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Workshop open Next sheet loads Tuesday. Currently quoting 4 working days.

Terms · returns · privacy

The boring pages, drafted honestly.

Not yet reviewed. Do not publish as-is.

This page is a structured scaffold, not legal advice and not finished terms. It lists the clauses a cutting and made-to-order business needs, drafts the ones that are really commercial decisions rather than law, and marks what a solicitor or a trade body template has to settle. Publishing unreviewed terms is worse than having none, because it looks like you promised something you did not intend.

Two cheap routes to finishing it: a trade association template, or an hour of a commercial solicitor's time to review a draft you bring them. Bringing a filled-in draft rather than a blank brief is what keeps that to one hour.

Terms of supply Returns and cancellation Privacy and your files ICO registration

Section 01

Terms of supply

Who you are contracting with

Butler Industries Ltd, trading as Redwing Manufacturing, company number and registered office to be inserted on incorporation.

Needs: company number, registered office, VAT number

Quotes and their validity

Draft position: written quotes hold for 30 days. The online estimator is an indication only and is not an offer. Material price movement inside a quote's validity is ours to absorb.

Decide: 30 days or shorter, given sheet prices move

Accuracy of customer files — the clause that matters most

Draft position: we cut what the supplied file says. The customer is responsible for the dimensions, the units and the intent of their drawing. Where we spot something that looks wrong we will query it, but we do not warrant that we will spot it. If we cut accurately to a file that turns out to be wrong, the recut is chargeable.

Counterweight, so it is fair rather than one-sided: if we deviate from the file, the recut is free and immediate. That symmetry is what makes the clause defensible in a dispute.

This will happen. Get the wording checked and make sure it is on the quote, not just the website

Customer-supplied material

Draft position: we do not insure or replace material we did not supply. On unfamiliar board we cut one test piece first and get approval before running the sheet. Spoiled customer material is charged at the machine time used.

Decide: whether to require a spare board on any job over a certain value

Tolerance and what counts as a defect

Draft position: ±0.2 mm on cut dimensions, an internal corner radius equal to half the cutter diameter, and a stated surface finish. A corner radius is not a defect. Natural variation in grain, colour and figure is not a defect.

Confirm the tolerance you can actually hold once the machine is commissioned

Payment terms

Draft position: new trade accounts pay on order. Established accounts, 30 days from invoice. Retail pays at checkout. Late payment interest at the statutory rate.

Decide: whether you offer credit at all in year one, and what the account-opening test is

Lead times

Draft position: lead times are estimates in working days from approved file and cleared payment, not guarantees. Where a date is agreed in writing as critical we will say so explicitly.

Needs: your position on liability for a missed critical date. Keep it narrow

Liability cap

Standard commercial practice is to cap liability at the contract value and exclude consequential loss.

Solicitor territory. Consumer contracts cannot exclude what the law requires, so this needs two versions: trade and retail

Intellectual property in customer drawings

Draft position: the customer's drawings remain theirs. We keep a copy solely to repeat the job, we do not cut it for anyone else, and we delete on request.

Must match the retention period stated in the privacy notice below

Section 02

Returns and cancellation

Two different policies, one website

This is the split most likely to catch you out. Stock-size items sold to consumers carry the 14-day right to cancel under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. Goods made to the consumer's specification or clearly personalised are exempt from that right. Trade-to-trade sales are outside those regulations entirely and run on your terms instead. Three regimes, and the website has to be clear which applies to each thing it sells.

Stock-size products sold to consumers

Draft position: 14 days from delivery to cancel, 14 further days to return. Customer pays return postage unless the item is faulty or not as described. Refund within 14 days of receiving it back.

Confirm who pays return postage and state it plainly on each product page

Bespoke and cut-to-size

Draft position: exempt from the right to cancel, and we say so at the point of order rather than burying it here. Statutory rights on faulty or misdescribed goods still apply and always will.

The exemption only holds if the customer is told before ordering. Needs to appear at checkout, not only on this page

Faulty goods

Draft position: report within 48 hours of delivery with photographs. We recut or refund, our choice, and we pay carriage both ways.

Careful: a 48-hour reporting window cannot cut across the consumer's statutory rights. Get this one checked specifically

Trade returns

Draft position: cut parts are not returnable except where we deviated from the file. Uncut sheet material returned unmarked within 7 days, 20% restocking.

Decide the restocking percentage, or drop the clause if you would rather not take returns at all

Section 03

Privacy and your files

What you collect

Name, company, email, phone, delivery address, the job specification, and uploaded drawing files. Payment is handled by Stripe, so card details never reach your systems, which is worth stating explicitly because customers ask.

Confirm the final list once the forms are built

Why, and on what lawful basis

Draft position: contract performance for quoting, cutting and delivering. Legitimate interests for keeping a job history so repeat orders are cheap. Consent, separately and unticked, for anything resembling marketing.

Standard shapes, but the wording should be checked alongside the terms

How long you keep drawings

Draft position: job files kept for 24 months so a repeat order needs no new drawing, then deleted. Deleted sooner on request. Say this plainly on the upload form, because trade customers care about it more than consumers do.

Pick a number and make the R2 bucket lifecycle rule match it, or the policy is fiction

Who else sees the data

Stripe for payment, the email provider, Cloudflare as host and file store, the courier for delivery addresses. Each needs naming, and each is a processor you are responsible for.

List the actual providers once the stack is built

Their rights, and how to use them

Access, correction, erasure, portability, objection, and complaint to the ICO. Needs a working contact route that you actually monitor.

Needs: a named contact address for data requests

Cookies and analytics

Draft position: no analytics at launch, so no consent banner needed. If you add analytics later, use a cookieless option or build a proper consent banner. Do not add Google Analytics and hope.

Revisit when you want traffic data

Section 04

ICO registration

Holding customer contact details and drawings makes the company a data controller. Most small businesses processing personal data electronically have to pay the ICO's annual data protection fee, which is banded by size and turnover. There are exemptions, and some very small operations fall outside them, so this is a check to make rather than an assumption either way. Worth settling before launch rather than after a complaint.

Action: check the ICO's own self-assessment before the site goes live, and diary the renewal if it applies.

Summary of what to hand a solicitor