Ebook Refund Policy

This Ebook Refund Policy is the single source of truth for refunds on ebook purchases through the ChefSphere Ebook Marketplace. It is an addendum to the Platform Refunds Policy, the Ebook Marketplace Terms, the Buyer License, and the Ebook Fee Schedule.

1. Purpose

Ebooks are digital content and cannot be "returned" in the physical sense. This policy balances two rights that usually pull in opposite directions:

• the buyer's right to a fair remedy when an ebook genuinely does not match expectations, is defective, or was purchased by mistake, and
• the author's right to earnings that will not be taken back after a buyer has effectively consumed the ebook.

The rules below are applied consistently to every third-party ebook sale. Official Ebooks follow the same rules with ChefSphere as the refund counterpart.

2. When a refund can be requested

You can file a refund request within 7 calendar days of the purchase date, from the Refunds section of your ChefSphere account. After the seven-day window closes the purchase is final, subject only to the mandatory consumer-law rights described in section 7.

3. Eligibility thresholds

A refund request is eligible only if all of the following conditions are true at the moment the request is filed:

1. the purchase is still within the 7-day window;
2. the ebook has not been manually downloaded from your library;
3. you have read no more than 3 pages, measured from your reading-progress percentage applied to the ebook's total page count;
4. your total reading time is 10 minutes or less;
5. you have opened the ebook in no more than 1 reading session;
6. there is no prior refund request for the same purchase already decided.

If any single condition fails, the request is rejected with a specific reason. The rules are strict on purpose: they prevent the refund system from becoming a way to read ebooks for free while still letting a buyer change their mind quickly after a small sample.

4. Fraud scoring and automatic decisions

Every refund request runs through a fraud-scoring service that looks at, among other signals, the buyer's refund history, reading-activity metrics, IP/device reputation, and the ebook's overall refund rate. The request is then decided according to the score:

Fraud score	Outcome
< 0.30	Auto-approved and processed
0.30 – < 0.40	Sent to manual review by our trust & safety team
≥ 0.40	Auto-rejected with reason recorded

Scores, bands, and signals are reviewed periodically. Manual review decisions are final at the operational level; a buyer may appeal a rejection under section 9.

5. How the refund is executed

When a refund request is approved:

• the full purchase amount is refunded to the original payment method through Stripe (for web purchases) or returned by Apple / Google (for iOS and Android in-app purchases);
• the ebook is removed from your library and all of the following are permanently deleted for that purchase: reading progress, bookmarks, highlights, download tracking, and any rating you left;
• the purchase is marked as REFUNDED in our records and can no longer be restored;
• the Author's earnings are reversed through the lifecycle described in the Ebook Fee Schedule; Stripe processing fees may or may not be reversed depending on Stripe's own policy at the time of the refund.

If a request is rejected, your access to the ebook is unchanged. You keep the library entry and your reading data; no payment is taken again.

6. Daily refund caps

The Marketplace enforces two daily refund ceilings as a safety net against systemic fraud:

• no more than €500 in approved refunds per individual buyer per day;
• no more than €10,000 in approved refunds platform-wide per day.

These ceilings protect every Author from a worst-case compromised-buyer scenario. Requests beyond a ceiling are not rejected; they are queued for the following day.

7. EU consumer rights and waiver

• Under Directive 2011/83/EU, EU consumers normally have 14 days to withdraw from a digital-content contract. Because ebooks are delivered with immediate access, Art. 16(m) of the Directive disapplies that withdrawal right once performance has begun, but only where the Buyer has given prior express consent to immediate performance during the withdrawal period and has expressly acknowledged that this consent causes the loss of the right of withdrawal. ChefSphere collects these two express statements at checkout as separate controls before any download or streaming is started, and records them together with the contract confirmation on a durable medium (Art. 8(7) of the Directive). The seven-day Marketplace refund right in section 2 is offered on top of this statutory minimum, voluntarily.
• Where your local consumer law grants a right that you cannot legally waive (for example, an additional guarantee on defective digital content), that right applies on top of this policy and prevails if there is any conflict.

8. Apple App Store and Google Play refunds

• For purchases made on iOS through the Apple App Store, Apple decides the refund under its own policy. ChefSphere cannot override Apple's decision. You can file a request from Apple's Report a Problem page.
• For purchases made on Android through Google Play, Google decides the refund under its own policy. Requests go through the Google Play Order history flow.
• We will coordinate with Apple or Google in good faith when asked, including providing reading-activity data if the store requests it.

9. Appeals and out-of-court dispute resolution

• If your request is rejected automatically (fraud score ≥ 0.40) or after manual review, you can appeal by replying to the rejection notice or by writing to [email protected] within 14 days of the decision. Appeals are reviewed by a different reviewer.
• EU consumers may also refer the dispute to a certified out-of-court dispute settlement body under Article 21 of the EU Digital Services Act (see the EU DSA Notice) or to a national alternative dispute resolution (ADR) entity notified under Directive 2013/11/EU. The European Commission's Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform was discontinued on 20 July 2025 by Regulation (EU) 2024/3228.
• None of the steps above affects your right to bring the dispute before the competent courts.

10. Chargebacks

Filing a bank-level chargeback before giving the refund process a fair chance is an abuse of the system and may lead to account suspension. Please use the in-app refund flow first; it is faster for you and cheaper for the Author. Chargeback handling is described in detail in the Ebook Chargeback Policy.

11. Changes

We will post a new version of this policy when the refund flow, fraud bands, or applicable law changes materially. Material changes take effect no sooner than 30 days after we notify you and apply only to purchases made after the effective date.

12. Contact

• Refunds and billing: [email protected]
• Trust & safety escalations: [email protected]
• Legal notices: [email protected]