Shipping
Everything it costs, on this page
Hyderabad delivery
₹50
Within 48 hours
Offered automatically when your pincode is a Hyderabad one. You do not have to know to ask for it.
Standard delivery
₹70
5–7 working days after pickup
The default. Nothing faster is pre-ticked on your behalf.
Express delivery
₹130
3–5 working days after pickup
A choice you make, never one made for you.
Orders over ₹1,999
Free
Anywhere in India, prepaid or cash on delivery, whichever rate you picked.
Cash on delivery
No extra charge
No COD fee, no handling fee, no surprise at the door.
Over 500g, or bulk
We quote it
A real number for your actual parcel, before you pay. We will not invent a per-gram rate here and discover it was wrong at the counter.
Every rate above covers a parcel up to 500g, which is most orders — a bar, a jar, a small stack of either. Heavier than that, or buying for an office, and we work the postage out and tell you what it is before you commit to anything. That is the entire pricing table. There is no second one.
Payment
₹100 off if you pay now
Applied automatically. No code, no minimum, nothing to remember.
Here is the arithmetic, since it is your money. A cash-on-delivery order in India comes back undelivered roughly a quarter of the time. The parcel travels to your city and back, we pay both legs, and a bar of soap that has been on two vans is not something we can sell to anybody else. A prepaid order comes back two or three times in a hundred.
That difference is real money. Rather than build it into the price of every bar and let prepaid customers subsidise the returns, we hand it back to whoever saves it. Hence ₹100 — a flat amount, not a percentage, because on a ₹350 bar a percentage is a rounding error and ₹100 is a reason.
And if you would rather pay cash, pay cash. Cash on delivery is offered, at no extra charge, across the pin codes our couriers serve. The option is not hidden below the fold. It is not pre-deselected. There is no “no thanks, I like paying more” button anywhere near it. That kind of thing is illegal in India, and it was a horrible way to talk to a customer even before it was.
- UPI— GPay, PhonePe, Paytm, or any UPI ID. Roughly 85% of digital payments in India, so it is first in the list rather than hidden behind “other methods”.
- Cards, net banking, wallets — through Cashfree. We never see your card number and we do not store it.
- Cash on delivery — available across the pin codes our couriers serve, at no extra charge.
How long it takes
Everything ships from Hyderabad. Two clocks run: ours, from the moment your order and payment are confirmed, and the courier’s, from the moment they pick the parcel up.
- Dispatch: 24 to 48 hours
- Counted from order confirmation and payment clearance, and not counting weekends or public holidays — an order placed on Saturday evening is picked up on Tuesday, not Monday, and we would rather you knew that now. Nothing is sitting in a warehouse waiting to age. The bar is ready the day it is poured; the day or two is the queue in front of it, and the trimming, wrapping and packing that are done by hand afterwards.
- Hyderabad: 48 hours
- From order confirmation, not from pickup — it is our own city and there is no long leg. This is the one line on the page where the two clocks are the same clock.
- Metros: 3 to 5 working days
- Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata, counted from pickup. Add the dispatch window above and you have the honest door-to-door figure.
- Tier 2 cities: 5 to 7 working days
- From pickup. Allow another day or two for processing on top, and if it matters that it arrives by a particular date, tell us before you order rather than after.
- Tier 3 and remote: 7 to 10 working days
- From pickup. The hills, the north-east, the islands and anywhere the courier's own map calls remote. We use whichever of our couriers actually reaches you; India Post reaches places the others quietly do not.
- Festival seasons: add 2 to 3 days
- Diwali, Holi, Christmas and the wedding months. Every courier in India is over capacity at once and there is nothing we or anyone else can do about it except tell you in advance and suggest you order early. We would rather say this in August than apologise in October.
- When it slips, and why
- We hand the parcel to a third-party courier, and from that moment the van is not ours. Weather, strikes, floods and the ordinary chaos of a large country all add days we cannot promise away. Soy wax is the other one: it softens around 45°C, which a stationary van in Nagpur in May comfortably exceeds, so during declared heat advisories we hold candles back and pack them with insulation. That costs you a day and saves your candle. If you would rather we sent it regardless, say so — it is your candle.
The small print, which is not small
Tracking
The moment your parcel is picked up, the tracking link goes to you by email and on WhatsApp — both, because one of them is always the one you actually read. After that the courier is telling you where it is directly, which is faster than us relaying it. Track an order if you would rather look it up yourself.
Someone has to sign
Every order needs a signature on delivery. A small inconvenience, and a deliberate one: a parcel left on a step is a parcel nobody can prove arrived, and when it goes missing the argument that follows is one you cannot win. If you will be out, give us a neighbour, an office, a guard’s desk — anywhere a person will be.
The address, in full
Flat or house number, building, street, landmark, city, state, pin code, and a phone number the courier can actually reach. No P.O. boxes — our couriers will not carry to one, and signature confirmation makes it impossible anyway. An incomplete address does not fail loudly. It goes out, wanders, and comes back to Hyderabad a fortnight later, which is the slowest possible way to find out a landmark was missing.
Open it at the door
We pack in protective materials and the courier is still a courier. Open the box while the delivery person is still there, or as soon after as you can, and look at what is inside. Transit damage is completely our problem — but the returns window is 48 hours from delivery, and a box opened on Friday that was delivered on Tuesday is a conversation neither of us can have with the courier any more.
What is not damage
Colour, texture and scent vary from bar to bar and batch to batch. That is what handmade means and it is not a defect — the beetroot decides the pink, not us. It is on every product page, on the about page and at length on the returns page, precisely so it is never a surprise on your doorstep.
Your invoice
Goes out with every order, by email at dispatch and on paper in the box. If you would like your company’s GSTIN noted on it for your records, enter it at checkout. For anything at corporate scale, the corporate gifting enquiry handles the paperwork from the start.
Gifts
Send it straight to the recipient and no price appears anywhere in or on the box — the invoice goes to you by email. A handwritten card costs nothing; put the message in the order notes. We will not add gift wrap you did not ask for and then charge you for it. Auto-adding anything to a basket is a prohibited dark pattern in India, and it is also just a mean thing to do.
International
Not yet, and we will not take your money for it until we can do it properly. The honest blocker is heat: we cannot get a candle across a border in an Indian summer without a cold chain we do not have. Soap and salt would be fine. But a shipping policy with an asterisk in the middle of it is a bad shipping policy.
If it goes wrong
Damaged in transit is our problem and we cover it completely — photograph it within forty-eight hours, tell us on WhatsApp (+91 72070 93716) or by email at thebathaura@gmail.com, and we arrange the pickup and the replacement at our cost. The full returns policy is one page, in English, and worth the two minutes. We read both inboxes Monday to Saturday, 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM IST.
If you ever find a charge on this site that was not disclosed before you paid it, that is a bug and a legal problem, and we want to know about it more than you want to tell us. Tell us.