FigSteadTerms of Service
Last updated: August 16, 2026
These terms are the agreement between you and FigStead LLC( “FigStead”, “we”, “us”) covering your use of figstead.com. By creating an account, listing a plant, bidding, or buying, you accept them. If you don't, please don't use the site.
1. What FigStead is — and isn't
FigStead is a venue and nothing more. Members list fig trees, cuttings and related plant material; other members buy them. We provide the listing pages, the search, the messaging and the connection to a payment processor. That is the entire service.
We are not the seller, and we are not in the middle. Every sale is a contract between the buyer and the seller alone. We are not a party to it, not an agent of either side, and not a broker, escrow agent, guarantor or insurer of it.
We never take possession of anything sold here. We never see it, handle it, inspect it, test it, verify it or authenticate it. Not the plant, not its health, not its variety, not its origin, not its condition, and not whether it exists at all. Everything you read in a listing was written by the seller, and we have done nothing to check it.
Because we never see the goods, we are in no position to decide who is right when a transaction goes wrong, and we do not try to. Section 7 explains what to do instead.
We verify no one. A “Verified” badge means only that an administrator applied a marker to that account. It is not a background check, not an endorsement, not a guarantee of identity, honesty or plant quality, and you should place no reliance on it.
2. Who can use it
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.
Selling is not automatic, and it is not a right. Anyone eligible may create an account, browse and buy. Whether a given member may sell is a decision FigSteadmakes at our sole discretion — we may approve, decline, or revoke a member's ability to sell at any time, for any reason or no reason, without owing an explanation.
As a general practice, we look for sellers who already carry selling reputation built elsewhere — another marketplace, an established plant-trading community, a prior track record we can check — before extending that ability here. We value accuracy and quality over volume, and we would rather have fewer sellers whose listings can be trusted than open the gate to everyone.
Only accounts carrying the “Verified” badge may list items for sale. If you'd like to sell and don't yet have it, email shaqqani@duck.com to request seller access. (As section 1 says, the badge itself is only an internal marker, not an endorsement — it is a permission, not a claim about you.)
3. Plant material and agricultural law
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 apply default restrictions to listings based on the plant type a seller chooses and the state they ship from. These are transcribed from the National Plant Board's State Law & Regulation Summaries, the reference compiled by the state plant regulatory agencies themselves, and each restriction cites the quarantine or statute it comes from.
Those summaries state that they are for informational purposes only, are not necessarily complete, and are not legally binding — and neither is our transcription of them. They are a convenience. They are not legal advice, not a guarantee that a permitted shipment is lawful, and they do not make us responsible for your compliance. They may be more restrictive than the law requires, or may fail to cover a rule that applies to you.
Beyond those defaults we do not check any of this and we cannot advise you on it. Complying with the rules that apply to what you ship, and where, remains entirely yours as the shipper. 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.
4. Listings, auctions and offers
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.
5. Payments, fees and payouts
Payments are processed by Stripe or by PayPal, depending on which the seller has set up and which the buyer chooses at checkout. We never receive or store your card number — it goes directly to the processor, under that processor's own terms. Sellers must complete the processor's onboarding, including its identity verification, before they can be paid.
Listing is free. During our introductory period of 6 months from launch, the selling fee is 0%. No listing fee, no platform fee, no final value fee. When that period ends, the standard selling fee of 2% of the item price (never of shipping) applies, 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. This is Stripe's fee and not ours.
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.
6. Shipping, returns and refunds
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.
We strongly recommend that sellers insure every package and ship only with a tracking number, and that the tracking number be entered on the order so the buyer can follow it. Tracking is the only record either party has that an item was actually dispatched and delivered: a seller who ships without it will usually be unable to prove delivery in a dispute or a payment chargeback, and a buyer who agrees to an untracked shipment gives up the same evidence. Insurance is what makes a package that is lost, destroyed or stolen in transit recoverable at all.
FigStead does not provide, arrange or underwrite shipping insurance, and is not a party to the carriage contract. Any insurance or declared-value coverage is bought by the seller from the carrier, and any claim for loss or damage in transit is the seller's to file, subject to that carrier's own deadlines, evidence requirements and exclusions — most carriers limit or wholly exclude perishable and live plant material, so read the policy before relying on it. Loss or damage in transit does not create a claim against FigStead, and declining to insure or to use tracking is the seller's own commercial decision and risk.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, FigStead is not responsible for packages that are lost, delayed, damaged, mis-delivered or stolen in transit, nor for the condition of any item on arrival. We are a venue: we list the item, take the payment and pass it on. We do not take possession of, inspect, pack, handle or ship anything sold here, and we are not the agent of either party to the sale. The sale contract is between the buyer and the seller alone, and disputes about a transaction are to be worked out between the buyer and the seller — directly and in good faith first, and failing that with the carrier, the payment provider, or through whatever remedies the law gives them against each other. Section 7 sets out that route in full.
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.
7. When something goes wrong
FigStead does not mediate, arbitrate, investigate or resolve disputes between buyers and sellers, and will not take sides in one.
This is not indifference. We never take possession of the goods and never inspect them, so we have no way to know whose account of a transaction is true. A platform that never sees the plant cannot responsibly rule on whether it arrived dead, arrived mislabelled, or arrived at all. We will not pretend otherwise.
Where a transaction goes wrong, your remedies are these:
- Contact the other party first. Most problems are a misunderstanding, and most sellers would rather fix one than carry a complaint. Use the messaging on the order.
- Then your payment provider.If you paid by card, your rights run against your card issuer through the chargeback process — contact the bank that issued the card. If you paid by PayPal, use PayPal's own buyer-protection and dispute process. These systems exist precisely for this, they are run by the party that actually holds the money, and they are where a payment dispute belongs.
- Then law enforcement, where a crime has been committed. If you believe you have been defrauded — payment taken with no intention of shipping, a fabricated listing, a stolen identity — that is a police matter, and you should report it to your local law enforcement and, where relevant, to the appropriate consumer protection authority. We will respond to properly issued legal process.
Do not expect FigStead to recover your money, replace your plant, adjudicate your claim, or serve as a witness to a transaction we did not observe. We have no fund for this, no insurance covering it, and no factual basis to decide it.
Reporting rule-breaking is different from asking us to resolve your transaction.The “Report a problem” button exists so we can police this site — remove listings, suspend accounts and shut out members who defraud people or break these terms. Please use it for exactly that. It is not a claims process: reporting someone does not open a case, does not entitle you to a refund, and does not put us under any obligation to you or to them. We act on reports when we choose to, in our own interest in keeping the site usable, and we may decline to act or to explain ourselves.
Nothing here limits any right you have that cannot be waived under the consumer law of your state, and nothing here stops you pursuing the other party by whatever legal means are available to you.
8. Conduct
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.
We protect our sellers, and there is no room for bad-faith buying. A seller who ships a live plant has already spent the money and the time before a buyer has done anything but click a button — that imbalance is exactly what bad-faith buying exploits, and we treat it as seriously as we treat seller fraud.
Winning a bid or accepting an offer and then not paying, refusing to accept a correctly delivered package, returning a package without the seller's agreement, or filing a knowingly false chargeback or claim are examples — not an exhaustive list. Any pattern of not acting in good faith toward a completed or agreed purchase, however it shows up, may result in a permanent ban from purchasing on FigStead, at our sole discretion and without notice.
Accepting these terms is a binding legal agreement. A buyer's obligation to see a purchase through in good faith is the mirror of a seller's obligation to ship what they listed — both sides answer to it.
9. Your content
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 shaqqani@duck.com with enough detail to identify the work and the listing, and we will remove it if the claim is substantiated.
10. Disclaimers and limits
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.
11. Disputes with FigStead — arbitration and class waiver
Please read this section carefully. It affects your legal rights, including your right to sue in court and to participate in a class action.
Except as set out below, you and FigStead LLC agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or your use of FigStead will be resolved by binding individual arbitration, not in court, administered under the rules of a recognised arbitration provider, with the seat in Illinois.
Class action waiver:claims may only be brought in your individual capacity, not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective or representative proceeding, and the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims.
You can opt out.If you don't want to be bound by this arbitration agreement, email shaqqani@duck.com within 30 days of first accepting these terms, stating your account email and that you are opting out of arbitration.
Either party may still seek injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property. Outside of that, and except for any right that cannot be waived under the consumer law of your state, you agree not to bring a claim against FigStead LLC in any court — small-claims or otherwise.
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.
This section is not negotiable, individually or otherwise. It applies on the same terms to every member. Creating an account and continuing to use FigStead is your acceptance of it as a binding legal contract, in the same way accepting any other part of these terms is.
12. Governing law
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.
13. Changes, termination and the rest
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.
14. Contact
FigStead LLC
shaqqani@duck.com