Refund policy

• Before a physician has started — full refund, no reason needed, no questions asked.
• After the report arrives — full refund if it is late, thin, plainly not about you, or not what this page said it would be.
• If we decline your intake — full refund, always, and we say why.
• If you simply changed your mind after reading it — write to us anyway. See the last clause.

US $39 is not enough money to argue over. If you are unhappy and we cannot fix it, we would rather return the fee than keep it.

From the moment you pay until the moment one of us opens your intake, a refund is unconditional. Write to care@bencaohouse.com with the word “refund” in the subject line. We do not ask why, we do not offer you a discount to stay, and we do not make you fill in a form.

In practice this window is at least a few hours and often more than a day, because reports are written in batches in the morning, Hangzhou time. If you write within an hour of paying, you are almost certainly inside it.

We delete your answers and your photograph at the same time, unless you ask us to keep them because you intend to come back.

Once a physician has begun reading, the work has been done even if nothing has been sent yet. We still refund in full at this stage. We have never refused, and we are not going to start by refusing you.

What we ask for in return is one sentence about why, because it is the only way we find out that a question in the intake reads badly, or that our email sounded wrong. You are free to decline to give it, and the refund happens either way.

A written report cannot be returned. That is the honest reason most services stop refunding at delivery. We do not stop, but the terms narrow to things we can actually judge. We refund in full, within 30 days of delivery, if any of these is true:

• It arrived later than 48 hours and we had not written to you first to say so.
• It does not engage with what you told us — generic paragraphs that would suit anybody, or advice that contradicts an answer you gave.
• The English is poor enough to make it hard to use.
• It is shorter or thinner than the sample on the sample report.
• It crosses a boundary we said we would not cross: naming an illness, telling you to stop a medication, or suggesting a herbal formula.

You may keep the report. We do not ask anyone to delete a file before we return their money, because that would be an insult wrapped in a condition.

We will say this plainly, because a policy that pretends to have no limits is not being read carefully by the person who wrote it.

A report is a considered reading, not an outcome. If you followed the food suggestions for three weeks and feel much the same, that is disappointing and we would like to hear about it, but it is not a fault in the work — nobody, in any tradition, can promise you a result from a document.

Nor is a refund the right instrument if you disagree with the pattern we describe. Chinese medicine is interpretive. Two careful physicians can read the same tongue differently, and where that is likely we say so in the report itself. If you think we read you wrongly, ask for the second reading below — it is more useful to you than thirty-nine dollars.

Instead of a refund, you may ask for a second reading: a different physician in the family reads your intake and your photograph from the beginning, without seeing the first report, and writes their own. It costs nothing. You keep both.

This exists because it is the honest answer to “I do not think this is right”. It takes about a week, because it waits for whoever is next free. If the second reading also misses, take the refund — ask for it then and we do not argue that you already had two.

Email care@bencaohouse.com from the address you bought with, with “refund” in the subject. Tell us the date, or paste the receipt. That is the whole procedure. There is no form, no portal, and no support ticket that closes itself after seven days of silence.

• We reply within 2 working days, from a named person.
• We issue the refund through Stripe within 5 working days of agreeing to it.
• Your bank then takes its own 5 to 10 days. That part is out of our hands, and we will send you the Stripe reference so you can chase it if it stalls.

The refund goes back to the card you paid with. We cannot send it anywhere else, and we will never ask you for bank details in order to return money — if an email claiming to be us asks for that, it is not us.

This policy is what we offer voluntarily. It sits on top of whatever your own law gives you, and it never replaces it.

In the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area you have a fourteen-day right to cancel a distance contract. Because a report is digital content delivered before that period ends, the intake asks you to agree that we may begin at once, and tells you in the same sentence that agreeing shortens the statutory window. That box is not ticked in advance. If you would rather keep the full fourteen days, say so and we will simply start on the fifteenth.

In the United States, your state consumer protection law and your card issuer’s chargeback process remain available to you at all times. We would rather you wrote to us first, because a refund from us takes days and a chargeback takes months, but nothing here asks you to give that up.

Write anyway. The list above is what we have promised; it is not the limit of what we will do. We are a family of five people, not a returns department, and the person reading your email is one of the people whose name is on the disclosure.

If a complaint is really about how we behaved rather than what we wrote, the disclosure sets out the complaints route and the outside bodies you can take it to. We would rather you used the outside route than stayed quiet.