What you can pay with, how card details are handled, and what to do when a payment does not go through.
We accept Visa, Mastercard and American Express, along with PayPal. Available methods are shown at checkout for your delivery country, since a few local card schemes cannot be processed for every destination.
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. The order is created on our side in the usual way, and refunds go back to the same PayPal account.
The order total is in US dollars. Your bank applies its own conversion and may add a foreign transaction fee; that line on your statement comes from the bank, not from us.
When a card is refused we do not retry it silently. Nothing is captured when a payment fails, and a temporary authorisation clears itself 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. We cannot see the full number, the expiry date or the security code, and we could not look them up even for a support request.
The first step is an authorisation, which reserves the total without taking it. We capture the payment at dispatch; if an order is cancelled before then, the reserved amount simply drops off instead of being refunded.
A confirmation email is sent as soon as the order is accepted, and it doubles as your receipt. If you need an invoice in a company name or with a tax number on it, write to us and we will provide one. Ask us and we will issue it against the same order number.
Please talk to us first if you do not recognise a charge. Almost every unexplained charge turns out to be a pending authorisation from an attempt that did not complete, and it clears on its own within a few days.
A chargeback is handled between your bank and our payment provider. We send the order and delivery records when asked; if the claim succeeds, the amount returns to the card that paid for it.
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.