Terms of service

1. Who this is between

These terms are between 14728114 Canada Inc., carrying on business as Nifty Design Solutions (“we”, “us”), the provider of the Umbrella application, and the merchant who installs it (“you”). Installing or using Umbrella means you accept them.

14728114 Canada Inc. is a corporation incorporated under the laws of Canada. Nifty Design Solutions is its trade name. It carries on business in the Province of Ontario, at Broadacre Dr, Kitchener, Ontario N2R 0S5, Canada.

If you are accepting on behalf of a company, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and “you” means that company.

These terms sit alongside your agreement with Shopify. Where Shopify’s terms govern your store, your billing or the App Store itself, they apply to those things and we do not purport to change them.

Shopify is a trademark of Shopify Inc. Umbrella is an independent application built for Shopify and is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Shopify Inc.

2. The service

Umbrella publishes per-storefront sitemaps, canonical URLs and a robots.txt template for a Shopify store serving several brands across several domains. It also generates storefront blocks into your theme, and can install the files it generates with your approval — see clause 8. It is provided as a subscription through the Shopify App Store.

We may change how the service works, add features and retire ones that are not used. If a change materially reduces what your plan provides, we will tell you before it takes effect and you may cancel.

3. Your account

You need an active Shopify store to use Umbrella, and Umbrella’s access to it is granted and revoked by you through Shopify. We request only the permissions the app uses; you can review them at install and withdraw them by uninstalling.

4. Your responsibilities

• The accuracy of the storefront, domain and brand configuration you enter.
• Your theme, including any change you approve the app to make and any change you make yourself, and any customisation you make to the blocks it generates.
• Owning, or having the right to publish, the content Umbrella lists in your sitemaps.
• Keeping your Shopify account secure. Anything done through a session Shopify authorises is treated as done by you.

5. Fees, trial and billing

Subscriptions are billed by Shopify, not by us. Charges appear on your Shopify invoice and are governed by Shopify’s billing terms. We do not process payments and never receive your card details.

Prices are stated in USD on the pricing page and exclude any taxes Shopify applies at checkout. Every plan includes a ten-day free trial; cancel before it ends and you are not charged.

Upgrades, downgrades and cancellation are made from your Shopify admin. Shopify handles proration. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing period you have paid for, and we do not pro-rate refunds for a partial period — but if the product did not do what the pricing page says, write to us and we will ask Shopify to refund you.

We may change prices. Existing subscribers get at least 30 days’ notice by email before a change applies to them, and may cancel instead.

6. Plan limits

Each plan states a number of connected storefronts, a number of URLs across all sitemaps, and how often sitemaps rebuild. These are limits on the service, not merely guidance.

They are enforced as follows:

• Reaching the storefront limit prevents connecting a further storefront. It does not disconnect one you already have.
• Exceeding the URL limit means your generated sitemaps list up to your plan’s allowance and omit the remainder. Omitted URLs are restored to your sitemaps when you move to a plan that covers your catalogue.

You acknowledge the effect of the second: because Umbrella’s robots.txt template suppresses Shopify’s own sitemaps, a URL omitted from ours is not advertised to search engines by any sitemap. The affected pages remain live on your storefront and reachable by any link to them; they are not listed for discovery.

We will notify the store owner by email when your URL count exceeds your plan’s allowance, stating the number of URLs affected. The app displays your count against your allowance at all times. If you do not wish to move to a larger plan, you may remove Umbrella — in which case clause 8 applies and you should also remove its robots.txt template, restoring Shopify’s own sitemap.

7. What we do not promise

Umbrella does not promise any search ranking, traffic level, indexing outcome or commercial result. Search engines decide independently what to index, when, and how to rank it. No software controls that, and any product telling you otherwise is guessing.

What Umbrella does is make your sitemaps, canonical URLs and robots.txt correct and specific per storefront. That is a prerequisite for being understood correctly, not a guarantee of any result. Nothing on our website, in the app, or in support correspondence should be read as a guarantee of a search outcome.

8. Changes to your theme

Nothing is written to your theme that you have not approved. Umbrella holds the read_themes and write_themes permissions and the per-app approval Shopify additionally requires before an app may write theme files. When you approve a change, the app writes the files you approved and no others.

When the app makes a change for you, it shows you the exact content of every file before and after, and it copies any file you already had into your own theme, under snippets/umbrella-…-backup.liquid, before replacing it. Settings carries an Undo that restores those copies and removes the files the app added. Use it before you uninstall. Shopify revokes the app’s access the moment it is removed, so after that nothing of ours can reach your theme, including to undo.

Your own theme backups remain yours to keep, as with any change to theme code. The copies described above are a convenience inside your theme, not a backup service, and we do not warrant that they are sufficient for your purposes. If you would rather a change were reviewed on a duplicate theme first, our setup service can do that, with your permission and on an account you can revoke.

If you remove Umbrella without undoing its changes, remove its robots.txt template as well. Left in place with the app gone, it suppresses Shopify’s own sitemap while nothing publishes a replacement. We cannot do this for you once the app is uninstalled, for the reason above.

9. Ownership

We own Umbrella, its source and its brand. You own your store, your content, your catalogue and your theme.

The Liquid that Umbrella generates into your theme is yours to keep, edit and use, with no time limit and no obligation to keep subscribing. That is deliberate: it is code sitting in your files, and it continues to work after you uninstall.

You may not copy, resell, reverse engineer or create a competing service from the app itself, as distinct from the code it generates for you.

If you tell us how to improve the product, we may act on it without owing you anything for it.

10. Acceptable use

• Do not publish sitemaps for content you do not own or have the right to publish.
• Do not use Umbrella to misrepresent the origin of content, or to operate storefronts designed to deceive shoppers about who they are buying from.
• Do not attempt to access another merchant’s data, interfere with the service, or circumvent plan limits.
• Do not use the service in breach of applicable law, or of Shopify’s own terms.

11. Availability and support

We aim for high availability and do not currently offer a contractual uptime guarantee. Generated sitemaps are served from object storage independently of the application, so an application outage does not stop search engines fetching your sitemaps.

Support is through the contact form on our website. We aim to respond within one business day. That is a target, not a contractual service level.

12. Suspension

We may suspend the service, with notice where practicable, if your use threatens the security or stability of the service or another merchant, if a payment fails, or if we are required to by law. We will restore it as soon as the cause is resolved.

13. Ending the agreement

You may uninstall at any time. Uninstalling preserves your configuration so that reinstalling does not mean starting over; Shopify then sends an erasure request about 48 hours later, at which point your records and published sitemap files are deleted. To erase everything immediately, use Settings › Remove Umbrella data before uninstalling.

We may end this agreement on 30 days’ notice, or immediately for a material breach of clause 10. If we discontinue the product, we will give at least 30 days’ notice and refund any period already paid for and not delivered.

Clauses 9, 14, 15, 16 and 18 survive termination.

14. Disclaimer

To the fullest extent permitted by law, and except as expressly stated in these terms, Umbrella is provided “as is” and we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error free.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. If you use Umbrella as a consumer rather than in the course of a business, your statutory rights are unaffected.

15. Limitation of liability

To the extent permitted by law, neither party is liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, anticipated savings or data, however caused.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with these terms is limited to the greater of (a) the fees paid for Umbrella in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, whether billed through Shopify or by us directly, and (b) one hundred Canadian dollars (CAD $100).

16. Indemnity

You will indemnify us against claims arising from content you publish through Umbrella that you did not own or have the right to publish, and from your breach of clause 10.

17. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change is material we will update the date above and notify installed merchants by email at least 30 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use Umbrella after that date means you accept the change; if you do not, cancel before it applies.

18. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable therein, and the courts of the City of Kitchener have exclusive jurisdiction, except that either party may seek injunctive relief in any competent court. If you deal with us as a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory rules in your country of residence.

19. Contact

The contact form on our website reaches us for anything in these terms, including notices.

Formal legal notice may also be sent to niftydesignsolutions@gmail.com, or by post to 14728114 Canada Inc., Broadacre Dr, Kitchener, Ontario N2R 0S5, Canada. We give notice to you at the email address on your Shopify account.

If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest continues in force. Our not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it. These terms, with the privacy policy, are the whole agreement between us about Umbrella.

20. Third-party services

Umbrella is built on services we do not run: Shopify itself, and the providers that host the application, hold its data, serve the generated sitemap files and deliver our service email. Each one is named, with what it does, in the privacy policy. That table is the list — we keep it in one place so there is only one thing to keep current, and we update it before adding a provider rather than after.

Each is engaged under its own terms. We choose them and we answer to you for the service, subject to clauses 14 and 15. What we cannot do is control them: if one is unavailable, changes how it works, or withdraws something we use, Umbrella is affected. Clauses 21 and 22 say what follows.

21. When a standard or a provider changes

What Umbrella writes — sitemaps, canonical URLs, a robots.txt template — follows formats and directives defined by other people. Those definitions change. A directive is deprecated, a specification is revised, Shopify changes how a theme behaves, or a tool such as Search Console changes what it accepts or reports.

When that happens we may change what Umbrella generates, including removing something it used to emit, so that the output stays valid under the current definition. A change made for that reason is not a breach of these terms. Where it affects Liquid already sitting in your theme, we will tell you what needs replacing; whether the app can replace it for you depends on clause 8. If it materially reduces what your plan provides, clause 2 applies.

This is not clause 7 restated. Clause 7 is about search engines deciding for themselves what to do with a correct file. This clause is about the published rules for writing that file changing underneath it. We control neither.

22. Force majeure

Neither of us is in breach of these terms for failing to perform, or for performing late, where the cause is outside our reasonable control. That includes the failure of a provider under clause 20, a failure of networks or infrastructure we do not run, a change in law, industrial action, fire, flood and war.

Whoever is affected will say so as soon as it is practical, and will keep the delay as short as they can. This does not excuse paying money already due. If the cause runs for more than 30 days, either of us may end the agreement on notice, and we will refund any period already paid for and not delivered.