Acceptable Use

1. The rule behind all the rules

Pata works because a shopper can believe what a storefront says. Everything below is a way of breaking that, and the response is proportionate to how badly it does.

2. Do not sell these

• Counterfeit goods, or anything passed off as a brand it is not.
• Stolen goods.
• Medicines, supplements or medical devices you are not licensed to sell.
• Firearms, ammunition, explosives and weapons.
• Illegal drugs, and equipment sold for taking them.
• Wildlife products, ivory and protected species.
• Alcohol or tobacco without the licence your county requires.
• Sexual services, or sexual content of any kind.
• Other people’s personal data, or lists of phone numbers.
• Anything the law of Kenya forbids you to sell.

3. Do not misrepresent

• Photographs of goods you are not selling.
• Prices you will not honour, or a price that changes once someone arrives.
• Stock levels you know are wrong.
• A shop location that is not where the shop is.
• A KRA PIN, licence or certification that is not yours.
• Claiming an approval, verification or partnership you do not have.

4. Do not game the signals

Ratings, reports and search position are how customers choose. Interfering with them harms every honest trader on the platform.

• No ratings written by you, anyone who works for you or your family about your own shop.
• No paying for ratings, and no rating a shop you never bought from.
• No reporting a competitor to have their listing pulled.
• No second account to get around any of the above, or around a suspension.

Merchant accounts cannot rate or report at all, which removes most of this temptation by design rather than by policing.

5. Do not misuse the messaging

• No SMS or WhatsApp to people who did not give you their number.
• No ignoring someone who asks you to stop.
• No pretending a message comes from Pata, a bank, M-Pesa or KRA.
• No links to phishing pages or malware.

6. Do not abuse people

• No threats, harassment or intimidation of customers, traders or the Pata team.
• No hate speech, and nothing targeting someone’s ethnicity, religion, gender, disability or sexuality.
• No publishing someone’s personal details to expose them.

7. Do not attack the platform

• No probing, scraping at scale, or trying to reach data that is not yours.
• No automated account creation, and no automating the till.
• No interfering with anyone else’s use of the service.

If you find a security flaw, tell us rather than using it. We would rather hear it from you.

8. What happens

The response fits what happened, and in most cases starts small:

• A warning - for something fixable: a wrong description, a stale price, an inaccurate pin. It names the problem, reaches you as a notification, and stays on your record. Your shop keeps trading.
• Content removed - a listing or a rating comes down while the shop stays open.
• Suspension - the shop goes offline. For repeated warnings ignored, or for anything in sections 2, 5 and 6 that puts people at risk.
• Referral - fraud, stolen goods and threats go to the police, whatever else we do.

Every decision is made by a person, recorded, and can be appealed by replying to the warning or raising a support ticket.

9. Reporting something

Any shopper can report a shop or a rating from the storefront, and must give a reason. Reports reach a moderator, not the trader - you are not exposed to the person you reported.

Vilcom Networks Ltd, Nairobi, Kenya. Contact details for privacy requests are published on the Help Centre; the desk number and data-protection address must be filled in before launch.

See also the Terms of Service and the Merchant Agreement.