Merchant Terms of Service

1. Eligibility and claiming

• You must have a PlateRanks account and be at least 16 years old to claim or manage a restaurant. If you claim a restaurant, you must also be old enough to make a binding contract where you live.
• You may claim a restaurant only if you are its owner or an authorized representative (for example, an owner, general manager, or a person the business has authorized to act on its behalf). You represent that you have the authority to accept these Merchant Terms on behalf of the business.
• Claims are verified, for example by a one-time code sent to an email address on the restaurant’s website domain, or by manual review of documentation you provide. Providing false, misleading, or unauthorized claim information is prohibited and may result in denial or revocation of the claim and suspension of your account. If your restaurant is not on PlateRanks yet, you can ask us to add it. We review each request before the restaurant appears, and if we approve it, you manage it under these Merchant Terms.
• A restaurant’s team can include owners, managers, and analysts. Only an owner can invite, change, or remove team members, and in the portal people join a team by accepting an emailed invitation. You are responsible for what your team does in the Business Services. For businesses with multiple locations, each location is claimed and managed separately. If you manage more than one location, you can choose to apply a menu change to all of them. Doing that when you manage more than two locations needs a paid plan (Section 9).

2. Owner obligations and content accuracy

• You are responsible for the accuracy of the information you add or edit about your restaurant, including name, address, hours, contact details, menu items, descriptions, prices, and allergen or dietary information. Keep it current and truthful.
• You are responsible for all activity under your account and for safeguarding your credentials. Do not share management access with anyone not authorized by the business.
• You agree to comply with all applicable laws in operating your restaurant and using the Business Services, including consumer-protection, advertising, food-safety, and accessibility laws.
• Menu and business information you submit may be shown to diners on PlateRanks. Do not submit content you do not have the right to use, and do not use the menu or profile fields to post promotional spam, off-topic content, or contact-harvesting solicitations.
• Some tools use AI. When you add a menu from photos or a PDF, we send them to Google’s Gemini AI service, which reads the plates and adds them to your menu. If Gemini cannot read them, we may use Google’s Cloud Vision service to pull out the text first. When you upload a profile image for your restaurant, such as your logo, or change your restaurant’s name, we may ask Gemini whether the image already shows your restaurant’s name, so we know whether to print the name under it on your table tents, flyers, and award certificates. You can change that choice. AI can get things wrong, so check your menu after an import.

3. Reviews belong to diners, and only PlateRanks moderates them

• You cannot edit or remove reviews. Reviews and ratings belong to the diners who write them, and PlateRanks has the right to show them (see the PlateRanks Terms of Service). The scores we build from them belong to PlateRanks. As a merchant you have no right to edit, hide, reorder, delete, or suppress any review or rating, or to condition service or benefits on a review being changed or removed.
• Your recourse is a reply or a dispute, not removal. You may post one public response per review, and you may dispute a review you believe violates PlateRanks’ guidelines (for example, a review that is not based on a genuine experience, targets the wrong restaurant, or contains prohibited content). A dispute opens a support conversation for PlateRanks to review. Only PlateRanks may remove or reinstate a review, at its discretion and consistent with its guidelines; a disputed review remains visible unless and until PlateRanks decides otherwise.
• PlateRanks may hide or restore a review at any time to enforce its guidelines. When PlateRanks removes a review, it may be shown as removed and the reviewer may be notified. These moderation decisions rest solely with PlateRanks.
• Once you claim a restaurant, only your team and PlateRanks can change its menu. If you remove a plate that has reviews, it moves to your past plates and keeps its reviews and ratings. If a claimed restaurant’s menu is emptied, PlateRanks may let diners add and change plates on it again.

4. Review-reply conduct

In your replies and posts, and in your dealings with reviewers and other diners, you agree not to:

• Create, solicit, incentivize, or facilitate fake, paid, or deceptive reviews, or offer any benefit in exchange for a review (good or bad, before or after it is written), the removal of a negative review, or a changed rating. This includes anything you print with a PlateRanks QR code (Section 6).
• Rate or review your own restaurant, or ask your staff to. PlateRanks does not let anyone on your restaurant’s team rate its plates.
• Retaliate against, harass, threaten, intimidate, or attempt to identify or contact a reviewer off-platform because of a review, or discriminate against a diner for having left one.
• Post replies that are defamatory, harassing, hateful, obscene, deceptive, or that disclose a reviewer’s private information.
• Impersonate a diner, PlateRanks, or another business, or misrepresent your affiliation with the restaurant.

Replies and posts are public and attributed to your restaurant. We may remove replies and posts, and suspend or revoke management access, for conduct that violates these Merchant Terms.

5. Data use and insights

The Business Services may give you access to insights about your restaurant, for example aggregate ratings, review counts, and trends. You agree that:

• Insights are provided for managing your own restaurant. You may use them for that purpose but must not resell them, use them to build a competing product, or attempt to re-identify individual diners from aggregate or anonymized data.
• To protect diners’ privacy, some numbers show only once enough different diners are behind them, and some are rounded. You may see a plate’s would-order-again rate, but never one diner’s answer, and you must not try to work out how a diner answered.
• Any competitor or market insights we may provide are anonymized and/or aggregated and are provided on an “as is” basis for general context, not as a guarantee of accuracy.
• When we turn them on, review themes and health and safety alerts may use Google’s Gemini AI service to read the written reviews of your restaurant and sum up what diners say about each plate. If several diners raise the same health or safety concern about a plate, such as getting sick or finding a foreign object, we may email your owners and managers and show an alert in your portal. PlateRanks may review these alerts. Themes and alerts come from what diners write. They are not an inspection, and they can be wrong.
• PlateRanks may use data generated through your use of the Business Services to operate, secure, analyze, and improve PlateRanks and its services, consistent with the Privacy Policy.
• PlateRanks staff can open your restaurant portal, including your Guests list and private messages, and can act there for your restaurant, for example to help you, to fix your restaurant’s page, or to enforce these Merchant Terms. This can include changing your menu, page, or team, and posting, replying to reviews, or sending offers and messages as your restaurant.

6. Printed QR codes

Your restaurant portal can give you a PlateRanks QR code for your table tents and one for the flyers you put in to-go orders. Each code opens your restaurant’s PlateRanks page.

• You may print these codes on your table tents, to-go flyers, and other materials at your restaurant or in your to-go orders to invite diners to your PlateRanks page. If you printed a PlateRanks receipt code before, it keeps working and is counted the same way.
• Print each code as we provide it. Do not change the link a code opens or add anything to it, and do not put a different link behind a PlateRanks code.
• Never offer anything in exchange for a review. Section 4 applies to everything you print with a code.
• Your portal can also give you a widget and a badge for your website, and a certificate and badge for any award you earn. Use them as we provide them, and do not change what they show or the link behind them.
• For your codes, your analytics show totals only: how many times each code was scanned in the last 30 days (the same phone or browser scanning the same code more than once in a day counts once), and how many reviews came from a scan over the last 4 full weeks. That review number is rounded down to the nearest 5 and stays hidden until at least 10 different diners have reviewed from a scan in that time. You will not see who scanned a code or which review came from a scan, and you must not try to find out (Section 5).

7. Importing your menu from your POS

An owner or manager can import your menu from your point-of-sale (POS) system by choosing the menu export file (CSV or Excel) that your POS creates.

• You must have the right to share the file. Only import a file you have the right to share with us. As with any menu change, you are responsible for the accuracy of what an import adds or changes (Section 2).
• We do not keep your file. Your browser reads the file and sends us its column names and rows, which we use to build your preview and the plates you approve. We do not store the file or its rows. We do keep a record of each import: which POS you chose, the file type, how many rows it had, how many plates were added, matched, and skipped, who imported it, and when.
• AI suggestions. To suggest a course and meals for each new plate, we may send item names and the categories they are listed under (not prices or descriptions) to Google’s Gemini AI service, using our paid account. Google’s terms for paid use of Gemini say Google does not use that content to improve its products. We do not use your menu data to train AI models. You can change any suggestion before you import.
• You approve every plate. The preview shows what the import will do, and only the plates you approve go on your public PlateRanks page. When an item matches a plate already on your menu, the import can update that plate’s price and description. The preview shows each update, and you can turn it off. Diners see prices only if you have turned on menu prices for your restaurant.
• Nothing is removed unless you choose. If a plate on your menu is not in your file, we show it to you and you decide what happens to it. A plate you remove that has reviews moves to your past plates and keeps its reviews.
• Tell us. If you press “Tell us” next to a POS, we record your restaurant, that POS, and who asked, so we know which POS to connect to next.

8. Guests, offers, and private messages

Some paid tools (Section 9) show you diners who have been to your restaurant and let you reach them inside PlateRanks. Diners trust us with this information, so these rules apply.

• What the Guests list shows. Based on the days diners reviewed your restaurant on PlateRanks, we put diners who have been to your restaurant into groups: Regulars, Lapsed, and New guests. Not every diner fits a group. You see how many diners are in each group. In the list, you see names only for diners with a public review of your restaurant. For each of them you see their name, their group, how many different days they visited in the last year, how many days since their first and last visit, and how many reviews of your restaurant they wrote. We do not show you their email address or where they live.
• Names. The name you see for a diner in your portal, in reports, and in our emails may be their full name, even if they show only a username in public. Do not repeat it in a public reply or share it outside your team.
• How you may use guest information. Use what you learn about diners through the Business Services only to run your restaurant and look after your guests. Apart from reports you download from your portal, do not copy it into other systems. Do not sell or share it, combine it with other information to find out who a diner is or how to reach them, or contact a diner outside PlateRanks because of it. Reports you download can include diners’ names and what they wrote. Keep them private and use them only to manage your restaurant.
• Offers and invitations. You can send an offer or an invitation to one group from your Guests list, or to guests you pick from it. It reaches only diners who have been to your restaurant and have not turned off restaurant offers, and each diner gets at most one from your restaurant every 15 days. Diners see it in PlateRanks under your restaurant’s name. We check each message before it goes out and may refuse to send one that seems to tie an offer to a review or rating, asks a diner to change or remove a review, or uses offensive language. Never tie an offer to a review (Section 4). Describe your offer accurately and honor it as written.
• Offer codes. If you include codes, each diner gets their own code, and each code works once. When your team redeems a code in the portal, you see the name of the diner who used it. If your plan ends or we switch offers off, you can no longer check codes in the portal.
• Private messages. You can send one private message to a diner who gave your restaurant a score of 5 or lower (out of 10) in a review from the last 45 days, to try to make things right. You can do this only once per diner, and only if the diner has not turned off restaurant messages. Every conversation starts with a note from us telling the diner their review will not change. The diner can reply, decline, or report the message, and you can read their replies. Do not ask the diner to change or remove their review, offer them anything to do so, or use the conversation to advertise. We may read any conversation, for example when a diner reports a message (Section 5).
• Our records and controls. We keep a record of who sent each offer and who redeemed each code. We may switch offers or private messages off at any time.

9. Paid plans

• Some tools are part of a paid plan, for example the Guests list, offers, private messages, detailed analytics, downloadable reports, and tools for managing several locations at once. The portal marks these “Paid plan.”
• Today you cannot buy a plan in the portal. PlateRanks turns a plan on for a restaurant directly. A plan we turn on either has no end date or ends on a date we set.
• If your plan has an end date, your portal shows a notice starting 30 days before it ends. When it ends, the paid tools stop working. You keep the free tools, and your restaurant’s data is not deleted.
• We will not charge you for a plan unless you first agree to a price and payment terms.
• We may change which tools are free or paid and what each plan includes, and we may end a plan we turned on, for example if you stop managing the restaurant or break these Merchant Terms.

10. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Use the Business Services for any unlawful, fraudulent, or deceptive purpose, or in violation of any third party’s rights.
• Access, probe, scrape, or interfere with the Business Services or PlateRanks by automated means except as expressly permitted, or attempt to circumvent security, rate limits, or access controls.
• Attempt to gain access to restaurants, accounts, or data you are not authorized to manage, or to another business’s insights.
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive the source code of the Business Services except where that restriction is prohibited by law.

11. Suspension, revocation, and unclaiming

We may suspend or revoke your access to a claimed restaurant, or unclaim a restaurant, if we reasonably believe the claim was unauthorized or fraudulent, that you have violated these Merchant Terms or applicable law, or that doing so is necessary to protect diners, other businesses, PlateRanks, or the integrity of reviews. When a restaurant is unclaimed, management access ends and the restaurant page may return to a community-managed state. You may also stop managing a restaurant by contacting us. Reviews, ratings, and history are not deleted by a suspension, revocation, or unclaim. Menu changes, photos, posts, and replies you added may stay on the page. If you delete your PlateRanks account, your access ends and your replies to reviews are deleted, as listed at plateranks.com/delete-account.

12. Disclaimers

The Business Services are provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Business Services will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure, or that any insight, aggregate, estimate, AI suggestion, or alert is accurate or complete. Insights are informational and are not business, financial, or legal advice.

13. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, PlateRanks will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, or goodwill, arising out of or related to your use of (or inability to use) the Business Services or any review, reply, moderation decision, or insight. Our total liability for all claims relating to the Business Services will not exceed the greater of the amounts you paid PlateRanks for the Business Services in the twelve months before the claim or one hundred U.S. dollars (US$100). Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so some of the above may not apply to you.

14. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold PlateRanks harmless from claims, damages, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of the content you submit, your replies, the offers and messages you send to diners, your use of the Business Services, your claim of a restaurant you were not authorized to claim, or your violation of these Merchant Terms or of any law or third-party right.

15. Changes to these Merchant Terms

We may update these Merchant Terms from time to time. When we make material changes, we will update the version identifier and effective date above and may ask you to accept the updated terms. Your continued use of the Business Services after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated Merchant Terms.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Merchant Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. If a dispute comes up, you and we will first try to resolve it informally: the party with the dispute sends the other a written notice under Section 17, and we both try in good faith to resolve it for 30 days. If we cannot, any lawsuit about these Merchant Terms or the Business Services must be brought only in the state or federal courts located in the State of Florida, and you and we consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts. Either of us may still bring an individual claim in small claims court if it qualifies.

17. Contact and notices

PlateRanks LLC
16350 Bruce B Downs Blvd, PO Box 46694
Tampa, FL 33646
Questions about the Business Services: support@plateranks.com
If you are signed in, you can also open a support ticket in your restaurant portal.

Notices. Send legal notices to us by email to support@plateranks.com and by mail to the address above. We may send notices to you at the email address on your PlateRanks account or show them in your restaurant portal.

Looking for the diner terms? Read the PlateRanks Terms of Service. You can return to PlateRanks for Restaurants at any time.