Can you actually say no refunds? What the law tends to expect
A blanket no-refunds line is common and, in several countries, unenforceable on digital goods. Here is how to write a policy you can actually stand behind.
You have probably seen the line, and you may have copied it: all sales are final, no refunds under any circumstances. It appears at the bottom of thousands of creator sales pages, usually pasted from another creator who pasted it from someone else. It feels like protection. In several of the countries your buyers live in, it is not protection at all, and in the one place where refund arguments are actually settled — a card dispute — it carries strikingly little weight.
Why the blanket line is weaker than it looks
Start with the part nobody enjoys: this is not legal advice, rules differ by country, and yours depend on where you are established and where your buyers are. What follows is the shape of the landscape, not a substitute for checking your own corner of it.
Across the UK and the EU, distance selling rules give consumers a cancellation window on most online purchases. Digital content delivered immediately is treated as a special case: the window can be given up, but generally only where the buyer has been told clearly that they are giving it up and has agreed before delivery starts. That is a real, usable route — it is just not the same as writing "no refunds" in bold and hoping. Separately, most consumer regimes keep a right to a remedy when the thing sold is faulty or not as described, and no sentence on your page removes that. In Australia the consumer guarantees work similarly, and signs claiming no refunds under any circumstances have long been treated as misleading.
The harder truth is that the law is often not where your refund argument gets decided. The buyer contacts their bank, the bank raises a dispute, and the case is settled by card network rules and the evidence you can produce. Your policy matters there, but as one document among several. A clear policy plus proof of delivery is a strong file. A blanket refusal on its own is not.
Two ways to write the same page
The choice is not between generous and strict. It is between vague and specific. Specific policies are easier to enforce, easier to defend and, oddly, easier to be kind within, because you know exactly where the edge of your generosity sits.
| The blanket no-refunds line | A policy with edges |
|---|---|
| "No refunds" pasted into a footer, applied to every product you sell | Different terms per product, written into the description on the page each product sells from |
| Says nothing about faults, so a genuinely broken file becomes an argument | Names the fault case explicitly, and promises a fix or a refund for it |
| Offers a disputing buyer nothing to read except a refusal | Gives a dispute response something concrete: terms shown before purchase, and instant delivery to a private order page they can still open |
| Gets ignored because it clearly applies to nobody's actual situation | Gets followed, because it describes situations buyers recognise |
| Makes every request a negotiation about your character | Makes every request a comparison against a rule, which is a much shorter conversation |
Writing a policy you can defend
This takes about twenty minutes and you only do it once. The aim is a short paragraph you can paste into each digital download description, adjusted for what that particular product is.
- 1Decide your window. Fourteen days is a familiar number to European buyers and easy to explain. Seven is defensible. Zero is where you need the delivery consent point below to be handled properly.
- 2Name the fault case in its own sentence: if the file will not open, is corrupted, or is materially not what the page described, you fix it or refund it. This costs you almost nothing and removes the most legitimate reason anyone has to dispute.
- 3Say what happens on delivery. Purchases on store.fan are delivered instantly to a private order page the buyer can return to, so tell them the download is available immediately and that this is the point at which the standard cancellation window no longer applies, if that is the position you are taking.
- 4Give a route in. One line: message me first and I will reply within two working days. A named alternative to the bank is the single most effective dispute prevention available to you.
- 5Paste it into the product description in your store.fan dashboard, above or below the buy button, on every paid product. Not only the expensive ones.
- 6Keep a copy of the wording and the date you published it. If a dispute arrives in three months, you will want to show what the page said at the time of purchase.
A short version you can adapt
"This is a digital download, available immediately after payment on your private order page. Because delivery is instant, I do not offer change-of-mind refunds once the file has been made available, and by buying you agree to that. If the file will not open, is damaged, or is not what this page described, message me and I will fix it or refund you in full. I reply within two working days." Adapt the window and the tone; keep the structure. It says what you do, what you do not do, and what to do next.
The arithmetic of being reasonable
Suppose you sell a $29 template pack and one buyer in fifty asks for their money back. Across two hundred sales that is four refunds, $116 returned, and roughly twenty minutes of your time. Now suppose that instead of refunding you refuse, citing your no-refunds line, and one of those four takes it to their bank. You lose the $29 anyway, you pay a dispute fee that is often larger than the sale itself, and you have spent longer on the response than four refunds would have taken.
The point is not that refunds are free. It is that refusal is not free either, and the cost of refusal is less predictable. Since store.fan charges 0% platform fee on every plan and payments arrive in your own Stripe account, the money you are deciding about is genuinely yours to decide about, which makes the arithmetic simpler than it is on platforms that keep a cut regardless.
Not selling anywhere yet? Set your terms up on day one, on the same page as the product, rather than retrofitting them after the first awkward message.
Create your storeThe mistake most people make
The mistake is treating the policy as a legal shield rather than as a piece of writing that buyers will read before they decide. Almost nobody buys a $19 guide after studying its terms, but the presence of a clear, human paragraph does something a legal wall does not: it tells a hesitant person that you have thought about them. A policy that reads as though it was written to defeat customers tends to reduce sales at the top of the funnel and increase disputes at the bottom. Write it as though the person reading it is honest, because almost all of them are, and keep the dispute process for the few who are not.
Not in itself, and it is normal in some markets. What tends not to work is using it to override statutory consumer rights, particularly around faulty or misdescribed goods. In the UK, the EU and Australia the safer approach is a policy that removes the change-of-mind window on immediately delivered digital content, with proper notice, while leaving the fault remedy intact.
It helps, and it helps considerably more when the terms are visible on the product page rather than behind a link. What you want to be able to say later is that the buyer could see the terms at the moment they decided. Putting them in the description of the product they bought is the simplest way to be able to say that.
That is exactly why the delivery clause exists. Say clearly that the download is available instantly and that this is the point where change-of-mind refunds stop. If the request is about a genuine fault, honour it regardless — that path is much cheaper than a dispute and usually keeps the customer.
Yes, and this is the strongest argument for per-product terms. A file delivered instantly, a call that occupies an hour of your diary, and a parcel you have to post are three genuinely different promises. Writing one policy that covers all three produces a policy that fits none of them.
A policy is not armour. It is a description of how you behave, written down in advance so that you behave that way on a bad day as well as a good one. Make it short, make it specific, put it where people buy, and let it do the deciding when you are tired. If you want to see how product descriptions and instant delivery fit together, the features pages walk through it, and the FAQ answers the account-level questions.
Publish products with your own terms on the page, delivered instantly, on an account that takes no platform cut from any of it.
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