Returns & refunds

Checkout is not taking payment yet — the merchant gateway is still being provisioned — so at the moment there is no live order to refund. This is the policy that applies from the first live order onward, published now so it can be read before anyone buys rather than discovered afterwards.

Unopened, unused items in their original sealed packaging, requested within 30 days of delivery. To be accepted the unit has to arrive back with all of the following intact:

• The manufacturer seal unbroken. A cap seal, induction seal, foil or blister that has been pierced, peeled or re-applied counts as opened.
• The lot label intact and legible — not torn, not overwritten, not covered by a shipping label — and matching the lot we shipped against your order.
• The original packaging, including any inner carton, desiccant, insert or protective tray it arrived in.
• A return reference from us. We issue one when the return is approved. A parcel that turns up without one cannot be matched to an order or to a lot, and we cannot process it.

Everything Seratide publishes rests on one claim: the material in your hand is the material described on its lot page. That claim survives only as long as the chain between the analysis and the physical unit is unbroken.

Once a seal has been broken, or a lot label has been damaged past reading, that chain is gone. Nobody — not us, not you, not the next buyer — can establish what is now inside the container or which analysis applies to it. A unit in that state can never be re-sold and can never be re-verified, so we do not put it back into stock and we do not pretend we could. That is the entire reason the rule is written in terms of seals and labels rather than in terms of how long you have had it.

• Anything opened, decanted, weighed out, aliquoted or reconstituted — including a vial that was reconstituted and never used.
• Bacteriostatic water once the stopper has been pierced or the seal broken, because its entire value is the state of that seal.
• Sterile single-use supplies — syringes, filters, sealed consumables — whose packaging has been opened, even if the item itself was never used.
• Custom, consolidated or reserved bulk allocations produced or set aside against a specific order. Those are covered by the quote they were agreed under; see wholesale.
• Items where the lot label is missing, illegible, or does not match the lot recorded against your order.

None of that is an inventory preference dressed up as a policy. Damaged, incorrect and below-spec items are handled under the sections below and are not caught by this list.

Tell us within 7 days of delivery and we will make it right without argument. Before you unpack any further, photograph the outer box as it arrived, the packing material inside it, and the affected item with its lot label readable. Those three photographs are what we need — they are also what a carrier claim needs, and getting them at the point of opening saves the whole exchange.

Send them with your order number through a returns request. We replace from the next available lot or refund in full, your choice, and we cover postage in both directions. You do not need to return a broken vial before we act.

Send us the report. If a competent independent laboratory assays the lot and returns a result below the specification stated on its lot page — purity for lyophilised material, potency against label claim for a capsule, tablet, softgel, powder or liquid, or any contaminant row reported as conforming that does not — we refund or replace in full, including shipping both ways, within 90 days of delivery.

We also hold back the remaining units of that lot while we take the discrepancy up with the lab named on the original report, and if the finding stands we say so on the lot page rather than quietly re-testing until we like the answer. Publishing per-lot analysis is only worth something if it can be checked and can be wrong.

Refunds go back to the original payment method used on the order — we cannot send a refund to a different card, a different account or a store balance. Once an approved return has been received and inspected, the refund is issued within 5 business days. How long it then takes to appear on your statement is your card issuer's timing rather than ours, and is commonly a few business days more.

Refunds include what you paid for the item. Original outbound shipping is refunded too whenever the fault was ours, and is not refunded on a straightforward change of mind. Duties or import taxes already collected by a customs authority are outside our reach — those are reclaimed from that authority directly.

• You do for a change of mind: a correct, undamaged item you no longer want. Use a tracked service — an untracked return that never arrives cannot be refunded.
• We do whenever the fault is ours: a wrong item, a wrong lot, a packing error, damage in transit, or a lot that fails an independent re-test. We send the label; you are never asked to pay first and claim it back later.

If an order cannot be shipped lawfully to its destination, or a buyer turns out not to meet the conditions on the Research Use Only page, we cancel and refund it in full rather than sending it and letting it be seized. That is a refund, not a penalty, and there is no fee attached to it. The shipping rules behind this are set out on the shipping page.

Open a returns request with your order number, the lot code from the label, and one line on what happened. If it is a damage or shortage claim, attach the three photographs described above. We reply with either a return reference and an address, or — where sending it back makes no sense, as with a shattered vial — a resolution without one.

You can also email support@seratide.com. Either route reaches the same people. Seratide cannot advise on human use of anything sold here, including in a returns conversation.