Refund Policy

1. What this policy covers

This Refund Policy governs money paid to CLV Media, LLC, a North Carolina limited liability company (we, us) for the ShelfStamp service. It forms part of the Terms of Service and uses the same defined terms.

There are two things you can pay us for: a single certificate, which costs $4.99, and a business, consignment, or childcare plan. Everything else the Service does — running a screening, showing you the result, letting anyone re-verify a certificate against current data — is free, and nothing free is refundable, because nothing was paid.

2. A flagged result is a successful screening

This is the clause most likely to be argued about, so it is stated plainly and it is stated first.

We understand why it stings. You paid us to look, and what we found reduced the value of the thing in your garage. But the alternative — a service where an unwelcome finding can be bought back — is a service whose clean results mean nothing, because every one of them would carry the silent question of what was deleted. The record stands, or the record is worthless. There is no third option, and we chose before you arrived.

3. When we refund, without argument

We will refund you in full, and we will not make you justify it, in each of the following cases:

• You were charged and no certificate was issued. Whatever the reason — our error, a payment that captured against a screening that failed, an outage in the middle of the transaction — you paid for an artifact you do not have. That is not a refund, really. It is a correction.
• The certificate is wrong through our fault, and we cannot correct it. If we bound your certificate to the wrong photograph, recorded the wrong result, or issued it against a screening that was not yours, we will first try to reissue it correctly at no charge. Where we cannot, you get your money back.
• You were charged more than once for the same screening. We refund the duplicates. You do not have to find them for us, but telling us which they are makes it faster.
• You ask within 24 hours, and the certificate has not been shared. Within 24 hours of purchase, if the certificate has not been made public, sent to anyone, embedded in a listing, or shown to a buyer, you may simply change your mind. No reason required. We refund you and we revoke the certificate, because the two go together.

4. What is never refundable

4.1 Free screenings

A screening costs nothing, so there is nothing to return. If a free screening failed, timed out, refused to run against stale data, or returned a result you believe is wrong, write to us — we want to know, and it is the fastest way for us to find a bug. But there is no money in it to refund.

4.2 A certificate that has already done its work

Once a certificate has been published, shared, sent, shown, or embedded anywhere, it is not refundable. Not at 23 hours, not for any reason short of section 3.

This is not a technicality. A certificate is not a document you own privately: it is a representation made to someone else. The moment you put it in front of a buyer, a parent, or a licensing inspector, a person who is not our customer relied on it. Refunding you then would mean unwinding a statement that a stranger has already acted on, and leaving them holding a verification link that resolves to nothing. We will not do that for $4.99.

If you want a shared certificate taken down, that is a different request and we will honour it. Write to us and we will revoke it and delete the photograph it is bound to. What we will not do is give you the money back and pretend the screening never happened.

4.3 Not liking the result

See section 2. It is the whole reason this page exists.

5. How to ask for a refund

Write to support@shelfstamp.com from any address, and quote the certificate number. It is on the certificate, on its verification page, and in the receipt Stripe sent you. Without it we cannot find your record, because we do not require an account and we therefore may hold no name for you at all.

Tell us, in a sentence, which of the cases in section 3 you think applies. Then:

• we acknowledge your email within one business day;
• we decide within three business days, and if we need something from you we will ask once and clearly;
• where we refund, we issue it to the original payment method within three business days of the decision. Your bank then takes as long as your bank takes, which is typically five to ten days and is not something we control.

If we decline, we will tell you why, in writing, in plain words, and we will point you at the clause we relied on. You may reply and argue with us. A person reads it.

6. Business, consignment, and childcare plans

6.1 Cancellation

You may cancel a plan at any time, and cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing period you have already paid for. You keep full access until then. Nothing you generated during the term — certificates, registers, state documentation records — is withdrawn when you cancel. It is yours, and it stays verifiable.

6.2 We do not pro-rate

We do not refund the unused remainder of a billing period. Stated plainly so that nobody has to infer it: if you cancel in the middle of a month or a year, you are not refunded for the part you did not use. You paid for a period of access and you had it.

The exceptions are the ones in section 3, which apply to plans exactly as they apply to a single certificate: if we charged you after you cancelled, charged you twice, or charged you for a plan you never received, we refund it in full and we do not argue about it.

6.3 An annual plan, cancelled early

If you cancel an annual plan within 14 days of the first charge and have issued no more than five certificates under it, we will refund it in full. After that, section 6.2 applies. We would rather state a hard number you can rely on than reserve a discretion we would exercise inconsistently.

7. Chargebacks

Ask us first. We are one email away, we answer within a business day, and the four cases in section 3 are refunded without a fight. There is no scenario in which you get your money back faster by going to your bank instead of writing to us.

A chargeback is not a refund request. It is an assertion to a card network that the transaction was fraudulent, unauthorised, or not delivered. When the transaction was in fact authorised and the certificate was in fact delivered, that assertion is false, and it costs us a fee whether or not it succeeds.

Where we believe a chargeback was filed to suppress a RECALL MATCHED result on an item that is being offered for sale, we will contest it, we will provide the card network with this policy and with the signed certificate, and we will treat the underlying conduct under the Acceptable Use Policy.

8. Revocation is not a refund, and a refund is not an admission

Two things that are easy to confuse, so we will separate them.

We may revoke a certificate without refunding it — for example, where it was obtained by misrepresentation, or is being used to claim something it does not say. The Terms permit this and this policy does not soften it.

Where we do refund a certificate, we revoke it. A refunded certificate is a certificate nobody paid for, and we will not leave an unpaid artifact in circulation bearing our signature. If you needed the record, do not ask for the money.

And a refund is never an admission that a screening result was wrong, that a product is fit for use, or that anything about the item has changed. It is a return of money. It is not a retraction of a fact.

9. Your statutory rights

Nothing in this policy limits or displaces any right you have under applicable consumer protection law that cannot be limited or displaced by agreement. Where the law of your state or country gives you a remedy this policy does not, you have that remedy, and this document yields to it.

If you think we have got a refund decision wrong, write to legal@shelfstamp.com before you go anywhere else. Section 16.1 of the Terms asks you to give us 30 days to fix a dispute, and most disputes are fixable by an email from a person who wants to fix them.

10. Changes to this policy

We may change this policy. A change applies to purchases made after its effective date and never to a certificate you already hold — the certificate you bought was bought under the policy in force on its date, and that is a property of the document, not of this page.