Our terms of business

1. Who these terms are between

These terms are between you and the company named below, referred to here as “we”, “us” and “our”. “You” means the person or organisation using this website or selling equipment to us.

They apply to two separate things: your use of this website, and any sale of equipment by you to us. Section 2 covers the website. Everything from section 3 onwards covers the sale.

2. Using this website

The content of this website is provided for general information. It describes the kinds of equipment we are interested in and how we work, and it is written to be accurate, but it is not advice and it should not be relied on as a valuation.

Nothing on this website is an offer capable of acceptance. Any indication of value, whether given on a page, in a guide or in a form, is illustrative. A price only exists once we have looked at your specific equipment and given you a figure for it, as described in section 3. Submitting a form does not create a contract, and nor does our acknowledgement of it.

We may change, withdraw or update any part of this website at any time. We try to keep it available and accurate, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, error-free or up to date at every moment. You agree not to misuse the site — no attempting to gain unauthorised access, no interfering with how it works, and no automated harvesting of its content.

The text, logos and design of this site belong to us or to our licensors. You are welcome to read, print and share pages for your own use or your organisation’s internal use. Republishing them commercially is a different matter, and needs our permission first.

Where we link to another organisation’s website, that is for convenience. We do not control those sites and we are not responsible for what is on them.

3. How a quote arises

A quote is our estimate of what your equipment is worth to us, based on what you have told us about it. It comes about like this:

1. You tell us what you have. Through the form on the site, by email, by phone, or as an asset list or spreadsheet for a larger clearance.
2. We give you a figure. That figure is calculated from the information you have given us — models, specifications, quantities, age, condition and whether the equipment is complete and working.
3. You decide whether to proceed. If you do, the equipment reaches us by collection or by delivery, as agreed.
4. We inspect what actually arrives. Every quote is subject to that inspection.

A quote is only as good as the description it is based on. If the equipment we receive differs from what was described — a different specification, missing drives, memory, caddies, rails or power supplies, undisclosed damage, water or impact damage, a fault that stops it powering on, or a lock that prevents it being used — then the figure we gave you no longer reflects what is in front of us. In that situation we will tell you what we have found and give you a revised figure, and you are free to accept it or to decline it.

A revised figure follows from something about the equipment itself that was not apparent from the description, rather than from the equipment simply having sat with us for a while. Whether a quote can be revised for any other reason, and how that sits with the validity period, is one of the decisions below.

4. Ownership and your right to sell

This is the most important thing you tell us, and the one we cannot check for ourselves. Business IT equipment is very often not owned by the business using it. Laptops, servers and networking kit are routinely supplied on lease, on hire purchase, on a finance agreement or as part of a managed service, and in every one of those cases the hardware belongs to somebody else until the agreement says otherwise — usually the funder, not the company it was delivered to.

Equipment like that is not yours to sell, even though it has been sitting on your desks for three years. Selling it can leave you owing the funder its value, and it can leave us holding hardware we have paid for and have to give back. It is worth ten minutes with your finance team before you send us a list.

By asking us to buy equipment, you confirm that:

We may ask you for evidence of ownership or of your authority to sell before we proceed, and we may decline to buy equipment where that evidence is not available. Asking is not an accusation; it is how a responsible buyer avoids handling somebody else’s property.

If it turns out that equipment was not yours to sell, we may return it to whoever is entitled to it, withhold payment for it, or recover any payment we have already made. Where we suffer a loss because the assurances above were not accurate, we may look to you for it.

5. Data on your devices

Laptops, desktops, servers, drives, phones, tablets, copiers and network appliances hold data, and some of it will be data you are responsible for under data protection law. Before equipment leaves you, please assume that responsibility is still yours.

Before you hand equipment over, you should back up anything you need to keep, remove or transfer any personal or confidential information you do not want to leave your premises, sign out of accounts and services, remove device management enrolment and activation locks, and make a note of any encryption recovery keys. Once equipment has left you, you should treat the data on it as gone.

Any data we encounter on a device is treated as confidential. What we do with the device at that point depends on what was agreed with you, and our handling of any personal data is covered by our privacy policy.

Where you have asked us to wipe data-bearing equipment, that work is described on our data wiping page, and the specific method, records and documentation for your equipment are agreed with you before we start. Nothing in these terms is a warranty that any particular erasure standard is met, and a wiping service does not transfer your own legal responsibilities for the data to us. You remain responsible for the information you chose to leave on a device.

6. Collection, risk and title

Equipment reaches us in one of three ways: we collect it from you, you deliver it to us, or you send it by your own carrier. Which of those applies is agreed with you when the quote is accepted, along with the date, the site contact and how the equipment will be reached and loaded. For larger clearances, see business collections.

Please make sure the equipment is accessible on the agreed date and that anything not being sold is kept separate from it. If a collection cannot go ahead because the equipment is not ready, access is not available or nobody is on site, we may need to rearrange it.

Two things follow from the direction of this sale and need to be stated precisely rather than approximately: the point at which the equipment stops being at your risk, and the point at which it stops being your property. They are not necessarily the same moment, and they are a commercial decision for us to make and publish here rather than something to leave vague.

7. Payment

We pay you for the equipment we buy. The amount is the figure you accepted, or the revised figure agreed after inspection under section 3.

The method and timing of payment are confirmed with you before you commit to a sale, so that you know when to expect the money and how it will arrive. Neither has been fixed as a general term yet, and we would rather say so than publish something we might not keep to.

8. Equipment we are unable to buy

Not everything that arrives is something we can buy. Items may be beyond economic repair, may be a type we do not handle, may be damaged in a way that was not described, or may be something we are not able to take for legal or safety reasons.

Where that happens we will tell you what we cannot buy and why, and we will agree with you what should happen to it before anything is done. We will not dispose of rejected equipment without first agreeing it with you, though how long we can hold it while waiting for that decision is still to be settled.

What the default position should be — returned to you, recycled on your behalf, and at whose cost — is a decision the business has not yet made. It is one of the most common causes of a dispute in this trade, precisely because it usually is not written down anywhere.

9. Consumers and business sellers

Whether you are selling to us as an individual or as a business makes a real difference to which of these terms can apply to you.

If you are a consumer — that is, selling equipment that was not used for the purposes of a business — you have rights under consumer protection law that these terms cannot take away, reduce or override. Nothing on this page is intended to do so, and where anything here conflicts with those rights, those rights win.

If you are selling as a business, you are treated as having the commercial knowledge to assess what you are selling, and the limitations in section 10 apply in full.

These are genuinely different relationships, and a single set of terms serving both is a compromise. Which of them the business intends to deal with has not been settled.

10. Our liability to you

We take responsibility for what we do. There are, though, limits on what we can reasonably be responsible for, and it is fairer to set them out plainly than to leave them unsaid.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for:

• death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or the negligence of anyone acting for us;
• fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
• any other liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

Those three cannot be signed away, and we are not attempting to.

Subject to that, and where you are selling to us in the course of a business:

• we are not responsible for data left on a device that you have not removed, except to the extent of any wiping service we have specifically agreed to carry out for you;
• we are not responsible for the value of information, software, licences or configuration held on equipment, as distinct from the value of the hardware itself;
• we are not responsible for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of contracts, loss of goodwill or loss of anticipated savings, or for any indirect or consequential loss;
• we are not responsible for equipment we never received, or for a consignment sent to us without a quote having been agreed.

We do not limit our responsibility for damage we cause to your premises or to property that is not being sold while we are carrying out a collection, and we do not limit our responsibility for equipment while it is in our physical possession. The point at which risk passes is still to be confirmed under section 6, and this clause will be re-read against it once that decision is made.

If you are a consumer, section 9 applies and your statutory rights are unaffected by any of the above.

11. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time, for example to reflect a change in how we work or a change in the law. The current version is always the one on this page, and the date at the top tells you when it last changed.

A change made after you have accepted a quote is not intended to apply to that transaction. Making that reliable means referencing these terms in every quote and keeping a dated archive of superseded versions, and neither is in place yet.

12. Governing law and jurisdiction

These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of a sale of equipment to us, are written on the basis that they are governed by the law of England and Wales, and that the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. Governing law follows where the contracting entity is established, and that entity has not been confirmed, so this is a placeholder rather than a settled position.

If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom, you may be entitled to bring proceedings in the courts of the part of the United Kingdom where you live, and nothing here is intended to prevent that.