Terms of use

1. This agreement

These terms are the agreement between you and Carlots.ng ("we", "us") covering your use of carlots.ng. By browsing the site, registering an account or posting a listing you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the site.

Our privacy policy forms part of this agreement and explains what we do with personal data.

2. Who may use the site

You must be at least 18 and legally able to enter into a contract. If you are posting on behalf of a company or a dealership, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and "you" in these terms means both you and it.

3. Your account

• Register with your own, working e-mail address and give accurate details. A listing is not published until the address is confirmed.
• One person or business is responsible for an account. Keep the password to yourself; tell us at once if you think someone else has it.
• You are responsible for everything posted from your account.
• We may disable an account that breaks these terms, as described in clause 11.

4. What Carlots.ng is, and what it is not

We provide the noticeboard. We are not the seller, the buyer, an agent, a broker, an escrow service or a party to your transaction. Every sale, rental and payment is directly between the people involved, and the contract is theirs.

We do not inspect vehicles, verify documents, confirm mileage, check whether a vehicle is stolen, encumbered or has outstanding customs duty, or vet the people who advertise. Listing content comes from sellers and we do not guarantee that any of it is accurate, that the vehicle exists, or that the seller may lawfully sell it.

So, as a buyer, before any money moves:

• see the vehicle in person, and inspect it or have a mechanic do it;
• check the papers against the vehicle — the chassis and engine numbers, the registration documents, and the customs papers on an imported car;
• meet in a public place in daylight, and take someone with you;
• pay nothing in advance — no deposit, no "clearing fee", no "agent fee", no transfer to secure a vehicle you have not seen. A request for money before an inspection is the single most common fraud on any classifieds site, and no genuine seller needs it.

If a listing or a message looks fraudulent, report it through the contact form. We act on reports, and it is the fastest way to get a bad advert down.

5. What you may post

• Vehicles only, in the categories the site offers: cars for sale, car rental and motorcycles. One vehicle per listing, and no duplicate listings for the same vehicle.
• Only a vehicle you own or are authorised to advertise, that you may lawfully sell or rent, and that is not stolen, cloned or subject to an undisclosed charge or unpaid duty.
• Accurate details. The year, mileage, condition, accident history and price must be true, and the price must be the one in Naira that you will actually accept. A deliberately low price to attract enquiries is a breach of these terms.
• Photographs of the actual vehicle, up to seven per listing, each up to 50 MB, as JPEG, PNG or GIF. Do not use a manufacturer's or another seller's photograph to stand in for the car you are advertising.
• Nothing unlawful, abusive, obscene, discriminatory or misleading, no malware, and no other person's personal data.
• No competing adverts. Do not use a listing, a photograph or an enquiry reply to advertise another website, another marketplace or an unrelated business.
• A listing is published for a limited period — by default a year from posting, and shorter in some categories — after which it expires.

6. Your content, and the licence it carries

You keep ownership of everything you post. The photographs, text and details in your listing remain yours.

To be able to run the site and promote it, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable and sub-licensable licence to host, store, copy, resize, crop, compress, watermark, adapt, display, publish, distribute and communicate the content of your listing — including your photographs, the vehicle details, the asking price and the seller name shown on the advert. We may use that licence:

• to publish and display your listing on the site, and to let search engines index it;
• to produce the aggregate price guides at pricing and the price checker, which draw on asking prices across many listings;
• to market and advertise Carlots.ng itself — which means your photographs and listing details may appear on our social media channels, in paid advertising on other platforms, in e-mail, on banners and in printed material, usually with the make, model, year, price and city alongside.

The licence lasts while your listing is on the site and continues afterwards for two limited purposes only: material we have already distributed and cannot recall, and our own archives. It does not let us sell your photographs on as stock, and it does not let us license them to an unrelated business for its own advertising.

You promise that you took the photographs or have the right to license them to us, that nothing in your listing infringes anyone's copyright, trade mark or privacy, and that you have the consent of any identifiable person in a photograph. If you do not want your listing used in our marketing, tell us through the contact form and we will stop and withdraw what we can; material already printed or already served by an advertising platform cannot always be recalled.

7. Promoted listings

You can pay to promote a listing so that it is shown ahead of others for a period. What you buy is the placement, for the period stated when you pay — not enquiries, not views and not a sale. We do not refund a promotion because it produced fewer enquiries than you hoped.

• Prices and durations are the ones shown at the time you pay, in Naira, and payment is taken by a licensed payment provider.
• If we fail to deliver the placement you paid for, tell us and we will run it again or refund it — your choice.
• If we remove a promoted listing because it breaks clause 5, the promotion ends with it. We will refund the unused part where the breach was a genuine mistake, and will not where the listing was fraudulent.
• Promotion does not buy moderation immunity, a verification badge, or any suggestion that we have checked the vehicle.

Nothing here removes a right you have under Nigerian consumer-protection law.

8. Advertising on the site

Carlots.ng carries third-party advertising, including Google AdSense. Those adverts are selected and served by the advertising provider, not by us. We do not endorse the advertisers or their products, and a transaction with one is between you and them. Section 7 of the privacy policy explains the cookies involved.

9. Things you must not do

• Scrape, crawl beyond what robots.txt allows, bulk-download or copy the listings, the photographs or the price data, by any automated means, whether for a competing service or anything else.
• Harvest e-mail addresses or phone numbers from the site, or use an enquiry route to send marketing, bulk messages or anything unsolicited.
• Register accounts automatically, post the same listing repeatedly, or manipulate the ordering of listings or the price guides.
• Interfere with the site or try to gain access to an account, a server or data that is not yours. Doing so is also an offence under the Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention etc.) Act 2015, and we report what we think is criminal.
• Impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your connection to a dealership or a brand.

10. Our material

The site itself — its software, design, text, layout, logos and the compilation and arrangement of its listings and price data — belongs to us or to our licensors. You may link to our pages and share a listing. You may not copy, reproduce or reuse the site's own material, or extract a substantial part of its database, without our written permission. The Carlots.ng name and logo are ours and may not be used without it.

11. Moderation, removal and suspension

We may edit, hide, refuse or delete a listing, and suspend or close an account, where we reasonably believe these terms have been broken, where a listing is fraudulent or unlawful, or where we are required to. Where it is practical and lawful we will tell you why and give you a chance to put it right; where a listing is plainly fraudulent we will take it down first.

You can hide any of your listings at any time, and that is how you take one down: a hidden listing leaves the search results, the category pages and our sitemap immediately, and only you can see it. You cannot delete a listing you have published. Once a car has been advertised here, the advert, the enquiries it drew and anything you paid to promote it are part of the record — a record a buyer who is mid-deal with you, and we, may both need. If a published listing has to come off the site outright, ask us through the contact form and say why.

You can close your own account at any time. That does remove your listings, their photographs and your conversations; clause 6 explains what survives.

12. If something infringes your rights

If a listing uses your photograph, your trade mark or your personal data without permission, tell us through the contact form with the URL of the listing, what has been used, and why you hold the rights to it. We will take down material we are satisfied is infringing, and we will tell the person who posted it that we have.

13. What we do not promise

The site is provided as it is. We work to keep it available and accurate, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, that listing content is true, that a seller or buyer is genuine, or that any particular listing will produce an enquiry or a sale.

The price guides and the price checker are estimates, calculated from asking prices advertised on this site. They are not a professional valuation, not an offer, and not a statement about any individual vehicle. Do not rely on one as the basis for a purchase, a sale price or an insurance claim.

14. Our liability

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

Subject to that, we are not liable to you for:

• any loss arising out of a transaction, dealing or dispute with another user, including money paid to a seller or a vehicle that turns out not to be as described;
• loss of profit, loss of a sale, loss of goodwill, or any indirect or consequential loss;
• loss caused by the site being unavailable, or by a listing being delayed, not published, or removed under clause 11.

Where we are liable, our total liability for all claims connected with your use of the site is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim — and where you paid us nothing, which is the case for ordinary use of the site, our liability is limited accordingly.

15. Your indemnity

If someone brings a claim against us because of something you posted — a photograph you did not have the right to use, a vehicle you were not entitled to sell, a statement in your advert that was untrue — you will cover the losses, reasonable costs and legal fees we incur as a result.

16. Ending this agreement

You end it by closing your account and stopping use of the site. We may end it by closing your account under clause 11. Clauses 6, 10, 14, 15 and 18 continue to apply afterwards.

17. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. When we do, the date at the top of the page changes and the previous wording stays in our version history. A change that materially affects your rights — the licence in clause 6, the liability limits, the promotion terms — will be announced on the site rather than made quietly, and continuing to use the site afterwards means you accept the new version.

18. Law and courts

This agreement is governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and the courts of Nigeria have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it.

19. General

• If a clause turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stands.
• If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms. We may transfer ours if the business is sold or reorganised, which does not reduce your rights.
• These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about the site.

Getting in touch

Questions about this page, requests about your own data, and reports about a listing or a photograph all reach us the same way: through the contact form. It helps to tell us the URL of the listing or account involved.

See also our privacy policy, which covers what we do with the personal data in your account and your listings.