What you can pay with, how card details are handled, and what to do when a payment does not go through.
Visa, Mastercard and American Express are accepted, as is PayPal. The checkout shows only the options that work for the country you have selected, so you will not be offered a method that cannot complete.
Card numbers are entered on the payment provider's own secure form and are never sent to our servers, which is why we cannot look up or store them. We see only the last four digits and whether the payment succeeded.
PayPal orders are completed on PayPal's site and confirmed back to us instantly. The order is created on our side in the usual way, and refunds go back to the same PayPal account.
All prices are in US dollars. Your bank applies its own conversion and may add a foreign transaction fee; that line on your statement comes from the bank, not from us.
When a card is refused we do not retry it silently. Nothing is captured when a payment fails, and a temporary authorisation clears itself within a few days.
Every page, including checkout, is encrypted in transit. That is deliberate: the company that specialises in handling cards is the company that handles yours.
From our side an order shows a result, a total and a card ending, and nothing more. The full card number and security code are held by the payment provider and never enter our systems, so we will never ask you for them by email.
Placing an order asks your bank to authorise the amount. We capture the payment at dispatch; if an order is cancelled before then, the reserved amount simply drops off instead of being refunded.
A confirmation email is sent as soon as the order is accepted, and it doubles as your receipt. Need a more formal invoice, or one addressed to a company? Ask us and we will issue it against the same order number.
Please talk to us first if you do not recognise a charge. A pending hold from a failed attempt looks exactly like a payment and disappears by itself; genuine duplicate charges we refund the same day.
If a dispute is raised with the bank, the payment provider will ask us for the order record and the delivery evidence. We send the order and delivery records when asked; if the claim succeeds, the amount returns to the card that paid for it.
Refunds always return to the method that paid — the same card, or the same PayPal account. We cannot send a refund to a different card or pay it out in cash, because that is what prevents someone else claiming your money.
Questions about this page? Write to [email protected] and we will answer within one business day.