Terms of Service & Privacy Policy

Hot Horology ("we," "us") is a community-driven luxury watch marketplace based in Charlotte, North Carolina, established 2025. These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a binding agreement between you and Hot Horology, and they cover:

• The website — hot-horology.com, including every page and report on it.
• The Discord community — the Hot Horology Discord server, including the Verified Marketplace, the Open Marketplace, and every marketplace channel.
• Our services — watch authentication, servicing, the shop, and anything else we offer under the Hot Horology name.

By using the website, joining the Discord server, posting in a marketplace channel, or purchasing anything from us, you accept these Terms. If you don't accept them, don't use the services.

Discord is a separate company. Your use of Discord itself is also governed by Discord's own Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, which we don't control.

Hot Horology currently offers:

• The community marketplace. Discord channels where members list, buy, sell, and trade watches — the Verified Marketplace (vetted sellers) and the Open Marketplace (open to eligible members, with mandatory authentication on every completed sale).
• Watch authentication. In-house inspection of a watch — case, dial, hands, bracelet, movement, serial, and papers where present — with a written report sent to both parties. Required for Open Marketplace sales; also available for private transactions.
• Watch servicing and technical support. Second-generation watchmaking, handled in-house.
• The shop. Our own merchandise, sold in limited runs — see §5.

We may add, change, pause, or retire services at any time. Where a change materially affects something you've already paid for, we'll honor the purchase or make it right.

This section matters more than any other. Read it twice.

• We are not a party to member deals. A sale between two members is a contract between those two members. We facilitate, we authenticate, and we stay close to the transaction — but the deal is yours.
• We never hold, touch, or route money. We are not an escrow service, a payment processor for member deals, a broker, or a bank. Buyer and seller settle payment directly between themselves, by whatever method they agree.
• We do not insure funds or guarantee counterparties. Authentication confirms the watch. It does not make anyone honest, and it does not make us responsible for how your counterparty behaves.
• We do not appraise and we do not set prices. Sellers ask what they choose. A watch passing authentication says nothing about whether it's worth the asking price. Do your own research before you offer.
• The watch remains the seller's property until it reaches the buyer. When a watch is with us for authentication, we hold it on the seller's behalf and ship on the seller's instruction, confirming the delivery address with the buyer before anything moves.

Verified is not a guarantee. The Verified role means we have checked an identity. It is not a statement about how someone trades, not an endorsement of any deal, and not insurance. Verified members are subject to every rule here and can be removed like anyone else.

Where authentication is required or requested:

• Fee: $150 per completed transaction, paid by the seller, plus both shipping legs billed to the seller. Whether the seller passes any of that on to the buyer is between the parties; our invoice goes to the seller.
• Turnaround: two business days from receipt of the watch, plus shipping time each way.
• Report: sent to buyer and seller at the same time.
• If the watch doesn't pass: we pause and contact both parties before anything moves. The watch returns to the seller unless the seller instructs otherwise. The fee is not refunded, and the seller pays return shipping.
• Shipping to us: the seller must insure the watch in transit for its full value with signature required on delivery. Risk of loss in carrier transit sits with the shipping party and their carrier/insurer.

What an authentication report is: our professional opinion, based on physical inspection by our watchmakers, that the watch matches its description and shows no signs of counterfeiting or undisclosed replacement parts at the time of inspection. It is not a warranty of future condition, not a service guarantee, not a valuation, and not an offer to purchase.

We sell our own merchandise — pins, apparel, and similar goods — at hot-horology.com/shop. These are our goods, sold by us. They are not member listings, so §3 does not apply to them: for a shop order we are the seller, and the contract is between you and us.

• Who can buy. Some runs are open to anyone; others are limited to members of the Hot Horology Discord. Where an item is members-only, its page says so and we check it at checkout — you'll need to sign in with Discord and be in our server when you pay. Being in the server costs nothing. If you leave or are banned before a members-only order ships, we may cancel the order and refund it in full.
• Limited stock and buying limits. Quantities are limited, and an item may cap how many one buyer can take; any cap is shown on its page. Starting checkout holds your unit for a short window; if payment isn't completed in that window the hold is released and the unit returns to stock. A stock figure on the page is the best count we have at that moment, not a promise that the item is still there when you pay.
• Price and payment. Prices are in USD and shown on the item page. Payment is taken at checkout by Stripe. If we can't fulfil an order after payment — an oversell, a damaged run, anything else — we cancel it and refund it in full; that refund is our entire liability for an order we don't fulfil.
• Shipping. We ship to United States addresses only. Any shipping cost is shown before you pay and depends on the destination zone you select — pick the zone that matches your delivery address, because we check the address against it before shipping. Delivery timings are estimates, not guarantees.
• Returns. Once an order ships the sale is final — no returns and no exchanges for change of mind. That does not cut into your rights under the law: if an item arrives damaged, defective, or isn't what you ordered, contact us within 30 days of delivery and we'll replace it where stock allows or refund it. Before an order ships, ask us to cancel and we'll refund it in full.
• Taxes. Shop prices are exclusive of any applicable sales or use tax — see §8.

• Age. You must be at least 18 years old and legally able to enter contracts to trade in the marketplace or purchase our services.
• Marketplace trading is US-only. Both parties to a marketplace transaction must be located in the United States.
• Discord requirements. Trading requires a Discord account at least 30 days old, server membership of at least 7 days, and completed onboarding. One account per person — alternate accounts used to trade, vouch, or evade a ban result in a permanent ban of every linked account.
• No trading on behalf of banned members, and no selling, renting, or lending your account.

The full conduct rules live in the Open Marketplace Rules. The short version of what earns a permanent ban on first offence:

• Replicas, fakes, or franken watches represented as genuine; stolen goods; undisclosed replaced or aftermarket parts
• Completing a marketplace deal off-book to skip authentication
• Fabricated or borrowed photos, altered documents, fake papers, shill bidding, invented competing offers
• Impersonating a member, moderator, or Hot Horology staff
• Taking payment and not shipping, or shipping something other than what was sold
• Sharing another member's personal information, ever, including in a dispute

Enforcement

• First minor breach: warning and listing removal. Repeat: marketplace access removed for 30 days. Fraud or misrepresentation: permanent ban of all linked accounts and a public scam advisory naming the account.
• Moderator decisions are final. Appeals go to the appeals channel — once, in writing. If you've been permanently banned, email appeals@hot-horology.com instead.
• We may suspend or terminate access to the website, the server, or any service at our discretion to protect the community, and immediately for any breach of these Terms.

Disputes between members

If a deal goes wrong, open a private report thread before posting anything publicly. We review evidence, contact both sides, and act where the evidence supports it. We cannot recover money, compel refunds, or arbitrate one person's word against another's. If you've been defrauded, report it to your payment provider, local police, and IC3 — early, because deadlines are shorter than people expect.

• Payments to Hot Horology (authentication, servicing, shop orders, and other invoiced work) are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your full card number.
• Prices are in USD and, unless stated otherwise on an invoice, exclusive of any applicable taxes. You are responsible for any sales, use, or similar taxes that apply to your purchase.
• Fees are non-refundable except as stated in these Terms or required by law. The authentication fee, in particular, is earned when the inspection is performed — pass or fail. Shop orders have their own refund and cancellation terms in §5.
• Payments between members are their own affair (see §3). We recommend methods with buyer protection; pressuring a counterparty onto an irreversible payment method after agreeing to another is a bannable offence.

Links to third-party sites — eBay, partner storefronts, payment services, Discord itself — take you to services we don't operate. Their terms and privacy policies apply there, and we're not responsible for their content, pricing, or conduct. A link is a reference, not an endorsement.

Ours

The Hot Horology name, flame mark, website, authentication reports, and all original content are our property, protected by intellectual-property law. Don't reproduce or exploit them commercially without written permission. Brand names of watchmakers mentioned on the site (Rolex, Tudor, and others) belong to their owners; we are not affiliated with or endorsed by them.

Yours

You keep ownership of content you post — listings, photos, messages. By posting it in the community or submitting it to us, you grant Hot Horology a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, display, and reproduce it as needed to operate the services (showing your listing, processing a dispute, publishing a scam advisory where our rules allow). You're responsible for what you post: it must be accurate, yours to post, and lawful.

Authentication reports are prepared by us and remain ours; both parties to the transaction receive them for their use in that transaction.

The services are provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We don't warrant that the website will be uninterrupted or error-free, that market data is complete or current, or that any member will perform their side of a deal.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Hot Horology and its founders, staff, and moderators will not be liable for:

• Losses arising from transactions between members — including fraud, non-payment, non-delivery, or misdescription by a counterparty;
• Decisions made in reliance on an authentication opinion;
• Loss or damage occurring in carrier transit;
• Indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or lost profits, however arising.

Our total aggregate liability for any claim relating to the services is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid Hot Horology for the service giving rise to the claim in the twelve months before it arose, or (b) $150.

Some jurisdictions don't allow certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including for fraud or willful misconduct on our part.

Indemnification. You agree to indemnify Hot Horology against claims arising from your breach of these Terms, your listings and content, or your transactions with other members.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute with Hot Horology that we can't resolve informally will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and you consent to their jurisdiction.

Talk to us first. Before filing anything, email info@hot-horology.com with a description of the issue and give us 30 days to work it out. Most things are fixable by two reasonable people over email.

You agree that any claim must be brought within one year of when it arose, to the extent the law allows, and on an individual basis — not as part of a class action.

This is a living document. We update it as the services evolve. When we do, we change the effective date above, and for material changes we'll announce in the Discord server. Continuing to use the services after a change means you accept it. If you don't, stop using the services — that's your remedy.

If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest stands. Our failure to enforce a provision isn't a waiver of it. These Terms, together with the Open Marketplace Rules and any service-specific terms agreed when you engage us, are the entire agreement between us.

Contact: info@hot-horology.com · Ban appeals: appeals@hot-horology.com · Hot Horology, Charlotte, NC.

Transparency is one of our three pillars, and it applies to your data too. This policy explains what Hot Horology collects across the website and the Discord community, why, and what we do with it.

The short version:

• We never sell your personal information. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone.
• We don't run advertising trackers. Our website analytics are self-hosted and cookieless.
• We collect what the service needs — an address to invoice a client, a serial number to authenticate a watch — and not much else.

When you browse the website

• Aggregate analytics — page views, referrers, and country-level location, measured by a self-hosted, cookieless analytics instance (Umami) that we run ourselves. It doesn't identify you and doesn't follow you to other sites.
• Server logs — our hosting provider (Vercel) processes IP addresses and request data as part of serving the site, as any web host does.

When we invoice you

• Billing details — for authentication, servicing, and business clients: name, email, and billing address, kept in our customer records and in Stripe, along with what was billed and payment status.
• Payment — handled by Stripe. Your card number goes to Stripe, not to us; we receive confirmation of payment and the billing details Stripe shares with merchants.

When we authenticate or service a watch

• Names and contact details of the parties, shipping addresses (we confirm the delivery address with the buyer before shipping), tracking numbers, and details of the watch itself — reference, serial number, condition, photographs — which go into the authentication report.

When you order from the shop

• Discord identity — where an item is members-only, signing in to order links the order to your Discord account ID and username so we can check you're in the server and show you your own orders.
• Order and delivery details — what you ordered, the delivery name and address you give at checkout, the shipping zone you selected, payment status from Stripe, and the tracking number once it ships.

In the Discord community

• Public activity — your username, listings, and messages in marketplace channels, visible to the community by design.
• Dispute submissions — if you open a report thread: usernames involved, DM history, payment records, tracking, and photos you submit. These threads are private to the parties involved and the moderation team.
• Verification — if you apply for the Verified role, the identity information we request to check who you are.

• Delivering the services — issuing invoices, producing authentication reports, coordinating shipping.
• Transactional email — invoices, reports, and correspondence about work you've asked us to do. We don't add clients to a marketing list without asking.
• Running the business — internal notifications, accounting, reconciling our records with our payment processor.
• Community safety — investigating reports, enforcing the marketplace rules, detecting alternate accounts and ban evasion, and publishing scam advisories where the evidence supports it.
• Improving the site — aggregate, anonymous analytics only.
• Legal compliance — keeping the records tax and commercial law require, and responding to lawful requests.

We share personal information only with the service providers that run the business, with the people a transaction requires, and where the law demands. Never for advertising, never for sale.

Recipient	What & why
Stripe	Payment processing, invoicing, and customer billing records.
Vercel	Website hosting — processes requests and server logs.
Supabase / Upstash	Our databases — customer and invoice records.
Email providers	Deliver our transactional email (invoices, reports, correspondence).
Discord	The community runs on Discord's platform under Discord's own policies. Signing in to the shop tells us your Discord account ID, username, and server membership.
Carriers	Names, addresses, and tracking for watch and shop shipments.

Sharing a transaction requires

• Authentication reports go to both parties of the transaction, at the same time.
• Serial numbers may be disclosed by a seller to a serious buyer per the marketplace rules; we include them in reports to the parties.

Scam advisories

Where a member is banned for fraud or misrepresentation after our review, we may publish an advisory naming the Discord account so the community can protect itself. Advisories name accounts and describe conduct; we do not publish members' personal information — doing so is against our own rules, and we hold ourselves to them.

Legal

We disclose information where required by law, subpoena, or court order, to report suspected crime (including to payment providers and law enforcement in fraud cases), or to protect the rights and safety of the community, our members, or ourselves. If the business is ever sold or merged, records transfer with it under this policy's protections.

• No advertising cookies. No third-party trackers.
• Analytics are cookieless. Our self-hosted Umami instance counts visits without cookies, fingerprinting, or cross-site tracking, and the data stays on infrastructure we control.
• Essential cookies only. The site sets cookies solely where a feature needs them — for example, staff sign-in to our own admin area. Blocking them breaks only those features.
• Fonts. Some pages load typefaces from Google Fonts, which involves a standard web request to Google's servers.

Affiliate link tracking: eBay links on our website may carry eBay Partner Network parameters. Those parameters tell eBay the click came from us; what happens after you land on eBay is governed by eBay's privacy policy. We receive aggregate commission reporting, not your eBay identity.

Retention

• Invoices and payment records — kept as long as tax and accounting law requires.
• Authentication reports and dispute records — retained because they exist to be a durable record; dispute evidence is kept while it remains relevant to enforcement and legal defense.
• Analytics — aggregate and non-identifying, retained for trend history.
• Everything else we keep only as long as it's needed for the purpose it was collected.

Security

The site runs over HTTPS. Payment credentials live with Stripe, not us. Our own systems use least-privilege, restricted API keys, and admin access is password-protected and limited to staff. No system is perfectly secure — if we learn of a breach affecting your personal information, we'll notify you as the law requires.

Email info@hot-horology.com to:

• Access a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
• Correct information that's wrong;
• Delete your information — we'll honor it except where we're legally required to keep records (completed transactions, invoices, tax records) or where retention is necessary to enforce our rules or defend legal claims;
• Object to a use of your data you think oversteps this policy.

We respond to verifiable requests within 30 days and never discriminate against you for making one. If your state's privacy law grants you additional rights, we honor those too. Deleting your Discord account or leaving the server stops community data collection going forward, though messages you posted publicly may persist on Discord's platform under Discord's policies.

Children. The services are for adults. They are not directed to children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their information — if we learn we have, we'll delete it. Marketplace participation requires being 18 or older.

Changes. Like the Terms, this policy is a living document. Updates change the effective date above; material changes get announced in the Discord server. Continued use after a change means acceptance.

Contact. Privacy questions and requests: info@hot-horology.com · Hot Horology, Charlotte, NC.