Legal Terms

Once your membership welcome email is emailed from us to the email address you provide, your membership fee and any handling fee is non-refundable under any circumstances.  We do this to protect the integrity of our intellectual material. 

It is your responsibility to provide and maintain a functional, working email address.  You can change your private account email address at any time, but you MUST keep a working email address on your account at all times or forfeit your membership.

Our CDs are sent out via USPS to the address provided with your payment.  If we provide you with a faulty CD, or you don't receive the first CD, or the post office destroys a CD en route, we may mail out 1 replacement at no cost to you to that same address at our discretion.  You must contact us within 30 days of your purchase to request a replacement CD.  If you don't receive either CD (and you paid for the CD membership), you'll need to send us a postage paid (by you) padded envelop so we can send out a 3rd CD via another service.  We will do our best to get your CD to you promptly, however, we cannot be held responsible if USPS loses more than 2, because we have no proof that you aren't just trying to get extra CDs out of us at that point.  We have only had 1 member as of 10/2012 that has ever had this problem.

Membership includes a listing in the PetSits.Com Find A Pet Sitter directory. Your membership includes a listing at PUPS, and currently listings in the Find A Pet Sitter directory do not have an annual renewal fee either (they stay up indefinitely, or until you ask for them to be removed). We do reserve the right to add a small yearly renewal fee for everyone in the future if we someday see a need. However we have no pending plans to do that, and have continued to provide free renewals since our organization opened in 2005. Your original membership covers a minimum of one year.

Officially when you join PUPS, you are paying for the use of materials in our Start Up Kit (form templates, guides, tools, etc) for use with clients of a pet sitting, dog walking, poop scooping, or related pet care business .  The benefits of membership listed (directory listing, use of forum/message board, support, forms, templates, guides, tools kit, email alias, etc) are included with membership, with this strong reservation:

We reserve the right to revoke all or parts of your Membership at any time at our discretion with no refund.  We are likely to do this, for instance ( as an example of, but not limited to)  if you do something we deem to be potentially unethical or illegal, or you no longer have a working email address listed on your private membership profile.  For privacy reasons in reference to pet owners and other pet sitters, we reserve the right to terminate your membership at any time without disclosing a cause.  If your membership is revoked completely you will no longer be able to advertise that you are a lifetime member of PUPS without explicit permission.  Revoked memberships are an extremely rare occurrence.

You may also request to have your membership terminated at any time.  No refund of any type will be issued.  You must provide proof that you own the membership (email us from the current email address on the account, or email your request with a receipt) before changes can be made to it.

Items in our Start Up Kit are copyrighted, and may not be redistributed or resold, even if modified or customized to your business.

Start Up Kit items must retain the Professional United Pet Sitters copyright at the bottom of each page in clear 7pt or larger font, even if modified or customized to your business.

Memberships are nontransferable.  If a business is sold, the new owner must purchase a new membership.  You may, however, purchase the membership as a gift as long as the email address on the Private Profile of the account is updated to the recipient's email within 30 days of purchase.

In no event shall PUPS be liable for any errors or omissions with respect to any information on this site. By joining PUPS you also completely understand and agree to the terms as stated on HERE -> Web Site Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Additional Terms

Members may list multiple cities in their listing, as long as the cities are adjacent to one another as well as serviced by one office.  Members may list multiple states in their cities field, but the business listed will only be listed under one main state.  We do have plans to change this restriction in the future so that businesses that live on the boarder of multiple states may be listed under each.  

Currently members may list up to 250 characters worth of city names on one listing, each separated by a comma and a space (which must be included in the character count).  The same is true for zip codes.  A member can purchase additional memberships to list additional areas.  Two memberships owned by the same business may not repeat the same city or zip code on multiple listings.

Each separate coverage area (non-adjacent cities) must purchase a separate membership.  You may not advertise a business (or a franchise, or a franchisee) as a member of PUPS on any website that provides services to multiple regions unless each and every region has its own paid membership.  A franchisee or other separate business location may advertise their PUPS membership on their own website, as long as the website is specific to their location only. 

Website links placed in the PUPS directory must not link to a website that services multiple coverage areas.  However, exceptions may be made for francises or offices that have their own region specific webpage within a larger website.  In this case, the link must take the viewer directly to the region specific webpage upon first click.   Contact us directly prior to purchasing if you would like to request an exception.

Our members are professionals who strive to help each other and themselves to grow successful pet sitting or pet care businesses.  If you fit that description, please join!  If you do not fully agree to all of these terms, then do not join PUPS.