Terms of Service

1. Service Description

Forto is a software platform that helps Shopify merchants manage cross-border shipping operations: carrier rate aggregation, shipping label generation, Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) duty & tax calculation, EU Import One-Stop Shop (IOSS) VAT collection, returns management, and prepaid wallet billing.

Forto acts as a platform layer. Carrier shipments are governed by each carrier’s own terms of service (FedEx, UPS, DHL, USPS, and others). You are the shipper of record for every shipment generated through Forto.

When a label is bought on Forto’s own carrier account, Forto contracts the carriage with the carrier in its own name and supplies that shipment to you; you remain the sender of the goods. A label bought on your own carrier account is between you and that carrier. Forto’s prices exclude VAT; the VAT that applies to your business is set out in section 1 of the Charges page.

2. Account & Acceptance

You must accept these Terms before using the Forto platform. Acceptance is recorded with your shop domain, the version of the Terms accepted, and the date and IP address of acceptance. We will notify you when the Terms are updated; continued use after notification constitutes acceptance of the new version.

2.1 Verifying Your Business

Before Forto buys labels for you on its own carrier accounts, acts as your seller and taxpayer of record under §6.4, or acts as your IOSS intermediary under §7, it confirms who your business is. You give your company registration number; Forto reads your company’s details and the people registered on it from the official company register, checks your VAT number with the EU VAT number service, and checks your business and those people against the EU, UN, UK and US sanctions lists. On Pro and Enterprise the person responsible for your business also verifies a photo ID through Stripe. Labels you buy on your own carrier account are not affected.

Forto checks the company register again each month and the sanctions lists whenever they change, and asks you to confirm your details once a year. If you have not confirmed them 14 days after that date, or a later check finds your company closed, in bankruptcy or in liquidation and it is not resolved within 14 days, labels on Forto’s carrier accounts and Forto acting as your taxpayer pause until it is. A possible sanctions match pauses them at once while Forto reviews it. Forto may refuse or end the service for a business it cannot verify or that is subject to sanctions (§10). You confirm that the details you give are correct and that you are allowed to act for the business.

3. Subscription Plans & Billing

3.1 Plans

• Starter — $0/month. No recurring fee.
• Growth — $39/month (or $374.40/year).
• Pro — $199/month (or $1,910.40/year).
• Enterprise — not available for self-service purchase. Enterprise is agreed with Forto in writing (an order form setting the plan, the modules taken, the monthly fee, the coverage line under §6.4 and the term) and invoiced separately.

Who bills your plan and Forto’s fees. If you install Forto from the Shopify App Store without having paid Forto first, Shopify bills your plan and Forto’s fees (the markup, the per-label fee, the calculation fee, the VAT-carried fee and overage) on your Shopify bill, under Shopify’s terms for app charges; these plans are monthly. If you paid Forto directly before installing, or signed an Enterprise order form, Forto bills them through Stripe. Either way, postage, duties, import taxes and carrier corrections are passed on at cost from your prepaid wallet (§4); Shopify never bills them.

3.2 Recurring Charges

A plan Shopify bills renews each Shopify billing cycle and is charged with your Shopify bill. A plan Forto bills renews monthly on the calendar day matching your initial signup, or yearly, until canceled; your stored payment method on file is charged automatically each billing cycle. Failed renewals are retried by Stripe Smart Retries; persistent failure after 21 days results in subscription downgrade to Starter and may suspend access to paid features.

3.3 Cancellation

A plan Shopify bills is changed or canceled on Shopify’s plan page for Forto, or ends when you uninstall the app, as Shopify’s billing provides. A plan Forto bills is canceled from the Forto admin panel; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. Forto does not refund partial-period subscription fees.

3.4 Plan Limits & Overage

Each plan includes a monthly number of orders. An order counts once: as a label when it ships on a label purchased through Forto, or, on Enterprise contracts that ship cross-border on their own carrier account, as a quoted order when Forto calculated its landed cost at checkout. On plans that bill overage, each order past the monthly limit is charged at the per-unit rate published on the pricing page at the time, after the calendar month closes: on your Shopify bill or from your wallet, depending on who bills your plan (§3.1). Each plan also includes a number of product variants Forto classifies; variants past that number are priced at an estimated duty until they carry an HS code, and no fee is charged for them.

4. Prepaid Wallet & Funding

4.1 Funding Source

All postage for shipping and return labels, DDP duties and IOSS VAT are funded from your prepaid Forto wallet. Where Forto bills your plan, Forto’s fees are taken from the wallet too. You add funds by attaching a payment card via Stripe and either initiating a manual top-up or enabling auto-charge.

4.2 Required Minimum Wallet Balance

You are required to maintain a minimum wallet balance of $100 USD (or equivalent currency) at all times while using Forto. This minimum acts as the working surcharge buffer for post-shipment carrier corrections (see §5) and protects against shipment-creation interruptions. Forto reserves the right to pause label generation if your balance falls below this minimum and your auto-charge cannot restore it.

4.3 Auto-Charge Authorization

By enabling auto-charge, you authorize Forto to charge your stored card off-session, without further user interaction, in the amount and at the threshold you configure (defaults: $200 increment when balance drops to $100). Auto-charge is enabled automatically when you attach a card. You can disable auto-charge at any time in your wallet settings; doing so will pause label creation when your balance is insufficient.

4.4 Wallet Refunds

Voided labels and canceled shipments are refunded back to your wallet balance, not to the funding card. Wallet balances are non-transferable and not redeemable for cash except on account closure, where any remaining balance is refunded to the most recent funding source within 30 days.

5. Shipping Labels & Surcharge Buffer

5.1 Label Cost Deduction

When you generate a shipping label on Forto’s carrier account, Forto deducts the carrier cost from your wallet immediately and sets part of your balance aside as a reserve against later corrections on that shipment: 5% of the carrier cost for each label, and for a DDP label also a share of the estimated duties and taxes. A reserve is not a charge. It stays in your wallet and is released when the shipment settles, or after 60 days for the label share and 30 days for the duties share. The shares are set out in section 7 of the Charges page. Reserves still held when you close your account are returned once they are released.

Surcharges that the carrier issues against the shipment after delivery (dimensional weight re-rating, address corrections, fuel adjustments, delivery area surcharges, oversize fees, residential delivery surcharges, and other carrier-imposed adjustments) are handled per §5.2–§5.4 below.

5.2 Carrier Audit Window

Carriers may re-rate or invoice surcharges within their audit window:

• FedEx, UPS, USPS, DPD, Canada Post, Royal Mail, and most express carriers: 21 days
• DHL Express: 14 days
• DHL eCommerce and economy services: 30 days

Surcharges that arrive within the carrier’s audit window are handled per §5.3 below.

5.3 Surcharge Auto-Debit

When a carrier issues a surcharge against a shipment, Forto will:

• First, deduct the surcharge from your available wallet balance;
• If your wallet balance is insufficient, automatically charge your stored card via Stripe (off-session) for the amount needed to cover the surcharge and maintain the required minimum balance.

You will receive a wallet transaction record for every surcharge debit and email notification for any stored-card auto-debit. By using Forto for label generation, you authorize this auto-debit pattern for the duration of the carrier’s audit window.

5.4 Late-Arriving Surcharges — 90-Day Liability Window

You acknowledge that all upfront shipping rates and duty estimates displayed by Forto are estimates subject to carrier audit and reclassification. Carriers may issue surcharge invoices, re-rate shipments, or correct addresses for up to 90 days after the shipment date. You are liable for any such carrier-verified adjustments within this window.

Forto reserves the right to deduct late-arriving carrier-verified surcharges from your wallet balance, and to charge your stored payment method on file for any deficit, for the full 90-day liability period after the original shipment date. We will not charge for any surcharge Forto cannot verify with carrier invoice data.

6. DDP Duties & Taxes

Merchant Liability. You are the importer of record for every shipment unless Forto acts as seller and taxpayer of record for it under §6.4, or explicitly acts as Importer of Record under a separate written agreement. Duties and taxes assessed by destination customs authorities are your responsibility, subject to §6.3.

When DDP is enabled, Forto estimates duty and tax at checkout and reserves the estimated amount in your wallet. After the carrier’s broker invoices the actual duty amount (typically within 7–30 days of delivery), the difference between estimate and actual is reconciled against your wallet. Underpayment auto-debits per §5.3, except where §6.3 makes it Forto’s; overpayment is refunded to your wallet.

The carrier’s fee for paying duties. When a carrier pays duties or taxes at the border for a DDP shipment, it charges its own fee for doing so (a brokerage, disbursement or duty-forwarding fee). Forto passes that fee on at the price the carrier charges Forto, without adding to it: it is included in the duties and taxes your customer pays at checkout, drawn from your wallet with them, and reconciled against the carrier’s invoice in the same way. Where no duty or tax is paid at the border, no such fee applies. Forto’s own fee for DDP is its calculation fee, a percentage of the duties and taxes set out on the Charges page.

Forto does not guarantee that customs will charge exactly the estimate. Duty estimates are computed using tariff data and product classification; actual duties depend on the classification at the port of entry and may differ from estimates. Who pays a difference is set out in §6.3.

6.3 Who Pays a Difference

When customs charges more duty and tax for a parcel than was collected at checkout, Forto compares what customs used with what the label declared and what checkout quoted, and the difference is paid by the party whose input caused it:

• Forto pays when it comes from a customs code Forto chose for your product, including a code Forto suggested and you confirmed; from Forto’s tariff data or duty calculation; or from Forto’s own copy of your product information being out of date.
• You pay when it comes from information you provide: a product’s price, its country of origin, or a customs code you entered yourself.
• A difference within rounding, one where customs changed a decision it had made before, and one whose cause the carrier’s or broker’s records do not show or that cannot be split between us, is reconciled against your wallet under §6. You can ask Forto to review it; where the customs papers show the cause was Forto’s, Forto credits what you paid back to your wallet.

A difference Forto pays is never taken from your wallet. Only a difference caused by information you provided counts against your account’s compliance standing. Where customs charges less than was collected, the surplus is credited to your wallet, whoever caused it.

6.4 Forto as Seller & Taxpayer of Record (Pro and Enterprise)

On the Pro and Enterprise plans, if you are established in Denmark, for a cross-border order to a jurisdiction in which Forto has activated this service, Forto may act as the seller and taxpayer of record. Where Forto holds its own tax registration there, it charges, files and remits the tax on that sale under it. Where the jurisdiction lets a seller sell before registering until its sales reach a threshold, as a US state does, Forto may sell there unregistered while its own sales there, across all stores, are under that threshold, when no tax is due on the sale. Once they reach it, your orders there proceed under your own registration or with duties and taxes payable on delivery until Forto is registered. Forto does so only within your coverage line — the goods value of your cross-border sales it covers per calendar month, in US dollars: $25,000 on Pro, and on Enterprise the line set in your order form, at any amount and priced into its monthly fee. On Enterprise the part of the line above $100,000 is open while your wallet holds the reserve the order form sets for it, or, on Enterprise billed after use, once the deposit the order form sets has been received. Before a label is bought for an order Forto sells, your wallet must hold that order's tax; on Enterprise billed after use the tax is instead recorded when the label is bought and invoiced with the week's other charges. While tax Forto has carried for you remains unpaid, Forto does not act as seller on your new orders, and resumes once it is paid. Orders beyond the coverage line, or outside the jurisdictions and product categories Forto covers, proceed under your own registration or with duties and taxes payable on delivery; no fee is charged for exceeding the line.

Your own registrations. If you already hold your own registration in a jurisdiction — your OSS registration, for example — you can give it to Forto in Settings. Orders to that jurisdiction then stay your own sales, under your number and filed by you, and Forto remains seller of record everywhere else it covers.

On the tax Forto carries under its own registration — as seller of record under this section or as IOSS intermediary under §7 — Forto charges a VAT-carried fee as a percentage of that tax (Pro 4%, Enterprise 3%, or as set in your order form). No such fee applies to tax filed under your own registration. You warrant that product classifications, declared values and shipment data you submit are accurate; tax, penalties or interest assessed against Forto because of inaccurate data you provided will be charged back to your wallet or stored card per §5.3 and §6.3.

6.5 Your Sale to Forto

When Forto is the seller of record for an order under §6.4, you sell the goods to Forto and Forto resells them to your customer. Your sale to Forto takes place immediately before Forto’s sale, as part of the same order: title passes to Forto and on to your customer at that moment, and the goods ship directly from you to your customer.

Price and settlement. Forto buys the goods, delivered, at the price your customer paid for them and their shipping, excluding the destination taxes and duties Forto charges. Forto takes no margin on the goods; its fees are those set out in these Terms and your plan. You collect your customer’s payment through your store on Forto’s behalf and keep the price of the goods and their shipping from it as payment for your sale to Forto. The taxes and duties Forto charges are Forto’s, and are drawn from your wallet when the label is created.

Danish VAT. If you are established in Denmark, your sale to Forto is a Danish sale subject to 25% VAT, which you declare on your own VAT return. Forto deducts the same VAT on its own Danish VAT return and pays it to your Forto balance once that return is settled with the Danish Tax Agency: Forto passes the VAT on, it does not advance it.

Self-billing. If you are established in Denmark, you agree that Forto issues the invoices for your sales to Forto in your name (self-billing, selvfakturering): one per calendar month, issued on its last day, in Danish kroner, numbered in Forto’s own series and marked as self-billed, listing the goods and their delivery on each order and a credit for each refund. You will not issue your own invoices for these sales. Forto sends each invoice to your contact email. If an invoice is wrong, tell Forto at legal@forto.app within 14 days of receiving it; otherwise it is accepted. Until your business details in Forto show your legal name, address and CVR number, the invoice is held and the VAT on it is not paid. Either party may end self-billing with 30 days’ notice, after which Forto no longer acts as seller of record for your orders.

Refunds and the goods. When your customer is refunded, the refunded goods — or, for a refund of an amount, the same share of the order — are credited back at the price Forto paid, on the next invoice, and the VAT on the credit is taken back from your balance on the same terms. You remain responsible for the goods themselves: their description, quality, conformity, safety and warranty. Forto passes on to you any claim your customer makes about them.

7. IOSS VAT Collection (EU Imports under €150)

When you enable IOSS VAT collection for EU-bound shipments at or under €150, Forto collects VAT from your customer at checkout via your Shopify store, holds the collected VAT in a segregated ledger, and remits VAT monthly to the Danish Tax Authority (Skattestyrelsen / skat.dk) under Forto’s Danish IOSS intermediary registration.

The EU’s €3 duty. From 1 July 2026 until 1 July 2028 the EU also charges a customs duty of €3 on each different category of goods, by tariff subheading, in a shipment of €150 or less imported from outside the EU: five T-shirts count once, a T-shirt and a watch twice. It is a customs duty, not VAT: IOSS does not cover it, and on a DDP shipment it is paid at the border with the shipment’s other duties under §6, including the carrier’s fee for paying it. Shipments between EU countries, such as from Denmark to Germany, are not imports and carry neither the duty nor IOSS VAT.

Joint Liability. You and Forto share liability for accurate IOSS VAT collection under Danish tax law as it implements EU Council Directive 2017/2455. You warrant that your product classifications, declared customs values, and shipment data submitted to Forto are accurate. Misdeclaration that results in IOSS audit findings will be charged back to your wallet or stored card per §5.3.

Acting as your IOSS intermediary (“Managed VAT”) is available on Pro and Enterprise after Forto approves your application. The VAT-carried fee under §6.4 applies to the VAT collected under Forto’s registration and is charged when the VAT is collected. The collected VAT itself is not Forto revenue and is segregated from operating funds.

8. Returns & Refused Deliveries

Return shipping labels are funded from your wallet on creation. Refused, undeliverable, or returned shipments may incur return-to-sender (RTS) fees from the carrier, which are charged per §5.3.

9. Prohibited Use

You may not use Forto to ship:

• Goods restricted or prohibited under the destination country’s import laws
• Hazardous materials, weapons, controlled substances, live animals, or human remains
• Counterfeit goods or goods infringing third-party intellectual property
• Goods sanctioned under EU, US, or UN sanctions regimes

Violation may result in immediate suspension of your Forto account and forfeiture of any wallet balance pending investigation.

10. Termination

You may close your Forto account at any time. On closure, your subscription is canceled at the end of the current billing period. Carrier surcharge liability persists for the 90-day window described in §5.4 even after closure, and any remaining wallet balance after final reconciliation is refunded to your most recent funding source within 30 days.

Forto may terminate or suspend your account for material breach of these Terms, prohibited use, or non-payment, with reasonable notice except in cases of fraud or sanctions violations where immediate suspension applies.

11. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by Danish law, Forto’s aggregate liability under these Terms for any rolling 12-month period is capped at the greater of (a) the subscription fees you paid Forto in the preceding 12 months or (b) DKK 5,000. Forto is not liable for indirect, consequential, or lost profits damages. Carrier-caused delays, losses, and damage are governed by each carrier’s terms; Forto facilitates claims but does not insure shipments.

12. Data Processing

Forto processes personal data of you, your team, your customers, and your shipment recipients to deliver the service. Processing is governed by our Data Processing Agreement, available on request. Subprocessors include Stripe (payments), Vercel (hosting), Supabase (database), and carrier APIs (FedEx, UPS, DHL, Shippo, and others as needed for routing). We comply with GDPR and Danish data protection law. The personal data used in the business check under §2.1, and how long it is kept, is described in our Privacy Policy.

13. Governing Law & Disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of Denmark, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute arising from or relating to these Terms shall be brought exclusively in the courts of Copenhagen, Denmark.

14. Changes

We may update these Terms. When we do, we will notify you in the Forto admin panel and via email. Material changes require renewed acceptance. The version and effective date of these Terms are at the top of this page.

15. Contact

RLD Solutions
CVR 41171790
Gadelandet 10G, 1. tv.
2700 Brønshøj, Denmark
Email: legal@forto.app