Refund & Cancellation Policy

Last updated: October 20, 2026

1. How your payment is held

When you pay for a request as a shopper, your payment is processed by our payment partner and held 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 in the following cases, without you needing to argue your case or go through a chargeback process:

You file a dispute at handoff. Instead of confirming an item, you report a problem (wrong item, damaged, or other). Your Smugglbear confirms they have the item back and you're refunded the item cost and its share of fees if it's damaged or the wrong item, or the item cost minus a 10% restocking fee for any other reason, to your original payment method, typically on the spot at the handoff, and automatically if they don't respond within 24 hours. There's no contest process and nobody reviews it by hand. The disputed item stays with your Smugglbear once confirmed, who's free to keep it, gift it, or otherwise dispose of it; it is not sent 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.
Your Smugglbear doesn't accept your request before their flight departs. The request auto-cancels and you're refunded 100%.
Your Smugglbear lands but the handoff doesn't happen. You both get a reminder 3 days after landing. If there's still no handoff 7 days after landing, your Smugglbear has 24 hours to propose a new meetup or confirm they can't deliver. If they don't answer, or can't deliver, the order auto-cancels and you're refunded 100%.
An item costs more on the shelf than quoted. If the rise is more than 3% and you chose to skip items that cost more, or it's bigger than the buffer you chose at checkout plus 3%, your Smugglbear skips it. Either way you're refunded 100% for that item. If you chose a price-change buffer, whatever part of it isn't used is refunded to you automatically once your Smugglbear is paid.
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 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.

You can see what happened to each item at any time in your order's delivery record. Enter your delivery number at smuggl.in/track; it shows whether each item was accepted or refused at the handoff. See our Delivery Policy.

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, which can take longer than the timeline in Section 6. 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.

How to cancel: in the app, open the request in your Requests tab and tap Cancel. You can cancel at any time until a Smugglbear accepts your request, and any refund follows the timelines in Section 6.

4. Returns, replacements and exchanges

Each item is bought for you on a trip and handed over in person, so you check every item at the handoff. If an item is damaged or isn't what you ordered, refuse it there and you're refunded as set out in Section 2. Once you accept an item at the handoff, it can't be returned or exchanged, and we don't offer replacements. If you still want the item, you can place a new request with a traveller.

5. 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 (Terms, Section 3) is raised before handoff, capped at a set percentage of the value of your goods for each product category, and is a reimbursement between you and your Smugglbear, not a refund from Smuggl. It covers customs duty and import taxes only, never customs penalties or fines.

If customs at the airport keeps an item your Smugglbear declared and they upload the customs document, the item's cost isn't refunded, because it was bought and declared for you. That item's share of the service fee is refunded to you (Terms, Section 3).

6. 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. We request the fastest refund our payment partner offers for your original payment method. For UPI and debit cards that is an instant refund, which usually arrives within minutes. Credit cards and netbanking don't support instant refunds, so those follow the standard timeline: typically 5 to 7 working days, depending on your bank or card issuer. Smuggl does not hold refunded funds at any point after a refund is triggered.

7. 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, so you're never left having paid a fee on an order that didn't complete.