Terms of Service

FigStead is a venue. Members list fig trees, cuttings and related plant material; other members buy them. We provide the marketplace, the payment plumbing and the dispute tooling.

We verify no one by default. A “Verified” badge means an administrator applied a trust marker to that account; it is not a guarantee of anything and you should not treat it as one.

You must be at least 18 and able to enter a binding contract. One account per person. Accounts are personal to you — don't share credentials or transfer an account to someone else.

You are responsible for everything that happens under your account. Keep your password to yourself, and turn on two-factor authentication from your account settings if you sell here — a compromised seller account is a compromised payout destination.

Sellers must comply with all federal, state and local agricultural regulations that apply to what they ship and where they ship it, including quarantine restrictions, licensing and certification. Buyers must not order plant material that cannot lawfully be shipped to them.

We do not check any of this and we cannot advise you on it. If your shipment is seized, destroyed or refused by an agricultural authority, that is a matter between you, the other party and that authority.

Listings must be for plant material you actually possess and may lawfully sell. Patented cultivars may not be propagated for sale without the patent holder's licence — asexual propagation of a patented plant is infringement, and listing one here does not make it our problem or our permission.

Describe things accurately. Photograph the actual plant you are selling. State the cultivar honestly — if you are not certain of an identification, say so in the listing rather than guessing with confidence.

Bids are binding. Placing a bid in an auction is a commitment to buy at that price if you win. Bids cannot be retracted. When an auction ends, the highest bid wins and the sale is formed automatically. Sellers may not bid on their own listings, or arrange for anyone else to bid them up.

An accepted offer is likewise binding on both sides. Sellers who repeatedly refuse to complete sales they have agreed to may have their accounts suspended.

Payments are processed by Stripe. We never receive or store your card number — it goes directly to Stripe, and you can read their terms at stripe.com. Sellers receive payouts through Stripe Connect and must complete Stripe's onboarding, including identity verification, before they can be paid.

Listing is free. During our introductory period the selling fee is 0%. When that period ends the standard selling fee is 6% of the item price (never of shipping), and the current rate is always shown to sellers at the point of listing. Stripe's own processing fee (currently 2.9% + 30¢) is separate and is deducted from the transaction.

Prices are in US dollars. You are responsible for any taxes arising from your own sales — we do not collect or remit sales tax on your behalf, and we do not provide tax advice.

Sellers set their own shipping cost and are responsible for packing adequately and dispatching promptly. Live plant material is perishable and its survival depends heavily on packing, transit time and weather at both ends.

Because of that, sales are final by default. There is no general right of return for a plant that has been shipped. That said, we expect sellers to make it right when they get it wrong — material misdescription, the wrong cultivar, or an item that arrives dead as a result of inadequate packing.

If a buyer and seller can't resolve something between them, use the “Report a problem” button on the order. We may, at our discretion, issue a refund from the platform side. We are not obliged to, we are not an arbitrator of plant quality, and our decision does not determine either party's legal rights against the other.

Don't:

• List anything you don't have, can't lawfully sell, or don't intend to ship
• Manipulate auctions, ratings or reputation, including with second accounts
• Take transactions off-platform to avoid fees after making contact here
• Harass, threaten or abuse other members, in messages or anywhere else
• Scrape, crawl or bulk-download the site, or attempt to circumvent rate limits, reCAPTCHA or authentication
• Upload malware, or probe the site for vulnerabilities without our written permission

We may remove listings, withhold payouts pending investigation, and suspend or terminate accounts that break these rules or that we reasonably believe are being used fraudulently.

You keep ownership of the photos and text you upload. You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, resize, cache and display that content for the purpose of operating and promoting the marketplace — that licence is what allows your listing photo to appear in search results, in a shared link preview, and in our own promotion of the site.

Only upload images you took or have the right to use. If you believe content here infringes your copyright, email [SUPPORT EMAIL] with enough detail to identify the work and the listing, and we will remove it if the claim is substantiated.

The site is provided “as is”. 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 don't warrant that the site will be uninterrupted, that auctions will always close on time, or that notifications and emails will always arrive.

Some states don't allow certain limitations, so parts of this may not apply to you.

You can opt out.If you don't want to be bound by this arbitration agreement, email [SUPPORT EMAIL] within 30 days of first accepting these terms, stating your account email and that you are opting out of arbitration. Opting out costs you nothing else — the rest of these terms still apply, and we will not treat you differently for it.

Either party may still bring an individual claim in small-claims court if it qualifies, and either party may seek injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property.

If the class-action waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim proceeds in court and the rest of this section still governs everything else.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Illinois, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Where a dispute is not subject to arbitration, it belongs in the state or federal courts located in Illinois, and both parties consent to that venue.

We may update these terms. If a change is material we'll say so on the site before it takes effect, and the “last updated” date above always tells you when the current version was published. Continuing to use FigStead after a change means you accept it.

You may close your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate access for breach of these terms. Obligations that by their nature should survive — fees owed, content licence for content already published, disclaimers, liability limits and the arbitration agreement — survive termination.

If any provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing something isn't a waiver of it. These terms, with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us.

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[SUPPORT EMAIL]