Terms of service

These terms are the agreement between you and BuildLink — "we", "us", the operator of the BuildLink marketplace. They apply every time you use the site, whether you are browsing, buying, or selling.

By creating an account or placing an order you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the marketplace.

Clause 8 adds terms that apply only if you sell here. They are in addition to everything else, not instead of it.

How we handle personal information is set out in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.

BuildLink is a marketplace. The contract to supply goods or to carry out work is between you and the vendor. It is not between you and us. What we provide is the platform, the checkout, and the hold on your money until the order is complete.

In practice that means:

• The vendor owns their listing — its description, price, stock and delivery promise — and is responsible for it.
• The vendor is responsible for the goods being as described and of satisfactory quality, and for the work being done properly.
• We verify a vendor’s registration, identity and settlement account before they can list anything. That is a check on who they are; it is not a warranty of what they sell.
• We can and do remove listings, suspend vendors and refund customers. Doing so does not make us the seller.

Where these terms give you a right against us — the hold, refunds, the complaints route in clause 15 — that right is ours to honour and we honour it directly.

You need an account to order. The details on it must be accurate, and kept accurate — a delivery address that is out of date is the single most common reason an order goes wrong.

• You must be at least 18 years old to buy or to sell.
• One account per person. A vendor account belongs to the business, and the person who opens it warrants they may act for it.
• Your password is yours to keep. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you until you tell us it has been compromised.
• We may require your email address to be verified before an order is accepted.

If you think someone else has used your account, change your password from your account security page and tell us immediately — see clause 16.

A listing is an invitation to buy, not an offer. Your order is an offer to the vendor, and the contract between you forms when we confirm your payment and the order is accepted.

An order may be declined — by the vendor or by us — where:

• the item is no longer in stock, or the vendor cannot reach your address
• the price or description was obviously wrong (see clause 5)
• we cannot verify the payment, or the account placing it
• accepting it would breach these terms or the law

If an order is declined after you have paid, you are refunded in full and we do not charge you for the attempt.

A basket holding items from more than one vendor becomes more than one order. It is one payment, but each vendor fulfils separately, with its own delivery fee and its own delivery window — the cart and checkout show this before you pay.

All prices are in Nigerian Naira and include VAT where VAT applies. Delivery is priced by each vendor and shown, with the delivery window, before you pay. Nothing is added to your total after the last screen.

You can pay by bank transfer, by card, or on delivery where the vendor offers it.

The hold is the core of this agreement. Money you pay is held by us. It does not belong to the vendor when you pay it — it becomes owed to them only once the order is confirmed delivered.

• Until release, the money is refundable to you under clause 7.
• An order that is never delivered is refunded. You do not have to recover it from the vendor.
• We take a commission from the vendor on completed orders. It is deducted from what the vendor is paid — it is never added to your total.

If a price is obviously wrong — a decimal point in the wrong place, a figure no supplier in the market would sell at — we are not required to supply at it. We will tell you and refund you in full rather than quietly ship a different quantity.

The vendor delivers, or arranges delivery. The fee and the estimated window shown against a listing are the vendor’s, and they are the ones you are agreeing to.

Windows are estimates in working days from dispatch, not guarantees. They assume the address you gave is correct and that somebody can receive the goods there.

• Give an address a delivery vehicle can actually reach, and a phone number that will be answered on the day.
• Where you can, inspect the load before you sign for it.
• Report anything wrong, short or damaged within seven days of delivery — clause 7.

Risk in the goods passes to you on delivery. Where a delivery fails because nobody could receive it or the address was wrong, the vendor may charge to attempt it again.

Before the vendor dispatches, you can cancel any order and be refunded in full.

After delivery, tell us within seven days if the order is wrong, damaged, short, or not as it was described, and we will arrange the return and the refund. Send photographs where you can — for a damaged load they settle it in one message rather than five.

Some things cannot be returned once delivered unless they are faulty or not what was ordered:

• bulk aggregates that have been tipped, mixed or spread — sand, granite, laterite
• cement and similar materials once opened, used or exposed to weather
• items cut, mixed, blended or made to your own measurements
• services that have already been carried out

Approved refunds go back to the method you paid with. We release them as soon as the return is approved; how quickly the money lands after that depends on your bank, which is outside our control.

A vendor may offer a returns policy more generous than this one. None of them may offer less, and where a vendor’s policy conflicts with this clause, this clause applies.

This clause applies in addition to the rest of these terms if you hold a vendor account.

• You must be a real business or trader, and complete our checks — business registration where it applies, identity documents, and a settlement account in the business name — before you can list anything.
• You are the seller. Your listings must be accurate, your stock real, and your prices ones you will honour.
• We charge commission on completed orders at the rate shown in your dashboard. We give notice before a rate changes.
• Payouts are made to your verified settlement account and to no other account. Changing it re-opens verification.
• You may not take a customer off the platform, ask to be paid outside the checkout, or use a customer’s details for anything beyond fulfilling their order.
• You must dispatch what you sold, within the window you published, or cancel promptly so the customer is refunded.

We may pause your listings, hold a payout, or close a vendor account where there is a pattern of undelivered orders, evidence of fraud, or an unresolved dispute of significant value. Where we hold a payout we tell you what would release it.

Your tax, your licences, and any regulatory approval your goods or your trade require remain yours. We do not obtain them for you and do not check that you hold them beyond the documents listed above.

Whether you are buying or selling, you must not:

• list, buy or attempt to buy anything illegal, counterfeit, stolen, or unsafe to supply
• misrepresent who you are, or use somebody else’s identity or business documents
• use the marketplace to move money that has nothing to do with a genuine order
• interfere with the site, probe it, scrape it at scale, or attempt to reach data that is not yours
• harass or threaten a customer, a vendor, a delivery driver, or our staff

We act on these. Accounts are suspended, listings are removed, and conduct that appears criminal is reported to the authorities with the records we hold.

Anything you upload — listing photographs and descriptions, business documents, messages — must be yours to upload and must be accurate.

You keep ownership of it. You give us a non-exclusive licence to store, display and reproduce it so far as is needed to run the marketplace, including showing your listings in search results and promoting them on the site.

We may remove content that breaches these terms or the law, and we may do so before explaining why.

We work to keep the marketplace running, but we do not promise it is never unavailable. Maintenance, a fault, or an outage at a payment or hosting provider can take it offline.

We may change, add to, or withdraw features. An order already placed runs under the terms in force when it was placed, whatever changes afterwards.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

Subject to that: we are responsible for operating the marketplace, taking your payment, holding it, and refunding you where this agreement says you are owed a refund. The vendor is responsible for the goods and for the work.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses arising from a vendor’s failure — lost profit, lost contracts, standing time, or delay to a construction programme. On a building site a late load is expensive, and that risk sits with the supply contract you made with the vendor, not with the platform that held the money.

Our total liability to you in connection with any one order will not exceed the amount you paid for it.

You may close your account whenever you like — write to us and we will do it. Closing an account does not cancel orders already placed or money already owed either way.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, that we are legally required to act on, or that is being used fraudulently. We tell you why, unless saying so would prejudice an investigation.

Money held against an order in progress is dealt with under clauses 5 and 7 regardless of whether the account is closed.

We may change these terms. The version in force is always the one on this page, and its effective date is at the top — currently 28 August 2026.

For a material change we give at least 14 days’ notice to the email address on your account. Continuing to use the marketplace after a change takes effect is acceptance of it.

Orders placed before a change are governed by the terms in force when they were placed.

These terms, and any dispute arising out of them, are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Talk to us first. Most disputes are a delivery that went wrong, and clause 7 settles them in days rather than months.

If we cannot resolve it between us, the courts of Lagos State have jurisdiction.

None of this removes a right you have under Nigerian consumer protection law, including your right to complain to the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission.

Email support@buildlink.ng, or call 0803 123 4567 during support hours (8am–8pm, Monday to Saturday).

By post: BuildLink, 12 Adeola Odeku Street, Victoria Island, Lagos.

For anything about personal data — access, correction, deletion, or a complaint — see the privacy policy, which sets out the same routes and the regulator you can escalate to.