Terms of Service

What we provide

Horizon West Guide operates a business directory for Horizon West, Florida. We sell two things, and they are separate products with separate billing.

• Placement. A labelled advertising slot above the ranked list on a page of the directory, sold by open auction with one-time payments.
• A claimed business page. A subscription that lets a verified owner control their own page in the guide.

Both are digital services. There are no physical goods and nothing is shipped. Using this site, bidding, or paying means you accept these terms.

Placement, and how it is priced

Placement is sold by open auction. Payments are whole-dollar amounts, and your standing on a board is the sum of every payment you have made on that board. Standing does not expire. Slots are ordered by standing, highest first, and every amount and every price is public.

A payment keeps your placement on the board for 30 days from the moment it clears, and each new payment resets that period in full. If 30 days pass with no payment, your placement comes off the board. Your standing is unaffected: a later payment of $30 or more restores it in full, plus the new amount, and puts you back at whatever rank that total earns.

Every payment costs at least $30, whether it joins a board, raises a position, tops up a placement or returns one to the board. A raise is charged as the gap between your standing and the amount you want to reach, plus $1, and never less than $30.

A higher bid from another business can displace you at any moment, and a business returning to the board arrives carrying everything it has previously paid. When either happens your placement moves to whatever slot your standing earns. There is no hold period, and no refund for a change in position.

The full mechanism is on the rules page. Where the rules and these terms disagree, these terms control.

Claiming your business page

A business owner may claim their page in the directory and manage it: the description, photos, hours, services and contact details, plus the traffic figures for that page. It is a subscription, at $99 per month or $990 per year. The annual term is twelve months for the price of ten and is charged in full at the start of the term.

A claim is per business page, and one page carries one live claim at a time. If somebody else already manages a page you believe is yours, write to us rather than paying: we will work out who owns the business and transfer it.

Payment authorises placement. A verified claim authorises editing a business page. They are different permissions and buying one never grants the other: paying for a slot does not let you edit that business's page, and claiming a page does not put you on a board.

Billing

All payments are processed by Stripe. We never receive or store your card number. Prices are in US dollars, and any tax that applies is added at checkout.

Placement is bought with one-time payments. There is no card on file and no recurring charge. Nothing renews, so there is nothing to cancel: a placement simply comes off the board 30 days after its last payment.

A claimed page is a subscription and it does renew, monthly or annually, until you cancel it. We email you before an annual term renews.

A completed payment is what claims a slot or starts a subscription. We write your placement when Stripe confirms the payment, never when your browser returns from checkout, so an unpaid bid never appears on the site.

A partner code discounts what your card is charged and never what the board records. A $30 bid paid with a $15 code charges $15 and stands as $30. Codes have expiry dates and redemption limits, and we may withdraw one at any time before it is used.

Cancellation and refunds

Cancel a subscription at any time, from your dashboard or by emailing us. It stays active until the end of the term you have paid for, and then stops. We do not prorate a refund for a cancelled term, because the page was under your control for that period.

Placement payments are final. Being outbid, a placement coming off the board 30 days after its last payment, fewer clicks than you hoped for, or a removal for breaking these terms does not create a refund.

If we fail to deliver what you paid for, through an outage, a billing error or our own mistake, we refund it in full. Email us and we will sort it out.

A chargeback raised without first asking us is a breach of these terms. We may remove the listing and decline future business.

Who may advertise

You must be 18 or older and able to enter a contract. If you are buying for a company, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

Advertisers must be real businesses operating in or serving the Horizon West area, and may only bid in categories they genuinely trade in. When you submit a bid or claim a page, you confirm that you represent that business, that the destination you link to is yours, and that what you submit is accurate and lawful.

Do not bid under a competitor's name, link to malware or a site built to deceive, or use the site to advertise anything unlawful. Do not interfere with the auction: no scripted raises, no inflating click counts, no working around rate limits.

Removing a listing

We may refuse, delay, edit, recategorise, hide or remove any placement, page or account, with or without notice, where we believe these terms or the law have been broken, where a rights holder complains, or where a listing creates a real legal or reputational risk. Removal on those grounds does not earn a refund.

Nothing is reviewed before it goes live. Whoever pays controls their own creative, and we answer a bad listing after the fact rather than putting a queue in front of everybody.

If you believe a listing infringes your rights or names your business without authorisation, email us with the page it is on, what the problem is, and how to reach you. We may remove or restrict it while we look.

The directory and its data

The directory includes businesses that have never paid us anything and have no relationship with us. Business names, addresses, categories, aggregate ratings and review counts come from the Google Places API. We store the rating and the number of reviews. We do not store review text.

Appearing in the directory is not an endorsement, a certification, or our opinion of a business. If you own a business and want its listing corrected or removed, email us and we will do it.

The site itself, its wordmark and its ranking are ours. Do not scrape the directory or the board to build a competing product.

What we do not sell

The organic ranking of the directory. It is computed from public data using a formula published on this site. Buying placement does not change it, and no payment will. Any claim otherwise is not something we offer.

A payment buys the rank your amount can take at the moment it clears, and nothing else. It does not buy traffic, clicks, customers, revenue, a fixed period at a given rank, exclusivity, or any position in a search engine. Click counts and visitor figures describe what our systems recorded. They are not a promise of what you will get.

Availability and liability

The service is provided as it is. It may be unavailable, slow, or wrong. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted or that every listing, rating or click count is accurate.

We are not liable for lost profits, lost business, or any indirect, incidental or consequential damages. Our total liability for any claim is limited to what you paid us in the three months before it arose. Nothing here limits liability that the law says cannot be limited.

Links from this site to a business's own website leave Horizon West Guide. Those sites have their own terms and we are not responsible for them.

Changes

We may update these terms. The date at the top of this page is the current version. If a change materially affects an active advertiser, we give notice by email before it takes effect for them. For a payment already made, the terms in force at checkout continue to apply to that payment.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. The courts of Orange County, Florida have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, and you agree to that venue.

If part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest stands. Not enforcing a term once does not waive it.

Contact

Horizon West Guide, Winter Garden, Florida. hello@horizonwestguide.com