Refund & Cancellation Policy

This policy covers payments made through Papigochi for event services: deposits, final balances, and the refunds that may follow. It forms part of the Terms of Service.

Two things decide the outcome of a cancellation: the terms you agreed with the vendor, and this policy. The vendor sets the commercial terms of their job; Papigochi processes the money and applies those terms.

This policy does not cover payments a customer and a vendor make to each other outside Papigochi. If money did not move through Papigochi, we cannot refund it.

Payments on Papigochi are taken through Stripe, on a payment page hosted by Stripe. Papigochi never sees your card number.

A booking may be paid in up to two parts:

• A deposit — requested by the vendor against a signed contract, to hold the date and start the work.
• A final balance — the remainder, requested closer to the event.
• Each part is a full charge at the moment you pay it, not a hold or a pre-authorisation.

Money for a booking settles into the vendor’s own Stripe account. Papigochi’s fee is taken at the same time. This matters for refunds, because returning money to a customer means pulling it back from the vendor.

Vendors run different businesses. A photographer who turns down other work for your date and a rental company with stock on a shelf do not have the same cancellation economics, so Papigochi does not impose a single rule on all of them.

Where a vendor sets out cancellation or deposit terms — in their proposal, their package description, or the contract you sign — those terms govern the job. Read them before you accept. If a proposal does not state cancellation terms and the terms matter to you, ask the vendor to put them in writing before you pay.

Papigochi does not currently offer vendors a separate cancellation-policy setting on their storefront. Until it does, the proposal and the contract are where a vendor’s terms live, and they are what we look at when a cancellation is raised.

Cancel as early as you can. Almost every cancellation outcome is better the more notice the vendor has.

The steps are:

• Tell the vendor through the Papigochi conversation, so there is a record of when you asked and what was agreed.
• Cancel the booking in Papigochi, or ask the vendor to, so the date is released.
• If money has already been paid and you believe some or all of it should come back, write to support@papigochi.com with the booking and what was agreed.

Cancelling a booking in Papigochi releases the date. It does not by itself return money — a refund is a separate step, described below.

A vendor who can no longer perform a booking must tell the customer as soon as possible through Papigochi and cancel the booking.

Where a vendor cancels a booking the customer has already paid for, and the customer has not received the service, we expect the amounts paid for the cancelled service to be returned to the customer. If the vendor does not arrange this, write to support@papigochi.com and we will look into it.

Repeated cancellations by a vendor may lead to loss of verified status, restriction of features, or removal from the marketplace.

Refunds on Papigochi are reviewed and issued by the Papigochi team. There is no self-service refund button, because a refund has to pull money back from the vendor’s account and that has to be done correctly, once.

When a refund is approved:

• It is returned to the original payment method through Stripe. We cannot send it somewhere else.
• It is returned in the currency it was paid in.
• The corresponding amount is recovered from the vendor, and Papigochi gives back its own fee on the refunded portion.
• The booking and the payment record are updated so both sides can see what was returned and when.

Papigochi does not profit from a refund. We also do not subsidise one: we keep only the part of our fee that covers processing costs already incurred on the payment, which cannot be recovered from the card networks.

Refunds can be full or partial, and partial refunds are common — for example when a deposit covers work the vendor has already done, or when part of a package was delivered and part was not.

Where a booking was paid in two parts, a refund can be applied to either or both, and more than one partial refund can be made over time. The total refunded can never exceed what was actually paid.

Which amount is right depends on the vendor’s terms, how much notice was given, and what was actually delivered. Papigochi will tell you the amount before it is issued.

Some amounts are legitimately not returned, and we would rather say so here than surprise you later.

A vendor may reasonably retain part of a deposit where their agreed terms provide for it and they have turned down other work, incurred costs, or already begun. Where a service has been delivered, it has been delivered.

Payment processing costs on the original charge are not recoverable from the card networks once a payment has been made. Papigochi retains only enough of its own fee to cover that cost and returns the rest; it is not an additional charge to you.

Once a refund is issued, Stripe sends it to your bank or card issuer. From there the timing is outside Papigochi’s and Stripe’s control; card issuers commonly take five to ten business days to show it, and some take longer.

You will be able to see in Papigochi that the refund was issued, and the amount, as soon as it is sent. If it has not appeared after ten business days, write to support@papigochi.com with the booking and we will trace it.

Occasionally a refund has to wait. This happens when the payment’s final settlement figures have not yet come back from Stripe, or when the same payment already has an open dispute with your bank. Papigochi deliberately refuses to guess in either case, because issuing the wrong amount is harder to fix than waiting.

If that applies to your booking, we will tell you, and we will tell you what we are waiting for.

If you ask your bank or card issuer to reverse a payment, that is a dispute. Your bank decides the outcome, not Papigochi and not Stripe, and the process usually takes weeks.

Please contact us first. A dispute freezes the payment, adds a fee that someone has to bear, and usually reaches a worse result for everyone than a refund we can issue directly.

Where a dispute is opened, Papigochi records it and may share transaction records, messages and booking history with Stripe and the card network as evidence.

A vendor subscription is separate from booking payments and has its own rules.

In summary:

• It renews monthly until you cancel it.
• Cancelling stops the next renewal; access continues to the end of the period already paid for.
• Papigochi does not generally refund part-months of subscription. If you believe you were charged in error, write to support@papigochi.com.

For anything about a cancellation, a refund or a payment, write to support@papigochi.com from the email address on your account, and include the booking and what happened.

Papigochi is the marketplace and the payment processor of record for bookings paid here; the vendor is the business that performs the service. Where a decision is the vendor’s to make, we will say so — and where it is ours, we will make it.