Draft, pending review
Terms
These clauses are written and complete, and they are waiting on review by an Australian lawyer. Read them as a full statement of how we operate. They are not a binding agreement until this page carries a version number.
Clause 1: What Saikyou is, and is not
Saikyou is a submission service. We receive your cards, check them in, prepare and package them, and send them in a batch to a third-party grading company such as PSA, BGS, TAG or CGC. When they come back we photograph them and post them to you.
We are not a grading company. We do not grade cards, we do not employ graders, and we have no say in what grade your card receives. Every grade on a card you submit through us is assigned by the grading company, under their standards and their process.
Anything on this site that describes a likely outcome is our opinion about somebody else’s decision. It is never a statement of what your card will grade.
Clause 2: No grade is guaranteed
We do not guarantee any grade, any grade range, or that a card will be graded at all. A grading company may return a card ungraded, with a qualifier, or with an outcome you did not expect, and none of those is a failure of this service.
A grade is the grading company’s decision, and as far as we are concerned it is final. We cannot appeal it, review it, or have it reconsidered for you. Some graders sell their own review or reholder services; if you want one you deal with them directly, and the fee is yours.
Clause 3: The cards you send us
By submitting cards you confirm that you own them, or that you have the owner’s authority to submit them, and that they are not stolen, not the subject of a dispute, and not knowingly counterfeit or altered.
If we have good reason to believe a card is stolen or counterfeit, we may refuse to send it on, hold it, and report it where the law requires. We will tell you when that happens unless we are not permitted to.
We do not take ownership of your cards at any point. They are yours the entire time they are with us.
Clause 4: Declared value
You give each card a declared value when you submit it. It should be your honest estimate of what the card is worth in its current, ungraded condition.
Declared value does two things. It decides which service tier the grading company requires, which affects what you pay. And it is the most we will pay for that card if it is lost or damaged while we are responsible for it.
We publish a cap on declared value per card and per order, and the current caps are shown on the submission form as you use it. We may refuse a card above the cap, or ask you to arrange your own cover for it.
Understating a value to reduce a fee can invalidate a claim on that card, and can cause the grading company to charge more once they see it. Overstating one costs you money for nothing.
Today those caps are A$500 per card and A$2500 per submission.
Clause 5: Prices and payment
Our prices are published on this site. The price for your submission is fixed the moment you place the order, and later price changes do not apply to it. Prices for future submissions can change at any time.
Payment is by bank transfer in Australian dollars, using the reference shown on your order. Your cards do not join a batch until the payment has cleared.
Some charges cannot be known in advance and are billed at cost when they arise. Return postage is one. A grading company’s upcharge, when they assess a card as worth more than the tier you paid for, is another. We tell you the amount and the reason before we ask for it, and your cards wait safely with us until it is settled.
Clause 6: The pre-screen
A pre-screen is a paid opinion, given before your cards go to a grader. We look at the card and tell you what we see and whether we would send it.
It is not a grade, not a prediction of a grade, and not a guarantee of anything. We are not graders, so a pre-screen is our judgement about somebody else’s decision. Cards we would have sent come back ungraded sometimes, and cards we flagged grade well sometimes.
When a pre-screen raises something, we ask what you want to do and we stop until you answer. You can send the card anyway, or have it returned ungraded. The fee is not refunded either way, because the opinion is the thing you bought.
If we cannot reach you, the clause on unanswered submissions below applies.
Clause 7: What we do not do to your cards
We do not authenticate cards. We do not clean, press, trim, restore, recolour or otherwise alter them, and we do not send cards to anyone who does.
We handle cards to prepare and package them, and we photograph them. That is all.
We cannot detect every alteration or counterfeit, and nothing in our handling should be read as confirming that a card is genuine or unaltered.
Clause 8: Turnaround times
Every turnaround figure we publish is an estimate. Most of the wait is the grading company’s queue, which they control and which changes without notice.
We do not offer a guaranteed completion date and we do not pay compensation for a slow one. If a service pauses at the grader while your cards are with us, we tell you, and we tell you what your options are.
Clause 9: Insurance
Our insurance position, including what is covered and to what limit, is published on this site and on the submission form. Where we have not published a figure, do not assume one exists.
Insurance we hold covers cards while they are in our care. It does not cover cards in the post in either direction, and it does not cover them while they are with the grading company, who carry their own terms.
Postage cover is separate and is bought per parcel. What you buy for the parcel you send us is your decision and your cost.
No insurance position is published yet.
Clause 10: Loss, damage and claims
If a card is lost or damaged while we are responsible for it, our liability for that card is limited to its declared value, or to the cap we publish, whichever is lower.
Tell us within 14 days of the cards arriving back with you, or within 14 days of us telling you something has gone wrong. Photographs help. We hold our own photographs of every card at check-in and at return, and you can see them on your account.
We are not responsible for damage that was already there when a card reached us, for a grade you are unhappy with, for damage caused by the grading company or a courier while the cards were not with us, or for the ordinary consequences of grading, such as a card being sealed into a holder.
This clause does not limit anything that cannot be limited under Australian Consumer Law. See the last clause on this page.
Clause 11: Getting cards to us, and back
You post your cards to us, at your cost and your risk. Until a parcel is signed for at our address it is not in our care, and a parcel lost on the way to us is a matter between you and your carrier. Use tracking, and pack cards so they survive being dropped.
Post only what is on your packing slip. If a parcel does not match its submission we tell you and we hold the difference safely, but an unlisted card has no declared value and is covered by nothing.
We post cards back to the address on your account, tracked and signed for, and return postage is charged at cost. Keeping that address current while a submission is open is your responsibility.
Clause 12: If we cannot reach you
Some points in the process need an answer from you: a pre-screen decision, an upcharge, a delivery address we cannot use. We email you, and we keep emailing you.
Cards waiting on an answer stay with us, stored the way every other card is. We do not charge storage.
If we have had no answer for 12 months, and we have written to you at least four times across that period, we may return the cards to the last address you gave us at your cost, or treat them as abandoned. We will always try the return first.
Clause 13: Cancelling, and refunds
You can cancel a submission for a full refund any time before your cards go to the grading company. If we already have the cards we post them back to you, and the return postage is yours.
Once cards are with the grading company the submission cannot be cancelled, because their fee is paid and the work has started.
A pre-screen that has been carried out is a delivered service and is not refunded, including when you decide not to proceed. That decision is what you paid for.
If we cancel a submission ourselves, for any reason other than something you have done, you get back everything you paid us and we cover the postage home.
Clause 14: Membership
Membership is billed monthly and can be cancelled at any time. Cancelling stops the next payment. It does not refund the current month.
Member pricing applies to submissions placed while the membership is active. A submission placed at the member price keeps that price if the membership later lapses, because the price was fixed when the order was placed.
Allowances and credits that come with a membership reset each month, and unused ones do not carry over.
Clause 15: Privacy and how we contact you
What we collect and what we do with it is set out in our privacy policy.
Email is how we run a submission, so we will email you about yours whether or not you want marketing from us. You can opt out of anything that is not about an order you have placed.
Photographs of your cards are held for our records and for yours. We do not publish a photograph of your card without your permission.
Clause 16: Changes to these terms
We can change these terms. The version that applies to your submission is the one published when you placed it, and every published version carries the version number shown at the top of this page.
A change never applies backwards to a submission already under way.
Clause 17: Which law applies
These terms are governed by the law of New South Wales, Australia, and the courts of New South Wales have jurisdiction.
Clause 18: Your rights under Australian Consumer Law
Our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law. Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies those guarantees, and where anything here conflicts with them, they win.
Among other things, you are entitled to a replacement or refund for a major failure, and to compensation for any other reasonably foreseeable loss or damage. You are entitled to have services put right if they are not of acceptable quality and the failure does not amount to a major failure.
The limits set out above apply only so far as the Australian Consumer Law allows.
The business entity and ABN behind these terms are not published yet, which is part of why this document is still a draft. Our privacy policy sits alongside these terms.