Refund & Escrow Policy

This policy explains where a customer's money sits between paying and receiving, when it reaches the merchant, and what happens when an order goes wrong.

It applies to money moving through EzStaw. It does not replace a merchant's own returns policy, which is the merchant's to write and to honour.

Each section starts with a one-line summary. The summary helps you read faster; the section under it is the actual policy.

1. Why we hold the money

Buying from someone you have not met is the hardest part of selling online. The customer worries about paying for nothing. The merchant worries about shipping for nothing.

So we sit in the middle. The customer pays us, we hold it, and we pass it on once the goods have arrived. The merchant knows the money is real before packing. The customer knows it is recoverable until the parcel is in their hands.

We are not a bank and we are not lending anyone anything. We are holding a payment that already belongs to one of the two of you until it is settled which one.

2. The lifecycle of a payment

Paid. The customer authorises the payment on their phone with Orange Money or Afrimoney. We never see their PIN.

Held. The money goes into an escrow account. It is not in the merchant's balance and the merchant cannot withdraw it. The order shows as paid so the merchant can pack it with confidence.

Delivered. On handover the customer gives a one-time code, which confirms the order arrived. This is the step that moves the money, so it matters that it is done at the door and not before.

Released. We take the transaction fee for the merchant's plan and send the rest to their payout account. The fee percentage is on the pricing page and depends on the plan.

Every one of those steps is written to a double-entry ledger. Entries are added, never edited, so the history of a payment cannot be quietly rewritten by us or by anyone else.

3. When a payout is delayed

Identity not verified. A merchant has to complete verification before we can send money to them. Until then, released funds stay in the account with the merchant's name against them. They are not lost. They go out once verification is done.

The mobile-money network is down. Transfers are retried. A network outage delays a payout, it does not cancel it.

If a payout has not arrived and neither of these applies, contact support and we will trace it.

4. Refunds before delivery

Until an order is confirmed delivered, the payment is still sitting in escrow. A refund at this point returns it to the mobile-money account that paid.

No transaction fee is charged. A refunded order earns us nothing, because the fee is only taken at release.

A refund can be for the full order or for part of it, for example when one item of three is out of stock. Partial refunds add up: the total refunded on an order can never exceed what was paid for it.

5. Refunds after delivery

Once an order is delivered the money has split: the merchant has their share and we have taken our fee. A refund after that point reverses both.

The customer gets back the full amount they paid. We do not keep our fee on a refunded order, and the customer is never shorted by it.

If the merchant has already withdrawn the money, we cannot simply take it back out of a balance that is empty. The refund is recorded as an amount the merchant owes, and someone from our team picks it up and works out how to settle it with them. The customer is not made to wait on that conversation.

6. When an order is disputed

Start with the merchant. They have the order, they know what they shipped, and most disputes are a delivery mix-up that they can fix faster than we can.

If that does not resolve it, contact us with the order number and what happened. We can see the payment, the delivery confirmation and the message history, and we will decide based on what the records actually show.

We can refund from escrow while an order is still held. Once the money has been released and withdrawn, resolving it takes longer, because it becomes a matter of recovering funds from the merchant rather than releasing funds we still have.

TODO(legal): the window within which a customer must raise a dispute, and the timetable we commit to for deciding one.

TODO(legal): what happens to a payment for an order that is never confirmed delivered and never disputed. There is no automatic release or automatic refund in the product today, so this needs a policy decision before it can be described here.

7. Who decides whether to refund

The merchant sets their own returns policy and normally decides whether a refund is due, the same as in a physical shop.

We issue a refund without the merchant's agreement when the order was never delivered and the merchant cannot show that it was, when the payment was fraudulent, when the listing broke the Terms of Service, or when the law or our payment providers require it.

We do not overrule a merchant's returns policy because a customer changed their mind.

8. How a refund reaches the customer

Refunds go back to the account the payment came from. We do not refund to a different number, and we do not pay refunds in cash, because sending money somewhere other than where it came from is how refund fraud works.

The transfer is automatic once the refund is issued. How quickly it lands depends on the mobile-money network rather than on us.

If the paying number has since been disconnected, contact support with the order details.

TODO(legal): the expected time for a refund to arrive, if we are willing to state one.

9. Plan fees are separate

Everything above concerns money customers pay for orders.

A merchant's own subscription is different. Plan fees are billed in advance and are not refundable for a period already billed, except where the law says otherwise. Cancelling stops the next payment; it does not refund the current one. The free trial exists so that nobody pays before deciding.

10. Contacting us

Have the order number ready. It is the fastest way for us to find the payment.

TODO(legal): confirm the addresses below before publishing.

• Payment and refund questions: TODO(legal): support address
• Everything else: see the Terms of Service

PeekTower Limited, trading as EzStaw. Registered in Sierra Leone.