Returns

Generous on damage. Firm on change of mind.

Forty-eight hours from delivery, and then the reasons. A policy you have to accept without understanding is not a policy. It is a trap.

The window

48 hours

Forty-eight hours from delivery to tell us the parcel arrived damaged, wrong, or not right. Tell us and we arrange the pickup ourselves. You do not have to find a courier, print a label or queue anywhere. It is a short window, and we would rather put it in the biggest type on the page than have you find it in a clause on day three.

Opened

Cannot come back

Once the wrapper is off a bar of soap, a jar of salt or anything else that touches skin, it cannot come back. Not a loophole, and not negotiable: nobody can look at an opened bar and tell whether a stranger has washed with it. Its only remaining destinations are you or a bin.

What comes back, and what does not

Both lists in full, on the same page, in the same size type.

We take it back

Damaged or defective — broken in transit, or a bar that is wrong in itself: improper texture, discolouration, separation, mould.
The wrong thing — a product you did not order, or fewer of them than you paid for.
A quality problem on arrival — it is not what it should be, and you can see that when you open it.

We cannot

Used, opened or partly finished — hygiene, as above.
A broken seal or tampered packaging — the seal is the only evidence either of us has.
Anything after 48 hours — past that we cannot tell the courier whether the damage happened in their van or in your bathroom, and they stop paying attention.
Damage from storage or handling — a bar left in a wet soap dish for a fortnight is a bar you have used.
Variation in colour, texture or scent — these are characteristics of a handmade bar, not defects. The rest of this page is about why.

The clause we refuse to hide

No two bars are identical — that’s the point.

Most Indian handmade brands put a line in their terms saying “imperfections inherent to the handmade process are not defects”, set it in grey, and hope you never read it. We are putting it here, in the largest type on the page. It is the best argument for the product we have, and burying it would waste it.

Our colour is the ingredient. Beetroot juice goes in off the heat and does as it pleases — the bar lands somewhere between rose and rust, and the batch decides, not us. Turmeric shifts with the crop from Erode. Carrot fades in sunlight, because beta-carotene fades in sunlight. Rose absolute from Kannauj is a different oil in a wet April than a dry one. Every bar is trimmed by hand to 100 g ± 5 g, and the ± is not a disclaimer, it is a knife.

So the bar in the photograph is a bar. It is not your bar. Yours will be a slightly different colour, the marbling will be somewhere else, and it will weigh a few grams either side. If we could guarantee otherwise we would be using a pigment and a machine, and you would be buying a different and cheaper thing.

Which is why colour variation is not grounds for a return. We say it on every product page, on the about page, twice in the questions and once here, precisely so it is never a surprise. If the bar is genuinely wrong — different formulation, different scent, not what you ordered — that is our error, not a variation, and we fix it at our cost immediately.

How a return works

Five steps, all of them ours

A cracked bar, a broken jar, a candle that arrived as a puddle: that is our packing and our courier, so it is our problem.

Tell us within 48 hours. Call +91 72070 93716, message the same number on WhatsApp, or email thebathaura@gmail.com. Give us the order number, the product name and SKU, what is wrong, and the photographs. We are there Monday to Saturday, 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM IST.
Show us. Clear, timestamped photographs or video: a close-up of the damage and a full view of the product, the original packaging and the unboxing if you have it, the manufacturing date or batch number if you can see it, and any damage to the box or the seal. This is not us building a case against you — it is what the courier asks us for when we claim, and without it we are arguing from memory.
We look, within 2 to 3 business days. Damaged or defective and we arrange a free pickup. Wrong item and you get a return label or a pickup, whichever suits. Quality problem and we verify it and get on with it.
It comes back to us. Pickup is free for every eligible return. Send it in its original condition and packaging, and keep the pickup reference — it is the only thing that proves the parcel left your hands.
Refund or replacement. Refunds are processed 5 to 7 business days after the parcel reaches us and has been looked at, back to the payment method you used. Replacements are dispatched on the same 5 to 7 business days.

What we do not do: ask you to fill in a claim form, or open an investigation into whether you are lying. If someone is going to defraud a small soap company for the price of one bar, they are welcome to it. Building a process to stop them would cost us more than they will ever take.

The parts about money, stated plainly

If the fault is ours, you get everything back — the product and the shipping you paid to receive it. A bar that arrived broken, a defect we should have caught, the wrong thing in the box: none of that is your mistake, so none of it should cost you money. Everything on the list above falls here.
Anywhere else, a refund covers the value of the product and not the shipping. We posted it once and we pay to bring it back, and that is real money for a workshop this size. We would rather charge it honestly here than pretend it does not exist and quietly price it into the bars.
If the refund has to go back by bank transfer rather than to the card or UPI you paid with, add 3 to 5 business days to the figures above. That is the bank, and we cannot hurry it.
Exchanges — a replacement of equal or greater value, dispatched within 5 to 7 business days, with no additional shipping charge. If it is worth more than the original, you pay the difference in the product price and nothing else.
Who pays the return leg — if the return is our error, we do, entirely. If we make an exception and take something back because you have changed your mind, the return shipping is yours, and we will say so and send you a prepaid label before anything moves. You will never discover this afterwards.

Cancelling

2 hours

From order confirmation. Short, and on this page rather than buried in the terms, because a cancellation window you cannot find is not a window.

Within two hours of confirming your order, tell us on WhatsApp (+91 72070 93716), by phone on the same number, or by email at thebathaura@gmail.com with your order number, and we cancel it. Full refund to the payment method you used, initiated immediately; your bank takes 3 to 5 business days to show it, which is their clock and not ours.

After two hours, we cannot. By then your order is being picked, wrapped and packed by hand, and the honest answer is that undoing it is no longer possible. Go ahead with it, or wait for it to arrive and use the returns process above if something is wrong with it.

Once it has shipped, definitely not. You may refuse the delivery when it arrives — that is your right and we will not make it awkward — but return fees may apply. The refund happens after the parcel is back with us and checked. It is slower, and it costs one of us money. That is why the two hours exist.

Bulk and custom orders run on different terms, because they are made for you specifically and cannot be sold to anyone else. Talk to us directly before you order, and we will put the terms in writing.

The awkward cases, answered

It arrived and my skin reacted to it: Stop using it and tell us. We will refund it, opened or not, and we do not hold you to the forty-eight hours for this one — a reaction does not always show up on the first day. This is the one place we set the hygiene rule aside, because charging someone for a bar that gave them a rash is indefensible. Tell us which one and what happened; every ingredient in every formulation is on the ingredients page, and it genuinely helps us to know which one did it.
My candle top is soft and uneven: If it arrived that way between March and June, that is Indian summer meeting soy wax at 45°C. Burn and scent are unaffected, and the first burn will level the top permanently. If it has gone properly wrong — wax pooled at an angle, wick displaced — tell us within forty-eight hours and we replace it. That one is ours.
I ordered the wrong thing: Tell us within two hours and we cancel it outright, or change it if you would rather — quicker and better for everyone than a return. After that it is packed, and a change of mind is not on the list above: an unopened bar you simply do not want is not something we can promise to take back. Ask anyway. We are a small enough business to say yes sometimes, and if we do, the return shipping is yours and we will tell you that before you post it.
It was a gift and they did not like it: Not liking it is a change of mind, and the answer above applies. If it arrived damaged or wrong, it is a normal return — forty-eight hours from when it was delivered to them, not from when you ordered it, and the refund goes back to whoever paid, which is a conversation the two of you should probably have first.
Nobody was home and it came back to you: We will reship once at our cost. If it comes back a second time we will refund the order minus the shipping we have now paid three times. This is the only clause on this page that costs you money for something that is not damage, and it exists because a returned COD parcel is roughly the difference between our margin and no margin. Someone has to sign for every order — that is on the shipping page, and this is why.
It never arrived: Tell us. We will chase the courier, and if it is genuinely lost we reship or refund — your choice — without making you wait for their investigation to conclude. Their process is not your problem, and the forty-eight hours obviously cannot start on a delivery that never happened.

Nothing on this page limits your rights under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. Every window, fee and timeline we have is written above, at full size. There is no second version of this policy that appears at checkout. If you think we have got something wrong, tell us — we would much rather hear it than not.

Start a return