Buyer Protection · reluv.co.uk
What happens to your money on Reluv.
When you buy on Reluv, the seller is not paid straight away. Your payment is held while the item is posted and delivered, and it is released once the order is complete. This page explains what we hold, for how long, who decides when something goes wrong, and what we do not cover.
Seller fee. We take no cut of the sale itself.
Refund if a dispute is resolved in your favour. No cap, whatever you paid.
For the seller to respond to a dispute, or it is decided for them.
What the Buyer Protection Fee buys
A fee with that name should be able to say what it does.
Buyers pay a Buyer Protection Fee of 70p plus 6% of the item price. The 6% is charged on the first £150 only, so the fee never exceeds about £9.70. That caps the fee, not your protection: your refund is never capped, whatever you paid (see below). It appears as its own line at checkout, before you pay. Ours pays for three things.
A held payment
Your money does not reach the seller at the point of sale. It is held until the order completes.
Buyer protection
If the seller does not post in time, the order cancels itself and you are refunded. You do not have to chase it.
Dispute cover
If the item arrives and it is not what was listed, you can open a dispute, submit evidence, and have a person decide it.
That is the list. It is not insurance and it is not a warranty.
No cap on your refund
You get your money back in full.
The fee stops growing at £150 of the item price, but your protection does not. If a dispute is resolved in your favour before the funds are released, you are refunded the full item price from the money held for your order, whatever you paid. There is no cap on the return of your own money.
That holds however much the item cost. The payment is held until delivery is confirmed, you can open a dispute, and a person decides it on the evidence, whether the item was £10 or £500.
You may see a £150 figure elsewhere. That is a separate guarantee we give sellers if a carrier loses a parcel: it caps what we pay the seller, never your refund.
Sellers pay nothing to sell
No selling fee. Zero.
There is no selling fee. Not a reduced one. Zero. List at £14 and you receive £14. The minimum item price is £2.00. We take no commission on the sale itself, so we have no reason to push your asking price up.
Postage
We buy the label.
We buy the label, so the seller does not have to work it out. The buyer pays a flat price based on parcel size, shown at checkout before you pay, starting at £2.99. Carriers are Royal Mail, InPost, Evri and Yodel. Craft and hobby parcels have a larger size band for things like yarn lots and fabric bolts.
The clock
Every stage runs on a fixed window.
Published in advance. Nothing here depends on anyone being in a good mood.
| Stage | Window | What happens at the end of it |
|---|---|---|
| Seller accepts or declines an offer | 24 hours | The offer expires |
| Seller posts the item | 5 days from confirmation, or 2 days if the buyer paid for next-day | The order auto-cancels and the buyer is refunded |
| Delivery is registered | On carrier tracking or buyer confirmation | There is no automatic delivered timer |
| A dispute can be opened | Within 48 hours of delivery (14 days from a business seller). If it never arrives, from 7 days after posting | Before 7 days a missing parcel is simply in transit |
| Seller responds to a dispute | 48 hours, private or business seller | The dispute resolves automatically against the seller |
| Seller is paid (normal order) | Shortly after the dispute window closes, then bank settlement | Money is released |
| No delivery scan, undisputed | Eligible for review from 11 days after posting | A member of the team checks it and confirms the release. It is not automatic |
| Buyer ships an agreed return | 5 days, or 14 days for a change-of-mind return | No hard cut-off: your refund is still due once it reaches the seller |
| Refund reaches your account | Up to 10 business days | Standard payment processing |
One thing worth saying plainly: creating a label is not posting. Buying a label does not extend the posting deadline. The clock runs until the carrier has the parcel.
When something goes wrong
One submission, decided by a person.
If the item arrives wrong, damaged, or not as described, you have 48 hours from delivery to open a dispute (14 days if you bought from a business seller). It goes three ways, in order.
You open it
In the app, describe the problem and attach your evidence: up to ten photos or videos, with video up to 90 seconds.
The seller responds
They have 48 hours, whether the sale was private or business. If they say nothing, the dispute resolves automatically against them.
A person decides
On the facts and the evidence, by a person. Reluv is a one-person company, so in practice that is the founder, not a scoring system you cannot see.
Submit it complete. There is no second window to add things later, so gather what you need before you send it.
Evidence is retained until the later of 120 days from the charge or 30 days from resolution, so there is a record if the payment is queried later.
Buying from a business seller
More than a private sale, not less.
Some sellers on Reluv are registered businesses rather than individuals clearing out. They are labelled as business sellers, and buying from one gives you more than buying privately, not less.
You get your full statutory consumer rights, including the right to open a dispute or cancel a distance purchase within 14 days and get your money back, whether or not anything was wrong with it. Once a dispute is open, the seller has the same 48 hours to respond as on a private sale. A business seller's contact details are always available to you. And their payout is held until that 14-day right has run out, so the money is still there if you change your mind.
Buying from a private seller does not carry those statutory rights, anywhere, on any platform. That is the law, not our policy. What our buyer protection does is give you a held payment, a dispute route and a person to decide it, on both kinds of sale.
What happens to the seller's money
Held, not spent, and not ours.
Your money exists from the moment the buyer pays. It is held, not spent, and it is not ours.
On a normal order it is released once the dispute window has closed, and then reaches your bank on the usual settlement timetable, so a few days after delivery in practice rather than a fixed date. If tracking never confirms delivery and no dispute is opened, the order becomes eligible for release from 11 days after posting: a member of our team checks it and confirms the release, rather than it happening on its own. A carrier that loses a scan is not your problem to absorb.
If you are a business seller, your payout is held until the buyer's 14-day statutory cancellation right has passed. That is a legal requirement, not a Reluv rule.
Account decisions
Four things hold.
If we suspend or restrict an account, four things hold. A person makes the decision and a person reviews it. You are told the reason, in words, not a code. You can reply to that person and have your reply read. And your balance is not held hostage: money you are owed on completed orders is still owed to you, and a decision about your account does not become a way of keeping it.
We are not going to describe a formal appeals structure we do not have. What we have is a small company, an inbox, and an obligation to answer you.
What this does not cover
The edges, said out loud.
We would rather be clear about the edges than let you find them yourself.
Missed windows
The dispute window is 48 hours from delivery (14 days for a business-seller purchase). Once it closes, the order settles and the seller is paid. We cannot reopen it because the item was left in a hallway for a fortnight.
We are not an insurer
Buyer protection covers the order you placed on Reluv. It is not cover for wear, for how something suits you, or for anything agreed off the platform.
Off the platform
If you take a conversation or a payment outside Reluv, none of this applies, because there is nothing held.
Refund timing
After we release it, your bank takes over, normally up to 10 business days. These windows are firm in both directions, which is the point of publishing them.
Reaching a person
The reply comes from someone who can change the outcome.
Message us from the app, or email hello@reluv.co.uk. It is a small company, so the reply comes from someone who can actually change the outcome.
If you are writing about a specific order, include the order number. If you are writing about a dispute, say what you want to happen. That is usually enough to sort it.