Who we are
BCP Directory is operated by Sandbanks Digital Ltd. These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. Nothing here takes away a right you have as a consumer that cannot be signed away.
Directory information
We work to keep listings accurate, but public information changes and may contain mistakes. Check critical details directly with the business before travelling, booking, purchasing or relying on professional advice. A food hygiene rating is a council inspection result on a particular date and is not a promise about today. Where listing information comes from sets out the sources and how often each is read again.
Anyone can suggest a correction, free, whether or not they own the business.
Your contributions
You must have the right to submit whatever you send us: text, photographs, opening hours, event details. Contributions must be accurate to the best of your knowledge, lawful and free of malicious code.
You keep ownership of everything you contribute. You grant Sandbanks Digital Ltd a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, format and publish it on BCP Directory for as long as it is published here, and to keep it in our records afterwards where our privacy notice or the law requires. We do not claim ownership of your photographs, your listing text or your reviews, and we do not license them on to anyone else.
Reviews
Reviews are governed by the review policy, which forms part of these terms. In particular, you must not submit a review of a business you have an undisclosed interest in, arrange or pay for reviews, or conceal an incentive. Those are banned practices under paragraph 13 of Schedule 20 to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, not merely breaches of this contract, and the review policy sets out what we do about them.
If you believe a review defames you, the review policy carries the statutory notice-of-complaint procedure under section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013, including the timetable we work to. Send it to the address given there.
Accounts
Keep access to your sign-in email secure; anyone who can read it can sign in as you. One person, one account. Business access may be suspended while an ownership dispute, a security concern or a serious policy breach is investigated.
Payments
Paid plans renew monthly until cancelled through the billing portal. The price and any tax are shown in Stripe Checkout before you pay. Cancellation takes effect on the date the portal shows, and the period already paid for runs to its end. A boost runs for a fixed period and does not renew. Boosts are not currently sold; we grant them.
Where we end a plan because of a breach of the review policy, the period already paid for is not refunded.
Terms for businesses with an account
This section is for business users: anyone holding a claimed listing or a paid plan. It exists because a directory that lets businesses offer their services to local customers and puts an enquiry or booking route on the page is an online intermediation service under Regulation (EU) 2019/1150 on fairness and transparency for business users, which stayed on the statute book after the UK left the EU and still applies to services offered to business users based here. Rather than argue about the edges of that definition, we apply it. The most important part of it is Article 5, which says a business user is entitled to know the main things that decide where their listing appears, and what difference paying makes.
How ordinary results are ranked
When a visitor types a search, listings are ordered by the following, in descending order of weight:
- First, how well the words match the listing. The largest single input by some distance. A match on the business name counts for more than a match somewhere in the description, and the search understands close spellings rather than only exact ones.
- Second, how complete the listing is. A score out of a hundred, made up of whether the listing has a name, a category, an area, a short summary, a longer description, a postcode or a stated service area, at least one way of making contact, a validated map coordinate, and a source that has been checked or verified. A listing carrying all of those sits above a bare one.
- Third, whether the listing has been verified by its owner or by an administrator. A fixed bonus, smaller than either of the two above, so it separates listings that are otherwise close and never rescues a poor match.
Where the visitor searches from a place, or uses the map, distance from that place is used instead of, or alongside, the above. Where the visitor picks a sort — highest rated, or name A to Z — that sort governs, and highest rated means the BCP Directory rating from approved reviews on this site, with the number of reviews breaking ties. Where a page has no search term and no sort, listings are ordered by when they were published, then by completeness.
So ranking reflects both what a business offers, through the words on its listing and the category it sits in, and how likely that listing is to answer the search a real person typed. It does not reflect anything about the business’s relationship with us.
We publish the parameters and their order of importance, not the exact weights, because published weights are an instruction manual for gaming the results, which would make the directory worse for the visitor and for every other business in it.
What paying changes, and what it does not
Payment is not an input to the ranking described above. Not a tie-break, not a multiplier, not a thumb on the scale. A free claimed listing with good, current details outranks a paid listing with poor ones, and the code that orders ordinary results is not told which plan a listing is on.
What a paid plan buys is a labelled block of its own, separate from the ordinary results and marked as what it is:
- Plus places a listing in the Featured block on its own category page and its own area page, and puts it in line for one of the two saleable slots in the featured strip on the home page.
- Pro adds the Sponsored block at the top of directory search results, which holds up to three listings and answers the same search the visitor typed.
- A boost is the same placement for a fixed period rather than monthly, and carries the same label. It is not on sale: a boost can only be granted by us at present, and these terms describe it so that a listing carrying one is covered by the same rules as a paid slot.
Within any of those blocks nobody outranks anybody: every listing in the block has bought the same thing, so the order inside it changes each day, deterministically, from the listing identifier and the date. Nothing in a paid block is repeated in the ordinary results below it.
Our advertising page describes the same arrangement in more detail, including the featured strip on the home page and the slot that holds our own listing, and it forms part of these terms.
Other distribution channels and affiliate programmes
There are none. Your listing is published on bcpdirectory.com and nowhere else. We do not syndicate listings to partner sites, we do not feed them to another directory, and there is no affiliate programme through which anyone earns a commission on your business. If that changes we will tell you before it does, and label it.
Restricting, suspending or ending a business account
We may restrict, suspend or end a business user’s access on these grounds and no others: a breach of these terms or the review policy; an unresolved dispute about who owns the listing; a security or fraud concern; a legal or regulatory requirement; or non-payment.
If we restrict or suspend, we give you the reasons, including the specific facts behind the decision, at the time it takes effect or before, and you can put your side of it to us. If we end a business account altogether we give at least thirty days’ notice with reasons, unless we are legally obliged to act sooner or the same breach has happened repeatedly. If we were wrong, we put it back without delay.
Removing a listing is a different matter from removing an account. An imported listing is a public record of a local business, and closing an account does not delete it.
Changing these terms
We give business users at least fifteen days’ notice by email before a change to these terms takes effect, and longer where the change is a substantial one. You can end your plan before it takes effect. Changes we have to make immediately to meet a legal obligation, or to deal with fraud, malware or a security risk, take effect without that notice.
Complaints from business users
Articles 11 and 12 of the Regulation — the formal internal complaint-handling system and the naming of mediators in advance — do not apply to a provider that is a small enterprise, meaning fewer than fifty staff and under ten million euro of turnover or balance sheet total. Sandbanks Digital Ltd is a long way inside that. We are telling you we rely on it rather than leaving you to find out, and we would rather you complained anyway.
Email support@bcpdirectory.com with what happened and what you want done. We acknowledge within two working days and answer properly within ten. If we cannot agree, nothing here stops you taking it further, and we will engage with a mediator if you propose one.
Availability and liability
We may change or withdraw features and cannot promise uninterrupted availability. We are not liable for a business’s goods, services or conduct: the transaction is between you and them, and we are not a party to it.
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.
Changes to this page
The date at the top is the date these terms last changed. Business users are notified of changes as set out above.