Acceptable use policy

This policy applies to everyone who uses BeautyZilla: salon owners and their staff using the console, the booking pages and the messaging tools; and consumers who search, book, pay or leave reviews through the BeautyZilla marketplace. It forms part of the terms of service, and a breach of this policy is a breach of those terms.

A salon is responsible for what its staff do on its account. If a member of staff breaks this policy, we treat it as the salon's breach, although we may also act against that individual's login.

You must not use BeautyZilla to do, or to attempt, any of the following:

• Unlawful or harmful content — upload, publish or send anything that is illegal, defamatory, threatening, obscene, discriminatory, or that infringes another person's intellectual property or privacy.
• Harassment — use booking notes, messages, reviews or replies to harass, intimidate or abuse any person, including a client, a member of staff or another salon.
• Spam and unsolicited marketing — send marketing messages through the platform's SMS, WhatsApp or email channels to anyone who has not consented to receive them, in breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR). The rules are set out in full under "Marketing channels" below.
• Scraping and bulk extraction — crawl, scrape or use automated means to extract data from the marketplace, a salon's booking page or the console, other than the exports the Service provides for your own account.
• Security testing without permission — probe, scan or test the vulnerability of the Service, or try to bypass any authentication, rate limit or tenant boundary, unless we have agreed the test with you in writing in advance.
• Fake or self-interested reviews — write, buy, solicit in exchange for a reward, or suppress reviews; review your own salon or a competitor's; or ask staff, family or friends to do so.
• Uploading other people's data without a lawful basis — import client lists, contact details or notes you do not have a lawful basis to hold, including lists bought or obtained from another business without the individuals' knowledge.
• Payment abuse — take payments for services you do not intend to provide, charge deposits or no-show fees outside the terms shown to the client at booking, launder money, or raise chargebacks for services you actually received.
• Circumventing plan limits — split one business across several accounts, share one login across several businesses, or otherwise avoid the limits of the subscription plan you are on.
• Interference — introduce malware, overload the Service, or interfere with any other user's use of it.
• Impersonation — pretend to be another salon, another person, or BeautyZilla.

BeautyZilla sends two kinds of message on your behalf. Service messages — booking confirmations, reminders, reschedule notices, receipts — are part of the service the client asked for and need no separate consent. Marketing messages — offers, "we miss you" nudges, new-service announcements, birthday promotions — are direct marketing under PECR and are subject to the rules below.

• Consent first. Send marketing by SMS, WhatsApp or email only to individuals who have given you clear, specific, opt-in consent to receive marketing from your salon by that channel, or who are existing customers you are contacting about your own similar services and who were given a simple way to refuse when their details were collected and in every message since (the "soft opt-in" in PECR regulation 22(3)). A pre-ticked box, silence or a booking on its own is not consent. Record where and when consent was given using the consent fields the Service provides.
• Honour opt-outs, every time. Every marketing message must carry a working way to opt out. When a client opts out by any route — a reply, a link, telling a member of staff — mark them opted out in their record immediately and do not send further marketing. Reminders about a booking they still hold are not marketing and may continue.
• No purchased or shared lists. Do not send marketing to a list you bought, rented or were given by another business. Consent given to someone else does not transfer to you.
• Say who you are. Every marketing message must identify your salon and give a way to contact you.
• Respect the channel's own rules. WhatsApp messages must use an approved template and stay within the message categories Meta permits; the Service enforces this, and repeated rejections count as a breach of this policy.

We monitor delivery failures, opt-out rates and complaints per channel. Unusual patterns will pause a salon's marketing sends while we look into them.

For consumers

Leave a review only for an appointment you actually attended, in your own words, about your own experience. Do not include another person's personal data, and do not accept payment or a discount in return for a review, or for changing or removing one.

For salons

You may invite a client to review you after a completed appointment, and you may reply publicly to a review. You must not offer a reward for a positive review, ask only satisfied clients to review you while steering others away, review yourself or a competitor under any name, or use a reply to reveal a client's personal or health information. Genuine reviews are not removed because they are negative; a review is removed only if it breaks this policy, and either party may report one to us for that reason.

• Keep your password private, make it unique to BeautyZilla, and change it at once if you think it has been exposed. You are responsible for everything done under your login until you tell us it has been compromised.
• Turn on two-factor authentication wherever the Service offers it, and require it for every staff login that can see client data or take payments.
• Give each member of staff their own login with the least permission their role needs. Remove a login the day someone leaves.
• Do not share sign-in codes, and do not enter your BeautyZilla credentials anywhere other than our own sign-in pages.
• Tell us straight away at the address below if you notice anything that looks like unauthorised access, a security weakness, or a client's data appearing where it should not.

We act in proportion to the breach. Depending on its seriousness, whether it is repeated, and the harm it causes, we may take one or more of the following steps, in this order where it is reasonable to do so:

• Warning — an email to the account owner describing the breach and what must change, with a deadline.
• Restriction — pausing a specific capability, most often marketing sends, reviews or marketplace listing, while the account otherwise keeps working.
• Suspension — locking the account or an individual login until the breach is remedied.
• Termination — closing the account under the terms of service, with the data-return and deletion steps in the Data Processing Agreement.
• Referral — reporting the matter to the police, the Information Commissioner's Office, our payment provider or another authority where we are required to, or where we reasonably believe a crime or serious harm is involved.

We will normally warn before we restrict and restrict before we suspend, but we may suspend immediately where there is an ongoing risk to other users, to clients' data, or to the Service. You can respond to any enforcement step by replying to the notice; we will consider what you say before taking a further step.

To report a salon, a consumer, a review or a message you believe breaks this policy, email info.beautyzilla@gmail.com with a link to or screenshot of the content, the date it appeared, and why you think it breaks the policy. We acknowledge every report within two working days and tell you the outcome once we have looked into it, without disclosing other people's account details. Reports made in good faith will never count against the reporter, even if we decide no action is needed.

We may update this policy as the Service, the law or the messaging channels' own rules change. Each version carries the version number and effective date shown at the top of this page. Where a change tightens what is permitted, we give salon account owners at least 30 days' notice by email before it takes effect; a change that only clarifies wording or loosens a rule takes effect when it is published.