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Terms of Service

‌Effective Date: October 26, 2026‌

These Terms of Service represent a legally binding agreement between you, the user and customer accessing and using our e-commerce platform, and HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED, the registered operator of the website accessible at www.hitchoninternational.com. By browsing our site, creating a user account, placing orders, or engaging with any of our platform features, you confirm that you have read, fully understood, and agreed to be bound by every provision outlined in this document. As a New Zealand-based retailer dedicated to providing durable, thoughtful small garden tools for plant parents, balcony gardeners, and backyard hobbyists, we have designed these terms to ensure a fair, transparent, and secure experience for every member of our growing gardening community. If you do not agree to any clause within these Terms of Service, you must cease all access to our website immediately.

1. Official Business Information

The full legal entity operating this platform is HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED. You may contact our team for all enquiries related to these terms at any time using the following verified contact details:

  • Registered Physical Address: 10 Syd Bradley Road, Avonhead, Christchurch 8042, New Zealand
  • Official Contact Email: [email protected]
  • Customer Service Telephone: +64 3 357 8979
  • Official Website Domain: www.hitchoninternational.com

All communications sent through the above official channels will be recognized as formal, valid notice for all matters referenced in these Terms of Service.

2. Eligibility to Use Our Platform

To create an account, submit orders, and access the full features of our e-commerce website, you must meet all of the following eligibility requirements:

  1. You are at least 18 years of age, or have reached the legal age of majority in your jurisdiction of residence, with full legal capacity to enter into a binding contract with our company.
  2. If you are placing orders on behalf of a minor for gardening tools designed for children such as our Kids Garden Trowel product lines, you confirm that you are the parent or legal guardian of the minor, and you accept full legal responsibility for all supervised use of our products by the minor.
  3. You are not located in any region where accessing or using our e-commerce platform is prohibited by local laws, regulations, or trade restriction rules.
  4. You do not hold multiple duplicate user accounts on our platform, nor have you previously been restricted or banned from using our services due to violations of prior terms of service.

We reserve the full right to reject new account registrations, or suspend existing accounts, if we have reasonable grounds to believe a user fails to meet these eligibility criteria.

3. Intellectual Property Rights

All content published on www.hitchoninternational.com is the exclusive intellectual property of HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED, and is protected by New Zealand and international copyright, trademark, and trade dress laws. This protected content includes, but is not limited to: all original product photography of our trowels, pruning shears, plant labels, watering cans and other gardening supplies, all written product descriptions, the original “Tiny Tools, Big Joy” brand slogan, website interface designs, custom graphic assets, brand logos, video demonstration content, all instructional gardening guide posts published on our blog, and all software code that powers the functionality of our platform.

You are granted a limited, personal, non-transferable, non-exclusive license to access, view, and make temporary copies of this platform content solely for your personal, non-commercial use to browse our store, compare products, and make purchase decisions. You are strictly prohibited from reproducing, distributing, publicly displaying, modifying, reselling, or using any of our intellectual property content for commercial purposes without our explicit written prior consent. You may not scrape our website content through automated tools, embed our product images on third-party e-commerce platforms, or register domain names that include our “HITCHON” brand trademark or confusingly similar variations that could mislead external users.

If you submit original user-generated content to our platform, including product reviews, photos of your purchased HITCHON gardening tools in use in your personal garden, or public comments on our community features, you grant us a perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide, sublicenseable right to use, edit, reproduce, and display this content for marketing, product improvement, and educational gardening content purposes, without requiring additional compensation to you. You confirm that any content you submit does not infringe the intellectual property, privacy, or other legal rights of any third party.

4. User Account Responsibilities

When you create a user account on our website, you agree to provide accurate, complete, and up-to-date contact information including your full legal name, valid email address, active contact phone number, and correct residential address. You are fully responsible for updating your account details promptly if any of this information changes in the future, to avoid missed order notifications or failed delivery issues.

You are also solely responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account login password, and for all activities, order submissions, and actions that take place under your account. You must immediately notify our support team via our official contact email if you become aware of any unauthorised access to your account, or any security breach that compromises your login credentials. HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED will not be held liable for any financial loss, order disputes, or negative outcomes that arise from your failure to protect your account security, or from your delayed notification of unauthorised account access.

We reserve the right to permanently suspend or terminate your user account immediately, without prior notice, if we identify any activity that violates these Terms of Service, including fraudulent order submissions, attempts to manipulate our pricing or discount systems, repeated abusive behaviour towards our customer support team, or unauthorised automated scraping of our website content.

5. Product Information and Pricing Accuracy

We make every reasonable effort to ensure that all product listings on our website are fully accurate, including clear descriptions of the tool specifications, material composition (such as stainless steel construction, eco-friendly bamboo and birch wood materials, weatherproof metal for plant labels), product dimensions, and functional features. The vast library of gardening tools available on our platform, from our folding hand trowels, ratchet pruning shears, extendable tree pruners, to our full range of watering can and plant label sets, are all photographed to show their true appearance, though minor variations in colour may appear due to individual user screen display settings that are outside of our control.

All product prices displayed on our website are quoted in Euros, and are subject to modification at any time without prior notice, though any price changes will never affect orders that you have already successfully paid for and confirmed prior to the price update. While we implement multiple layers of validation to prevent pricing errors, occasional typographical mistakes may occur where a product is listed at an abnormally incorrect price far below its actual fair market value due to system glitches or manual input errors. In this scenario, we reserve the right to cancel your confirmed order for the mispriced product, and issue a full 100% refund back to your original payment method, even if the order has already received an automated confirmation notification. We will contact you promptly to explain the situation and present suitable alternative product options, if applicable.

We do not guarantee that every product listed on our website will always be in stock. If a product you order runs out of stock unexpectedly after your payment is processed, our team will notify you within 2 working days to inform you of the expected restock timeline, offer you a suitable equivalent product substitution of matching or higher value at no extra cost, or process a full immediate refund for the out-of-stock item.

6. Order Acceptance and Payment Terms

When you submit an order on our website and successfully complete the payment process, you will receive an automated initial order confirmation email that acknowledges our receipt of your order details. This automated notification does not constitute formal legal acceptance of your order. Formal acceptance of your order is only confirmed when our warehouse team conducts pre-dispatch quality checks for your items and sends you a separate order dispatch notification with your unique parcel tracking number.

All payments for products on our platform are processed through PCI DSS compliant third-party payment gateways. By submitting a payment, you confirm that you are the authorised user of the selected payment method, and that you have full legal authority to complete the transaction. You agree to pay all applicable order totals, including displayed product prices, calculated shipping fees, and any relevant New Zealand goods and services taxes that apply to your purchase. All successful transactions will generate a full digital tax receipt that we will send to your registered email address automatically after your order is dispatched.

You are prohibited from using stolen payment card details, fraudulent payment methods, or payment information that does not belong to you to submit orders on our platform. We reserve the right to cancel any order that shows clear signs of payment fraud, and report suspicious fraudulent activity to relevant local law enforcement authorities when necessary.

7. User Prohibited Activities

When accessing and using our e-commerce platform, you explicitly agree that you will not engage in any of the following prohibited activities:

  • Uploading, transmitting, or distributing any malicious software, viruses, harmful code, or automated bot scripts that may damage our website server infrastructure, disrupt our normal business operations, or compromise the data security of other platform users.
  • Making false, fraudulent, or malicious claims against our products, submitting fake product reviews to harm our brand reputation, or intentionally abusing our return policy by submitting repeated refund-only requests that violate our published Refund and Returns Policy.
  • Impersonating any other individual, business entity, or member of our HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED staff, to mislead other users or extract unauthorised information from third parties.
  • Using our platform to post, share, or distribute unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, defamatory, or obscene content that violates the legal rights of other individuals or groups.
  • Circumventing any access control, security measure, or geofencing rule implemented on our website, to access restricted administrative areas, or attempt to harvest personal information of other registered users without explicit consent.
  • Reselling or distributing our purchased HITCHON gardening tools through third-party platforms without our prior official resale authorization, to engage in unauthorized commercial arbitrage activity.

Any confirmed violation of these prohibited rules may result in immediate permanent account termination, restricted future access to our website, and pursuit of all available legal remedies to recover any losses incurred by our company due to your improper activities.

8. Third-Party Links and Services

Our website may include select hyperlinks that direct you to external third-party websites, such as our courier partner tracking portals, trusted gardening community resources, or social media profile links. We do not exercise any control over the content, privacy policies, or operational practices of these external third-party websites, and we do not assume any liability or responsibility for any damages, losses, or disputes that arise from your use of these external services. We strongly recommend that you carefully review the terms of service and privacy policy of any third-party site you visit after leaving our official platform.

9. Limited Warranties and Liability Limitation

All HITCHON branded gardening tools sold through our website carry a 12-month limited warranty against confirmed manufacturing defects, counting from the date that you receive your ordered parcel. Within this warranty period, if your product fails to function as advertised due to flaws in materials or factory workmanship under normal intended home gardening use, you may contact our support team with clear photographic proof of the defect, and we will arrange a free replacement unit for you, at no extra product or standard shipping cost.

This limited warranty does not cover damages caused by accidental drops, improper misuse, excessive force applied outside of the product’s design specifications, intentional modification of the tool structure, regular wear and tear from extended daily use, or damage caused by extreme weather conditions. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable New Zealand consumer protection laws, we make no other explicit or implied warranties for our products, including implicit warranties of merchantability or fitness for a specific non-intended use.

Under no circumstances will HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED, its directors, staff, or supply chain partners be held liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages arising from your use of our website or our products, including lost gardening yields, lost profits, or unplanned incidental costs that exceed the total monetary value of the specific order you placed on our platform.

10. Modifications to Terms and Service Updates

We reserve the full right to revise, update, or amend these Terms of Service at any time to reflect changes in our business operations, new applicable regulatory requirements, or the launch of new platform features such as community gardening events or loyalty program functions. When we make material changes to these terms, we will update the effective date listed at the top of this document, publish a prominent notification on the homepage of www.hitchoninternational.com, and send a formal change notification to all registered users via their account-linked email address. Your continued access to our website and submission of new orders after the revised terms go into effect will be deemed as your full acceptance of all updated clauses.

11. Governing Law and Dispute Resolution

These Terms of Service are governed, interpreted, and enforced in full accordance with the laws of New Zealand. Any dispute, claim, or disagreement arising from your use of our platform, your product purchase, or the interpretation of these terms will first go through a good-faith informal negotiation process between you and our support team for a period of 30 calendar days, to reach a mutually satisfactory resolution efficiently. If the dispute cannot be resolved through this informal negotiation, the matter will be submitted exclusively to the jurisdiction of the courts located in Christchurch, New Zealand.

12. Final General Clauses

These Terms of Service, alongside our published Privacy Policy, Refund and Returns Policy, and Shipping Policy, constitute the complete, full legal agreement between you and HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED, and supersede all prior informal verbal or written agreements related to your use of our e-commerce platform. If any individual clause within these terms is found to be invalid or unenforceable by a competent court of law, the remaining all other clauses will remain in full legal force and effect. Our failure to enforce any strict performance of any provision in these Terms of Service will not constitute a formal waiver of that clause, or our right to enforce that provision at a later date.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns regarding any part of these Terms of Service, please do not hesitate to contact our team at [email protected], and we will provide you with a clear detailed explanation within 2 working days.