Refund & Cancellation Policy

Last updated: September 12, 2026

1. How your payment is held

When you pay for a request as a shopper, your payment is processed by our payment partner, Cashfree, and held in a secure hold rather than paid out to your Smugglbear immediately. It is only released to your Smugglbear once delivery is confirmed by both of you through the in-app handshake step (Terms, Section 4).

2. When a refund is issued

Smuggl issues a refund automatically, without a manual review or approval step, in the following cases:

You file a dispute at handoff — instead of confirming an item, you report a problem (wrong item, damaged, or other). This triggers a full, automatic 100% refund of that item to your original payment method. The disputed item stays with your Smugglbear, who's free to keep it, gift it, or otherwise dispose of it; it is not shipped back to Smuggl.
Your Smugglbear's flight is cancelled and they don't rebook in time — a 72-hour window applies; if it lapses without a new confirmed flight, the order auto-cancels and you're refunded 100%.
Your Smugglbear can't buy an item before their flight departs — if the purchase deadline passes with nothing bought, the order auto-cancels and you're refunded 100% for that item.
A Smugglbear excludes an item from a multi-item order (out of stock, or won't fit their bag) — you're only ever charged for what's actually carried, so the excluded item's cost is never captured from your held payment in the first place.

Refunds are per item, not per order — disputing or losing one item in a multi-item request only refunds that item; the rest of the order proceeds normally.

In most cases, your original payment was captured directly by our payment partner, so the refund above is issued automatically back to it. In the small number of cases where a payment was settled outside that standard flow, Smuggl processes the refund manually instead — this can take longer than the timeline in Section 5. If that ever applies to you, contact us at help@smuggl.in with your request ID and we'll process it directly.

3. Cancelling a request yourself

As a shopper, you can cancel a request before a Smugglbear has accepted it for a full refund. Once a Smugglbear has accepted and purchase is underway, cancellation is handled the same way as the scenarios in Section 2 above — through a dispute at handoff if the item isn't right, or automatically if your Smugglbear can't fulfil the trip.

4. What a refund does not cover

Once a delivery is confirmed by both parties through the in-app handshake, the held payment is released to your Smugglbear and the transaction is final — there's no post-handshake refund for buyer's remorse. Any additional customs-duty claim raised after delivery (Terms, Section 3) is a separate reimbursement between you and your Smugglbear, not a refund from Smuggl.

5. Processing time

Once a refund is triggered — by a dispute, an auto-cancellation, or your own pre-acceptance cancellation — Smuggl issues it immediately on our side. From there, it follows our payment partner's standard refund timeline back to your original payment method: typically 5–7 working days, depending on your bank or card issuer. Smuggl does not hold refunded funds beyond this processing window.

6. Smuggl's own fees

Where a refund applies to the full item cost, Smuggl's platform fee for that item is refunded along with it — you're never left having paid a fee on an order that didn't complete.