Creator Terms

1. Scope and Acceptance

These Creator Terms form a binding agreement between you (the “Creator”) and AOVANCY SRL, a company registered in Romania (“AOVANCY”, “we”, “us”), and govern how you offer digital products through the AOVANCY platform. They supplement our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy, which continue to apply. Where these Creator Terms conflict with the general Terms & Conditions on a commercial matter covered here, these Creator Terms prevail.

When AOVANCY sells your products, it does so under our Supplier Agreement, which forms part of these Creator Terms. Where the Supplier Agreement and these Creator Terms conflict on a matter the Supplier Agreement covers, the Supplier Agreement prevails.

You accept these Creator Terms, including the Supplier Agreement, when you create a creator account, when you first publish a product, or when you continue to offer products after an updated version has taken effect under Section 15 — whichever happens first. If you do not agree, do not publish products.

2. How Your Products Are Sold

When you publish a product, you give AOVANCY the non-exclusive, worldwide right to distribute and resell copies of it to buyers, as set out in the Supplier Agreement. You do not give AOVANCY the right to reproduce or adapt your product: the only copying AOVANCY does is the technical copying needed to store it and to give each buyer who has paid access to their copy. This means:

• AOVANCY sells copies of your products in its own name and on its own account. Each sale is a contract between the buyer and AOVANCY, not you. AOVANCY is the seller and merchant of record: we operate the checkout, set and collect the price, issue buyer-facing billing documents, deliver the product, and are responsible to the buyer for support, conformity, refunds and payment disputes.
• The money buyers pay is AOVANCY’s revenue. For every copy sold, AOVANCY owes you a supply price (Section 5). The supply price is a separate amount AOVANCY owes you, not money held for you. AOVANCY is not a bank, payment institution, electronic money institution, or other regulated payment service provider, and provides no payment services to you or to buyers.
• Your creator dashboard balance is a running record of supply prices earned and not yet paid. It is not a wallet, payment account, deposit, or stored-value account, and confers no right to instruct payments to third parties.
• You retain full ownership of your products and all intellectual property in them. Nothing here transfers ownership to AOVANCY. The right to resell is limited to what is necessary to sell and deliver copies and to serve buyers who already bought them.

AOVANCY holds no stock, does not buy copies in advance and pays nothing upfront. Each copy is supplied to AOVANCY when a buyer buys it, and your supply price on it is earned only when that copy is actually sold and paid for.

Selling directly. Where we offer it, a registered business (for example a company or a registered sole trader with a tax identification number) can instead connect its own account with a regulated payment partner we work with and sell its products itself. For those sales you are the seller and are responsible to buyers, buyers pay you through your own account, and AOVANCY charges a service fee at the rate shown in your dashboard, which the payment partner deducts from each payment. The Supplier Agreement does not apply to those sales, and no supply price is owed on them. The rest of these Creator Terms continue to apply.

3. Eligibility

By offering products through AOVANCY, you confirm that:

• you are at least 18 years old and have legal capacity to contract;
• you act in a professional or business capacity, and not as a consumer, in relation to offering products through the platform under these terms;
• the identity, country, and payment information you provide are accurate and kept up to date;
• you are not subject to, and not owned or controlled by a person subject to, EU, UN, UK or US sanctions, and you are not resident in a territory subject to comprehensive sanctions.

We may request documentation to verify any of the above, and may suspend listings, sales, or payments to you while verification is outstanding.

4. Pricing

You propose a retail price for each product in your dashboard. AOVANCY sets the final price: it normally uses your proposal, but may decline it, round it, or adjust it for discounts, promotional campaigns, bundle pricing, regional pricing, or free-access offers under the applicable programme terms. Where tax applies in the buyer’s country, AOVANCY may add it to the price the buyer pays, so a buyer may pay more than your price.

Where a product is sold at a reduced price, your supply price is calculated on the amount actually collected, as set out in Section 5. Where AOVANCY offers a product free of charge on its own initiative and not at your request, no supply price is due.

Free products. You may choose to offer a product free of charge. A free product generates no revenue, so no supply price is due on it and it produces no line on your supply statement. Offering a product for free does not reduce your obligations: each free product is listed, reviewed, distributed, and made available to buyers on the same basis as a paid one, and all of your representations, warranties, indemnities, content rules, and data-protection obligations under these terms apply to it in full.

5. Supply Price

For each copy sold, AOVANCY pays you a supply price, calculated on the price actually collected from the buyer, excluding any tax on the sale, after the payment processing cost of that sale, as set out in Section 6 of the Supplier Agreement.

Payment processing costs. Card and payment-provider fees are charged per transaction by the payment provider used for that sale. These are third-party costs — AOVANCY does not retain them and earns nothing from them. They typically fall between roughly 1.5% and 4% of the sale depending on the buyer’s card, country and currency, and the exact amount charged on each sale is shown against that sale in your dashboard. Your supply price for a sale is therefore:

(price collected excluding tax − payment processing cost) × supply rate

This applies to every sale, including where an individually agreed supply rate of 100% applies: a 100% supply rate means AOVANCY keeps nothing from the sale, not that AOVANCY absorbs the payment provider’s costs.

The standard supply rate is 92.5%. The supply rate applicable to a sale is the rate shown in your creator dashboard at the time of that sale, as published on our pricing page, or as individually agreed with you in writing. Individual arrangements are only binding on AOVANCY where they are confirmed in your dashboard or communicated from an @aovancy.com address. A commission rate agreed with you before this version took effect continues as a supply rate of 100% minus that commission rate: for example, a 7.5% commission becomes a 92.5% supply rate. Rates displayed as a result of an obvious error or system fault do not bind either party; the correct rate applies and any difference is corrected in the next payment.

Your dashboard records, for every sale, the price collected, the tax, the payment processing cost, the supply rate applied, and the resulting supply price. These records are the basis of payments between us.

6. Payments to You

Supply prices are added to your creator balance as sales complete. A supply price becomes payable after a holding period shown in your dashboard, which protects both you and AOVANCY against refunds and payment reversals; until then it is shown as pending.

You may request payment of your payable amounts at any time, using the payment methods available in your dashboard. Each payment is accompanied by a supply statement showing the sales included, prices collected, tax, processing costs, supply rate, deductions under Section 7, any tax withheld under Section 8, and the net amount paid.

• Self-billing. Unless you tell us otherwise, you agree that AOVANCY may issue supply statements as self-billed invoices on your behalf. Where your jurisdiction requires you to issue your own invoice, or requires use of a national electronic invoicing system, you will do so on the basis of the statement, and payment may be made after a valid invoice is received.
• Minimum amount. We may set a reasonable minimum payment amount, shown in your dashboard. Amounts below it remain in your balance until the minimum is reached, and are always paid on termination.
• Holdbacks and reserves. We may keep back a reasonable, proportionate part of amounts otherwise payable to cover refunds, chargebacks, and payment reversals that are still possible for recent sales, and may apply a longer holdback to newly created accounts, to unusually high or atypical sales volumes, and to sales showing indicators of payment fraud. The amount and reason for any holdback is shown on the statement.
• Rolling reserve. Where we identify elevated risk on your account — for example refund, chargeback or dispute rates above the usual level for similar products, a sudden increase in sales volume, indicators of fraud, or products in categories our payment providers treat as higher-risk — we may hold a rolling reserve, usually between 5% and 10% of what you earn and more where the risk is high, for up to 180 days from the date of each sale, the period in which buyers can dispute card payments. Reserved amounts are released on a rolling basis as each sale leaves that period, after any deductions under Section 7. We tell you when a reserve starts, its rate and its reason, and we review it when the risk falls.
• Payment provider holds. Where a payment provider withholds, reserves or delays all or part of the proceeds of sales that include your products, or pauses or closes the account those sales were processed through, we may hold the amounts owed on those sales for as long as the provider holds the funds, and we release them when the provider releases the funds, after any deductions under Section 7.
• Planned sales increases. If you expect your monthly sales to grow by more than 50%, for example because of a launch, a promotion or paid ads, tell us at least 7 days in advance. Payment providers treat sudden jumps as a risk signal, and an unannounced jump may lead us to review your account or to hold amounts owed under this Section while we check it.
• Accuracy of details. You are responsible for providing accurate and current payment details, matching your own name or entity. Following a change to those details, we may delay your next payment by a short verification period. We are not liable for payments sent to details you provided incorrectly.
• Suspension of payments. We may withhold or delay payments to you in whole or in part where required by law, where fraud, sanctions exposure, or a material breach of these terms is reasonably suspected, or where a legal claim relating to your products is pending — for as long as reasonably necessary, with reasons given to you.

Program rewards (including referrals). Separate from your supply prices, AOVANCY may operate optional programmes — such as the referral programme — under which you can earn rewards. Any such reward is a discretionary marketing incentive offered under the applicable programme rules, not a contractual entitlement and not a supply price. Unless the programme rules state otherwise: rewards are added to your balance and paid with your supply prices once they have accrued and matured; a reward is reversed if the qualifying activity is later reversed or refunded, or is found to breach Section 11 — for example, if a referred creator’s sales fall back below the qualifying threshold; and AOVANCY may change, suspend, or end any programme, including its rates and caps, on reasonable notice, without that being a change to these terms requiring the process in Section 15. Rewards may be a different category of income from your supply prices for tax and invoicing purposes, and you are responsible for accounting for them correctly.

7. Refunds, Chargebacks and Set-off

As the seller, AOVANCY decides and handles buyer refunds in accordance with our Withdrawal Policy and applicable consumer law. Where a sale is refunded, reversed, or charged back, no supply price is due on it: the supply price recorded for that sale is deducted from your balance and, if already paid to you, from your future payments.

Where deductions exceed the amounts payable to you, the resulting negative balance is a debt due to AOVANCY and repayable on demand. We may set off amounts you owe us against any amount payable to you, including across multiple accounts controlled by the same person or entity.

Dispute and refund fees. Where a payment provider charges a fee for a dispute or chargeback on a sale of your product (often around €25, and charged even when the dispute is won), or a fee for processing a refund of such a sale, that fee is a cost of the sale and is deducted from your balance. AOVANCY does not keep any part of these fees.

Sustained or unusual refund, chargeback, or dispute rates associated with your products may lead to review of your account, a reserve under Section 6, longer holdbacks, or removal of the affected products. The card networks start monitoring sellers whose disputes exceed about 0.9% of their transactions in a month; if disputes on your products are above that level, we may apply these measures without waiting for a network to act.

8. Your Status, Invoicing and Taxes

You supply products to AOVANCY as an independent party. Nothing in these terms creates an employment relationship, partnership, joint venture or agency between you and AOVANCY, and neither party may bind the other except as expressly set out here and in the Supplier Agreement.

AOVANCY is responsible for taxes arising on its own sales to buyers. You are responsible for declaring and paying all taxes and social contributions arising on the amounts you receive, and for holding any registrations required for your activity. Amounts stated in your dashboard are shown before any tax withheld under the next paragraph.

Where applicable law requires AOVANCY to withhold tax or contributions from amounts payable to you, we will withhold and remit them, and the amount paid to you will be net of that withholding. If you are not resident in Romania, you may qualify for a lower rate under a tax treaty by giving us a certificate of tax residence from your tax authority, and any other form the law requires, before payment. If a tax authority later decides that tax should have been withheld from an amount already paid to you, we may deduct it from your future payments, and any remainder is a debt you owe us. We may request tax identification, residence, or business-registration details from you where needed to determine the correct treatment or to meet reporting obligations applicable to us, and may suspend payments until they are provided.

9. Warranties and Responsibility

By offering a product, you represent and warrant that:

• you own the product and all material in it, or hold all rights, licences and permissions needed to give AOVANCY the right in Section 2 and the Supplier Agreement;
• the product and its marketing materials do not infringe any third-party rights, including copyright, trademarks, and personality rights;
• the product complies with applicable law and with our content rules in the Terms & Conditions, and contains no unlawful, deceptive, or harmful content — including guarantees of financial returns or earnings claims presented as certain;
• all descriptions, previews, specifications and claims you provide are accurate, complete, and not misleading, and the product conforms to them;
• the product is free of malware and functions as described on the formats and platforms stated;
• where a product is based on material sold with resale or private-label rights (PLR), you hold a licence that allows you to resell it in this form, you can show it to us on request, and it goes on sale only with our approval in advance;
• trading, investing and other financial content is educational only: it gives no trading signals or personal investment advice and promises no returns or income, and trading, investing, crypto and make-money education goes on sale only with our approval in advance;
• the product does not sell or give access to crypto assets (such as coins, tokens or NFTs) or to crypto mining, staking or yield schemes.

Content made with AI tools. Content you publish or sell is your content under these terms, including anything created or edited with AOVANCY’s AI tools, such as descriptions, covers, ebooks and translations. Review it before publishing. The warranties above apply to it in full. Images generated with AI tools are marked as AI-generated, and you must not remove that marking where the law requires it.

You will indemnify AOVANCY against losses, claims, and reasonable costs arising from breach of these warranties. Because AOVANCY is responsible to buyers for the conformity of what it sells, this includes refunds, price reductions, replacements, and compensation AOVANCY must provide to buyers because a product did not conform to its description or was defective, and claims from rights holders.

Updates you promise. Buyers always receive access to the latest published version of a product they have bought. AOVANCY does not, by default, promise buyers that further updates will be released. However, where you advertise, describe, or otherwise represent that a product includes updates, revisions, or new versions, that representation becomes a commitment you owe to buyers: you must provide those updates within a reasonable time for as long as the product is offered for sale. If you do not, AOVANCY may relabel, withdraw, or remove the product, and may refund affected buyers — and you will reimburse AOVANCY for refunds it must give because a promised update was not provided.

Products are reviewed before publication and remain subject to our notice-and-action process afterwards. We may ask for changes to products that need our approval in advance, or decline them. We may decline, suspend, or remove products in accordance with the Terms & Conditions, and you may appeal such decisions through the creator dashboard.

10. Limitation of Liability

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes either party’s liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for intentional misconduct (dol) or gross negligence (culpă gravă), or for any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law.

Subject to the paragraph above:

• AOVANCY provides the platform with reasonable care and skill, but does not guarantee that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or available at any particular time, that any level of sales, revenue, payments, visibility, or ranking will be achieved, or that any feature will be maintained.
• Neither party is liable to the other for any indirect or consequential loss, or for any loss of profit, revenue, sales, anticipated savings, data, goodwill, or business, however arising, even if the possibility of that loss was known.
• AOVANCY’s total liability to you arising out of or in connection with these terms and your use of the platform — whether in contract, tort (including negligence), or otherwise, and for all claims taken together in any twelve (12) month period — is limited to the greater of (i) the amount AOVANCY kept from sales of your products (the prices collected, less supply prices, tax and payment processing costs) in the twelve (12) months before the event giving rise to the liability, and (ii) one hundred euro (EUR 100).

The limits in the two bullet points above do not reduce your right to be paid the supply prices properly owed to you under Sections 5 and 6, and do not apply to your indemnity obligations under Section 9.

11. Anti-Abuse and Self-Dealing

You must not, directly or through another person:

• purchase your own products, or arrange purchases, in order to inflate sales figures, unlock rewards, qualify for programme milestones, or trigger payments;
• use payment instruments you are not authorised to use, or knowingly accept payments funded by them;
• create multiple or nominee accounts to obtain benefits intended once per person, or to evade a suspension;
• manipulate reviews, referrals, rankings, or platform metrics.

Where such activity occurs, AOVANCY may reverse the affected transactions and any resulting supply prices and rewards, reclaim amounts already paid, withhold payments, and terminate the relationship.

12. Data Protection

Each party will comply with applicable data protection law, including the GDPR, when processing personal data in connection with these terms. “Personal data”, “controller”, “processor”, and “data subject” have the meanings given in the GDPR.

(a) Buyer data we share with you. When a buyer purchases your product, AOVANCY may provide you with the buyer’s name, email address, and details of the purchase. In respect of this data, AOVANCY and you act as separate, independent controllers, each responsible for its own processing. You may use buyer data only to support your own relationship with buyers of products they bought through AOVANCY — such as answering enquiries or providing product updates — and to send marketing only where you have a valid lawful basis to do so. You must give buyers your own privacy information, honour their rights (including objection and erasure), and not use buyer data in any way AOVANCY has told the buyer it will not be used.

(b) Leads you collect through the platform. Where you use AOVANCY tools — such as email capture on your storefront — to collect personal data for your own purposes, you are the controller of that data and AOVANCY acts as your processor. AOVANCY processes it only to provide those tools and on your documented instructions, keeps it confidential, applies appropriate security, and returns or deletes it on termination, in accordance with our Data Processing Addendum, which forms part of these terms. You are responsible for having a lawful basis for the collection, giving the individuals the required privacy information, and honouring their rights.

(c) Your obligations. For all personal data you handle under these terms you will: maintain a valid lawful basis and your own privacy notice; keep the data secure; respond to the data-subject requests you are responsible for; not sell or unlawfully disclose the data; and notify AOVANCY without undue delay of any personal data breach affecting data received or collected through the platform.

(d) Enforcement. AOVANCY may restrict or withdraw your access to buyer data and to platform data tools, and may suspend or terminate your account, where we reasonably believe you are handling personal data unlawfully. You will indemnify AOVANCY against claims, regulatory fines, and reasonable costs arising from your breach of this Section or of data protection law.

13. Presentation and Ranking

AOVANCY decides how products are presented, categorised, and ordered across the platform. Ranking in listings, search results, and recommendations is determined mainly by relevance to the query or category, sales and conversion performance, recency, product quality signals including buyer ratings and refund rates, and completeness of product information. Paid placement, where offered, is identified as such.

AOVANCY may market your products through its own channels, including AOVANCY’s website, creator storefronts, email, and paid advertising, using product titles, cover images, descriptions, and your creator name. AOVANCY credits you as the author and states that the seller is AOVANCY SRL.

14. Term, Suspension and Termination

These Creator Terms apply for as long as you hold a creator account. You may stop offering products at any time by unpublishing your products or closing your account.

Where AOVANCY restricts or suspends the sale of your products, we will give you a statement of the reasons. We may suspend sales or payments to you immediately, with a statement of reasons, where a payment provider or card network requires it, or where we reasonably suspect fraud. Where AOVANCY terminates the relationship, we will give you at least thirty (30) days’ prior notice with reasons, unless we are subject to a legal or regulatory obligation to act sooner, or you have repeatedly breached these terms or the Terms & Conditions, in which case termination may be immediate.

On termination, supply prices earned and not yet paid are paid to you, after any deductions under Sections 6, 7 and 8. Buyers who purchased your products before termination keep their licences, and the right in Section 2 and the Supplier Agreement survives to the extent needed to continue serving them. Sections 5 and 6 (for completed sales), 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16 and 17 survive termination.

15. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Creator Terms, including the Supplier Agreement. Each version carries the version date shown at the top of this page. We will notify you of changes through the platform at least fifteen (15) days before they take effect, and longer where you need more time to adapt. During the notice period you may terminate under Section 14 with immediate effect. Continuing to offer products after the effective date constitutes acceptance. Changes required by law, or that add an entirely new optional feature, may take effect immediately.

16. Governing Law and Disputes

These Creator Terms are governed by Romanian law. Disputes are subject to the competent courts in Romania, unless mandatory law provides otherwise. Before starting proceedings, both parties agree to attempt in good faith to resolve the matter through the complaint mechanism described in the Terms & Conditions.

17. General

(a) Entire agreement. These Creator Terms, together with the Supplier Agreement, Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy and Data Processing Addendum they refer to, form the entire agreement between you and AOVANCY on their subject matter and replace any prior understanding on it, including the commission arrangement under earlier versions of these terms for sales made from the date this version takes effect, except for any individual arrangement confirmed under Section 5.

(b) No waiver. If AOVANCY does not enforce a right or provision, that is not a waiver of it, and any single or partial exercise of a right does not prevent its later enforcement.

(c) Severability. If any provision of these terms is or becomes invalid or unenforceable — including because it is void under Regulation (EU) 2019/1150 (the Platform-to-Business Regulation) — that provision applies to the maximum extent permitted, or is severed if it cannot, and the remaining provisions continue in full force.

(d) Assignment. You may not assign or transfer your rights or obligations under these terms without our prior written consent. AOVANCY may assign or transfer these terms, in whole or in part, to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganisation, or sale of assets, on notice to you; your rights under these terms are not reduced by such a transfer.

(e) Notices. We give you notices through the platform or to the email address on your account, and such notices are treated as received when sent or posted. You send us notices to the address in Section 18. Notice periods in these terms run from when notice is given in this way.

(f) Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay in or failure of performance — other than a payment already due — caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including outages of third-party infrastructure, network, or payment providers, cyber-attacks, natural events, or government action.

(g) Governing language. These terms are drafted in English. If we provide a translation, the English version prevails in the event of conflict, to the extent permitted by law.

18. Contact

Questions about these Creator Terms can be sent to legal@aovancy.com.