Cyprus: what the partner terms actually give a restaurant
Restaurant operators in Cyprus are unusually well served on paper, and the paper is worth reading because it cuts both ways. Foody publishes General Terms and Conditions for Business Users covering suspension, notice, complaints and ranking, and it operates its complaint system under European Regulation 2019/1150 rather than as a courtesy. The same document disclaims the platform’s own liability for interruption of the Website or Application, and it lists two months without orders as a ground for suspension or deletion, which is the asymmetry an operator should see before signing rather than afterwards.
What does the complaint system give me?
A written route with a stated deadline, which is more than most partner relationships offer anywhere.
The terms describe an Internal System for handling partner complaints, provided free, covering “conduct or measures of the Company related to the Services that affect the Partner and its activity”. A complaint must describe the issue “with reference to specific details”, and Foody undertakes to answer in writing “no later than 30 working days from its receipt”.
That last commitment is the useful part. It gives you a date to hold the platform to, and quoting it in your first message puts the deadline on the record from the start.
What is the requirement about specific details doing?
Filtering, and it is the reason most complaints of this kind fail.
A complaint that says availability has been poor is not answerable. One that names the site, the dates, the hours and what a customer would have seen is. The clause is asking for the second kind, and it is a fair request.
Which means the evidence has to exist before the complaint. Portals do not keep an availability history and sales cannot infer one, so the dates have to come from reading the storefront. A complaint written to the standard clause 10.2 sets needs hours and addresses, and that is the record Kitchain (kitchain.co) builds while nobody is arguing about anything.
Which clause actually costs a restaurant its listing?
5.4.6, and it is about inactivity rather than about anything you did wrong.
Clause 5.4 lists, indicatively, reasons for suspension, cessation or deletion. Among them, 5.4.6 is failure to receive orders through the platform for at least two months in a way that makes the partner appear inactive or unavailable. Nothing in that clause asks why the orders stopped.
Clause 3.4 runs the other way and is worth reading beside it. The partner accepts that website availability can be affected by external factors, and agrees the company bears no liability for interruption of operation or improper operation of the Website, the Application or its operating system.
What does 5.4.6 mean for a listing nobody is watching?
That a silent failure and a deliberate exit look the same to the clause.
A storefront that stops being orderable and is not noticed produces no orders, and after two months it satisfies the description in 5.4.6 without anybody at the restaurant having decided anything. The clause does not distinguish a site that chose to stop from a site that was switched off and never checked.
That is the specific reason a Cypriot listing should not be left unobserved for a quarter, and it is a sharper argument than any general one about lost trading.
Is there an availability figure in the contract?
There is one, and it is easy to point at the wrong thing.
Annex III of the terms is the Technical Interconnection Agreement, and it applies to partners connected to the company through a dedicated data exchange bridge. Its clause 2.3 requires the partner to keep the availability rate of its own ordering system at least 99.9 percent per year, alongside a response time not exceeding 500ms and required security protocols.
That is a technical service level on the partner’s integration endpoint. It is not a promise about whether the storefront is orderable to a customer, and treating the two as the same number is the mistake to avoid when quoting this document.
What about suspension and notice?
Clause 5.3 gives the company a right to suspend or temporarily cease part or all of its services on five days prior written notice where a serious reason exists, and immediately in cases such as malicious software, a data breach, illegal or inappropriate content or fraud.
Behind them sits the regulation. A statement of reasons is owed “prior to or at the time of the restriction or suspension taking effect”, on a durable medium, and ending the service altogether requires “at least 30 days” notice with reasons.
So a Cypriot operator has both a contract and a regulation to cite, which is the strongest combination available in any market we have looked at.
What should I do with all this?
Read clause 5.4 before you need it, and make sure no listing can go dark for two months unnoticed.
That is the practical instruction the document actually supports. The complaint route in 10.2 is there for arguing after the fact. The inactivity ground in 5.4.6 is the one that removes you without an argument at all.