Our Terms of Use

Please read this carefully before using Sherpa!

Who we are and how to contact us

https://sherpa-online.com is a site operated by Applications Labs Ltd ("We"). We are registered in England and Wales under company number 12238172 and have our registered office at Regency House, Dedmere Road, Marlow, SL7 1FJ. Our main trading address is Regency House, Dedmere Road, Marlow, SL7 1FJ. Our VAT number is 346731784.
We are a limited company.
To contact us, please email info@sherpa-online.com.

By using our site you accept these terms

By using our site, you confirm that you accept these terms of use and that you agree to comply with them.
If you do not agree to these terms, you must not use our site.
We recommend that you print a copy of these terms for future reference.

There are other terms that may apply to you

These terms of use refer to the following additional terms, which also apply to your use of our site:
• Our Privacy Policy https://sherpa-online.com/privacy-policy. See further under How we may use your personal information.
• Our Cookie Policy https://sherpa-online.com/cookie-policy which sets out information about the cookies on our site.

We may make changes to these terms

We amend these terms from time to time. Every time you wish to use our site, please check these terms to ensure you understand the terms that apply at that time. These terms were most recently updated on 22/03/2023.

We may make changes to our site

We may update and change our site from time to time to reflect changes to our products, our users' needs and our business priorities.

We may suspend or withdraw our site

Our site is made available free of charge.
We do not guarantee that our site, or any content on it, will always be available or be uninterrupted. We may suspend or withdraw or restrict the availability of all or any part of our site for business and operational reasons. We will try to give you reasonable notice of any suspension or withdrawal.
You are also responsible for ensuring that all persons who access our site through your internet connection are aware of these terms of use and other applicable terms and conditions, and that they comply with them.

We may transfer this agreement to someone else

We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another organisation. We will always tell you in writing if this happens and we will ensure that the transfer will not affect your rights under the contract.

You must keep your account details safe

If you choose, or you are provided with, a user identification code, password or any other piece of information as part of our security procedures, you must treat such information as confidential. You must not disclose it to any third party.
We have the right to disable any user identification code or password, whether chosen by you or allocated by us, at any time, if in our reasonable opinion you have failed to comply with any of the provisions of these terms of use.
If you know or suspect that anyone other than you knows your user identification code or password, you must promptly notify us at info@sherpa-online.com.

How you may use material on our site

We are the owner or the licensee of all intellectual property rights in our site, and in the material published on it. Those works are protected by copyright laws and treaties around the world. All such rights are reserved.
You may print off one copy, and may download extracts, of any page(s) from our site for your personal use and you may draw the attention of others within your organisation to content posted on our site.
You must not modify the paper or digital copies of any materials you have printed off or downloaded in any way, and you must not use any illustrations, photographs, video or audio sequences or any graphics separately from any accompanying text.
Our status (and that of any identified contributors) as the authors of content on our site must always be acknowledged.
You must not use any part of the content on our site for commercial purposes without obtaining a licence to do so from us or our licensors.
If you print off, copy or download any part of our site in breach of these terms of use, your right to use our site will cease immediately and you must, at our option, return or destroy any copies of the materials you have made.

Do not rely on information on this site

The content on our site is provided for general information only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
Although we make reasonable efforts to update the information on our site, we make no representations, warranties or guarantees, whether express or implied, that the content on our site is accurate, complete or up to date.

We are not responsible for websites we link to

Where our site contains links to other sites and resources provided by third parties, these links are provided for your information only. Such links should not be interpreted as approval by us of those linked websites or information you may obtain from them.
We have no control over the contents of those sites or resources.

User-generated content is not approved by us

This website may include information and materials uploaded by other users of the site, including to bulletin boards and chat rooms. This information and these materials have not been verified or approved by us. The views expressed by other users on our site do not represent our views or values.

How to complain about content uploaded by other users

If you wish to complain about content uploaded by other users, please contact us on info@sherpa-online.com.

Our responsibility for loss or damage suffered by you

Whether you are a consumer or a business user:

• We do not exclude or limit in any way our liability to you where it would be unlawful to do so. This includes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence or the negligence of our employees, agents or subcontractors and for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.

If you are a business user (including but not limited to tutors):

• We exclude all implied conditions, warranties, representations or other terms that may apply to our site or any content on it.
• We will not be liable to you for any loss or damage, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty, or otherwise, even if foreseeable, arising under or in connection with:
• use of, or inability to use our site; or
• use of or reliance on any content displayed on our site.
• In particular, we will not be liable for:
• loss of profits, sales, business, or revenue;
• business interruption;
• loss of anticipated savings;
• loss of business opportunity, goodwill or reputation; or
• any indirect or consequential loss or damage.

If you are a consumer user:

• Please note that we only provide our site for domestic and private use. You agree not to use our site for any commercial or business purposes, and we have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity.
• If defective digital content that we have supplied damages a device or digital content belonging to you and this is caused by our failure to use reasonable care and skill, we will either repair the damage or pay you compensation. However, we will not be liable for damage that you could have avoided by following our advice to apply an update offered to you free of charge or for damage that was caused by you failing to correctly follow installation instructions or to have in place the minimum system requirements advised by us.
• If defective software that we have supplied for the Online Classroom prevents you from being able to take part in a lesson with a Sherpa tutor that has been paid for, Sherpa Online will refund the cost of the session to the student. We will only do this if the bug in the classroom is proven to lessen the quality of the lesson so much that the student does not benefit at all, and if the bug is reproducible and provable by a member of Sherpa Online’s staff. We will not refund or compensate for any issues with lessons that are due to network quality, hardware problems or software problems outside of Sherpa Online’s control.

How we may use your personal information

We will only use your personal information as set out in our https://sherpa-online.com/privacy-policy.

Uploading content to our site

Whenever you make use of a feature that allows you to upload content to our site, or to make contact with other users of our site, you must ensure the content that you upload is appropriate.
You warrant that any such contribution does comply with those standards, and you will be liable to us and indemnify us for any breach of that warranty. This means you will be responsible for any loss or damage we suffer as a result of your breach of warranty.
Any content you upload to our site will be considered non-confidential and non-proprietary. You retain all of your ownership rights to any content shared privately with other parties through the platform. You retain all of your ownership rights in your public-facing content, but you are required to grant us a limited licence to use, store and copy that content and to distribute and make it available to third parties.
We also have the right to disclose your identity to any third party who is claiming that any content posted or uploaded by you to our site constitutes a violation of their intellectual property rights, or of their right to privacy.
We have the right to remove any posting you make on our site if, in our opinion, your post does not comply with the content standards set out in our Acceptable Use Policy.
You are solely responsible for securing and backing up your content.
We do not store terrorist content.

Rights you are giving us to use material you upload

When you upload or post public-facing content to our site, such as reviews or forum posts, you grant us the following rights to use that content:
• A worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform that user-generated content in connection with the service provided by the website and across different media including to promote the site or the service to expire when the user deletes the content from the site.
• a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence for other users, partners or advertisers to use the content for their purposes OR in accordance with the functionality of the site to expire when the user deletes the content from the site.

We are not responsible for viruses and you must not introduce them

We do not guarantee that our site will be secure or free from bugs or viruses.
You are responsible for configuring your information technology, computer programmes and platform to access our site. You should use your own virus protection software.
You must not misuse our site by knowingly introducing viruses, trojans, worms, logic bombs or other material that is malicious or technologically harmful. You must not attempt to gain unauthorised access to our site, the server on which our site is stored or any server, computer or database connected to our site. You must not attack our site via a denial-of-service attack or a distributed denial-of service attack. By breaching this provision, you would commit a criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. We will report any such breach to the relevant law enforcement authorities and we will co-operate with those authorities by disclosing your identity to them. In the event of such a breach, your right to use our site will cease immediately.

Rules about linking to our site

You may link to our pages, provided you do so in a way that is fair and legal and does not damage our reputation or take advantage of it.
You must not establish a link in such a way as to suggest any form of association, approval or endorsement on our part where none exists.
You must not establish a link to our site in any website that is not owned by you.
Our site must not be framed on any other site.
We reserve the right to withdraw linking permission without notice.
The website in which you are linking must comply in all respects with the content standards set out in our Acceptable Use Policy.
If you wish to link to or make any use of content on our site other than that set out above, please contact info@sherpa-online.com.

Recordings and use of Recordings

A Recording refers to the recording of any Introduction, Booking / Lesson or Group Class on Sherpa. These are recorded and stored for up to 12 months after.

A Session refers to an Introduction, Booking, Lesson or Group Class on Sherpa.

By using Sherpa Online for any Session, you are acknowledging that all Sessions you participate in may be recorded and you agree to the storage of such Recordings by Sherpa Online.

Taking Students off Sherpa

Taking a student 'off-platform' describes the act of any of the following:

  • Sharing personal contact details through the Platform
  • Attempting to take payment from the student outside of the Platform's payment system
  • Attempting to teach the student on an external, third-party, platform to bypass Sherpa.
If Sherpa has reason to believe that a tutor has deliberately taken students off-platform, Sherpa reserves the right to deduct up to £300 per student of the tutor's earnings in order to cover the marketing and customer service costs associated with bringing new students onto the platform. Reason to believe can include any of the following or any other reasonable pieces of evidence:
  • Messages showing that either student or tutor have shared personal contact details
  • Recordings of a Session that show either side suggesting or agreeing to go 'off-platform'.
  • Suspicious patterns with bookings and introductions. For example, consistent single introductions with no bookings, or consistent one-off, first bookings.

Sherpa's Non-attendance Policy For Tutors

Where attendance of a lesson is confirmed by means of payment and confirmation through the platform, a non-attendance and refunds policy then applies to both consumer users and business users (including but not limited to tutors).
Non-attendance is defined as:

  • A consumer user or business user (including but not limited to tutors) has not accessed the proposed online classroom in the first 20 minutes of the scheduled lesson runtime with no prior contact that would provide warning of non-attendance or acknowledgement of tardiness to any other user expecting attendance.
Tutors reserve the right to abandon the remainder of the lesson in question, provided they have attempted to make contact with the student, through sending a message themselves once the lesson start time has elapsed. The consumer user forfeits their lesson fee in the result of a lesson being abandoned through their non-attendance or technical problems related to user error.

Any disputes to this policy in reference to mitigating circumstances or the late/non-attendance of the tutor should be raised within 48 hours by requesting a refund. All evidence should be documented through this dispute process for review. All final decisions on compensation from disputed lesson charges are made using all available evidence by Sherpa

Which country's laws apply to any disputes?

If you are a consumer, please note that these terms of use, their subject matter and their formation, are governed by English law. You and we both agree that the courts of England and Wales will have exclusive jurisdiction except that if you are a resident of Northern Ireland you may also bring proceedings in Northern Ireland, and if you are resident of Scotland, you may also bring proceedings in Scotland.
If you are a business, these terms of use, their subject matter and their formation (and any non-contractual disputes or claims) are governed by English law. We both agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.