What you can pay with, how card details are handled, and what to do when a payment does not go through.
The checkout shows the methods available for the country you select, so you are only offered an option that can actually complete. 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.
With PayPal you complete the payment on PayPal's site and are returned here with the outcome. Refunds are issued to the same PayPal account that funded the order.
The order total is in US dollars. Any conversion into your own currency is done by your bank at its rate, so the figure on your statement can differ slightly from the order total — that difference is the bank's fee, not a charge from us.
A declined payment usually means the bank wants to verify the transaction; a second attempt or a call to the bank normally clears it. If you see a pending authorisation after a failed attempt, it expires on its own, typically within a few days.
The whole site is served over an encrypted connection, and the card fields are run by a payment provider rather than by us. That is deliberate: the company that specialises in handling cards is the company that handles yours.
We can see whether a payment succeeded, the amount, and the last four digits of the card so that a refund can be matched to the right transaction. 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.
Your order confirmation is the receipt, and it carries the order number we will ask for if you contact us. Need a more formal invoice, or one addressed to a company? Ask us and we will issue it against the same order number.
Contact us before raising a dispute with your bank. A pending hold from a failed attempt looks exactly like a payment and disappears by itself; genuine duplicate charges we refund the same day.
A chargeback is handled between your bank and our payment provider. We supply what we have, and where a claim is upheld the refund is made through the provider to the original card.
Refunds always return to the method that paid — the same card, or the same PayPal account. It is a deliberate restriction rather than an inconvenience, and it exists to protect the person who paid.
Questions about this page? Write to [email protected] and we will answer within one business day.