

Claim from the page itself: open your business page and the button is under the name. A claim is the one thing here with a card on file, and you manage it, or end it, from the Billing tab of your dashboard.

What your row shows

A paid row carries the business name, a headline of up to 160 characters, a logo if you upload one, and a link. Nothing is reviewed before it goes live. You control your own creative.

The link goes out through a redirect on our own domain so the click can be counted on the way through. Counts are computed on the server, never accepted from a browser, deduped per visitor for a day, and filtered against known bots. The number shown publicly is the number you judge a bid against, so a rival cannot inflate it and neither can you.

How the HWG Score works

Every business in the guide is scored out of 100 on public data. That is the HWG Score, Horizon West Guide's own number. It is what orders the ranked list under the paid slots, and no payment moves it. The formula is published here so an owner can read it and know what to improve.

The score only means something inside a category, because every business is measured against the others in its own trade. A 4.3 dentist and a 4.3 bakery are not the same business.

• Review quality, 55 points. Your star rating, pulled toward the category average by how few reviews it rests on. One five-star review does not outrank a 4.7 with four hundred, and a business with nothing yet sits at the average: unproven, rather than bad.
• Review volume, 27 points. How many reviews, with diminishing returns. The full points arrive at 1,000 reviews and the curve flattens there, so no business runs away with a category on review count alone.
• Locality, 18 points. How close you are to Horizon West. Full points within 4 miles of the centre, then a decay to nothing by 12 miles out. A Kissimmee plumber ranks below a Hamlin one.

A business with no premises is scored on the first two only. A web developer, a consultancy or a photographer who works on location has no distance to measure, so locality is left out of its score rather than counted as zero, and the remaining points are scaled back up to 100. It is not ranked below every business with a street door for not having one, and it does not collect points it cannot earn.

Three more signals are defined and score nothing today: Profile completeness, Freshness, Responsiveness. Each of them needs a business to have claimed its page, so there is no honest source for them yet and none of them is part of the 100 above. They are named here because leaving them out would make the score look more complete than it is.

Nothing about the score is negotiable and nothing about it is for sale. We do not adjust it by hand, and asking will not move a business up. What money buys is the labelled slot above the list, described in the next section.

What is not for sale

The ranked list. It is computed from public data using the formula published above, and no payment changes it. Paid slots are labelled and sit above the list, outside it.

A business holding a paid slot is lifted out of the ranked list below it, so it appears once on the page rather than twice. The count in the page heading is taken before that lift, so the number of businesses in a category means what it says.

We also do not sell a takeover. No amount buys a page with only one advertiser on it, because that stops being a guide.

After you pay

A completed payment is what claims a rank. Your placement is written when Stripe confirms the payment, never when your browser returns from checkout, so a bid that has not been paid for never appears.

Your dashboard shows every placement you hold, what it stands at, and the day it comes off. It also shows the people reaching you: page views, phone taps, map opens and clicks through to your site, on the day they happened, counted the same way the number on your row is.

Payments are final. Being passed, a row coming off the board 30 days after its last payment, fewer clicks than you hoped for, or a removal for breaking these rules does not create a refund. If we fail to deliver placement you paid for, through an outage or our own mistake, we make it right. Write to us.

These rules explain the mechanism. The terms of service are the agreement, and they control where the two disagree. Questions go to hello@horizonwestguide.com.