These terms apply to you if you sell notes on Study Market. They are part of our Terms of Use. If they conflict with the Terms of Use on a seller matter, these terms win.
1. Selling only your own work
When you publish a listing, you declare that:
- you wrote the notes yourself, in your own words
- you have the right to sell them
- they do not break anyone else's copyright or other rights
- everything you say about the notes, yourself, your school and your marks is true
You can use what you learned in class and from books to write notes. But the notes must be your own work.
2. What you must not upload
Do not upload:
- textbooks, or scans, photos or retyped pages from textbooks
- past exam papers or memos, including from the DBE, the IEB or a school
- worksheets, handouts, slides or tests made by teachers or schools
- someone else's notes, even a friend's, or notes you bought on Study Market
- work copied from the internet, or created by someone else and passed off as yours
- leaked or stolen exam material
- anything that has a person's private information, such as other students' names or contact details
- anything illegal, harmful or offensive
If you are not sure, do not upload it. Read the Community Guidelines.
3. Copyright and indemnity
You are responsible for the copyright in everything you upload. We run a notice-and-takedown process (see the Copyright and Takedown Policy):
- When a rights holder sends a proper complaint, we may pause or remove your listing promptly, and tell you.
- You can respond with a counter-notice.
- If three complaints against you are upheld, we suspend your account. (We may change this number. It is currently three.)
If someone makes a claim against us because of your listing, you agree, to the extent the law allows, to cover our reasonable losses and costs from that claim. This does not apply if we caused the problem.
4. What buyers see, and optional marketing
On your listings and profile. Buyers choose notes by who made them. So your listings and seller profile always show your first name and surname, and the school, grade, curriculum, photo, marks and bio you choose to add. This is part of selling. If you don't want something shown, don't add it (school, photo, marks and bio are all optional).
Marketing is optional. You can choose to let us feature you in our marketing: on our homepage, in emails to other users, and on social media such as TikTok and Instagram, using your name, school, photo, marks and listings.
- You can sell whether or not you agree to marketing.
- We use only what you chose to add to your profile.
- We never use your date of birth, contact details or bank details in marketing.
- We do not pay you for marketing. You keep ownership of your notes.
- If you are under 18, we only feature you if you and your parent or guardian both agree.
- You can switch marketing off at any time in your account settings, or by emailing privacy@studymarket.co.za. We stop new use straight away and remove existing posts we control where we reasonably can. Your listings are not affected.
Under 18s. A parent or guardian must confirm before you can publish listings. Until then you can set up your profile and save drafts.
5. Your licence to us
You keep the copyright in your notes. You give us a non-exclusive licence to store them, show their cover and free preview pages on Study Market (including in search, category pages and lists of popular notes), make the share images used when someone shares your listing, and deliver them to buyers with watermarks, for as long as they are listed. If you opted in to marketing, the licence also covers featuring your listings in our marketing. Buyers keep the licence to the copies they bought (see section 11).
6. Prices, commission and your earnings
You set the price of each listing. A payment processing fee is added for the buyer at checkout. It does not come out of your earnings.
Study Market keeps a 15% commission. You earn 85% of the sale price, after any discount code.
Example: a note is listed at R100, and the buyer uses a code that makes the price R80. You earn 85% of R80, which is R68.
7. Discount codes
Buyers can use discount codes, including "creator codes". A code lowers the price the buyer pays. You earn 85% of the discounted price. If a code belongs to a creator, the creator's commission comes out of Study Market's share, not yours. We decide which codes are valid and can cancel codes that are misused.
8. When your money is available
- New earnings are pending for 3 days.
- After 3 days they become available.
- You can see your pending and available balance in your account.
9. Withdrawals
- The minimum withdrawal is R100.
- There is a flat R5 fee per withdrawal.
- You can be paid into any South African bank account.
- We store your account number encrypted. Only admins making a payout can see it, and your account only ever shows the last 4 digits.
- An admin checks and approves each withdrawal. We then pay it into your bank account by EFT, usually within 2 working days of approval. The reference starts with "StudyMarket".
- Only use a bank account you are entitled to use. We may ask for proof, or decline a withdrawal if the account details do not check out.
- If you are under 18, your parent or guardian may need to provide or approve the bank account before we approve a withdrawal.
10. Refunds, reversals and negative balances
If a buyer is refunded (for example, for a broken file, a duplicate charge or a copyright takedown), the earnings for that sale are reversed.
If this happens after you have already withdrawn the money, your balance can go negative. We recover the amount from your future sales. You cannot withdraw until your balance is positive again. If you close your account while your balance is negative, we may recover the amount from you by other lawful means.
11. Listings and removal
You can unpublish or edit your own listings. We may remove or pause a listing if it breaks these terms, a copyright complaint is made, a parent withdraws consent, or the law requires it.
Buyers who already bought your notes keep their copies and licence. The exception is where the note was removed because of a copyright problem or a legal reason. In that case we may remove their access and refund them.
12. Verification of marks
You can upload a school report so that your marks show a "Verified" tick.
- An AI model (Cloudflare Workers AI) reads the report. An admin then confirms the marks.
- The report must be your own, real, unaltered school report.
- We store the report privately, where only admins can see it. We delete it 30 days after the verification decision. We keep only the verified marks, term and year.
- If you are under 18, your parent or guardian must have consented before you can upload a report.
Entering false marks, or uploading an altered or someone else's report, is serious. We may remove your marks, remove your listings, and suspend or close your account.
Marks you enter yourself without verification do not get the tick.
13. Taxes
You are responsible for any tax that applies to your earnings. We do not give tax advice. We keep records of sales and payouts and may share them with tax authorities where the law requires. If you are under 18, your parent or guardian may wish to help you with this.
14. Suspension
We may suspend your selling or your account if you break these terms, if we receive upheld copyright complaints, or if we believe you are acting dishonestly. Earnings from sales that were reversed or refunded because of the breach will not be paid out.
15. Contact
Questions about selling: hello@studymarket.co.za.