Cancellations and reprints

Printing is made to order. Your business cards carry your name; your banner carries your artwork. The moment a job goes on the press, the materials and the press time are spent, and there is nobody else the work can be sold to. A returned box of flyers is worth nothing to anyone but you.

So we do not offer change-of-mind refunds. What we offer instead is a real window to stop a job before it is printed, and a reprint at our own cost when the printing is our fault. The rest of this page is what those two things mean in practice.

You can cancel for any reason, right up to the moment you approve your proof. Approving the proof is the act that sends your job to print, so that is where the window closes. Nothing is printed before it.

To cancel, tell us before you approve: [OWNER: cancellation channel — an email address, or the Cancel control on the order page once one exists. There is no self-service cancel button in the storefront today]. Quote your order number.

If you are unsure about a proof, ask for changes rather than approving it. Requesting changes costs nothing, does not start production, and keeps your cancellation window open.

Once an order is cancelled, the hold is released in full — the whole amount, with nothing deducted. [OWNER: how long a release takes to appear in a points balance]

Sometimes a job stops on our side rather than yours:

• we cannot produce the specification you ordered;
• a production partner cannot fulfil the job;
• a proof is never approved and the order is closed after [OWNER: how long an unapproved order stays open before it is closed];
• something went wrong at checkout and points were held against an order that never came into existence.

In every one of these your points are released in full, whether or not a proof was approved. This is not a goodwill gesture and you do not have to argue for it. We hold points to print a job; if the job does not print, we have no claim to them.

One line is firm: if the mistake was visible on the proof you approved, we cannot reprint it for free. The proof exists so that both of us are looking at the same thing before the press starts.

• A typo, an old phone number, or last year’s logo.
• An image that was low-resolution in the file you supplied, where that was flagged before printing.
• Text or a logo sitting in the trim area after a preflight warning.
• Colour built in RGB and approved despite a colour warning.
• A change of mind about the design after approval.

None of this makes you a difficult customer. It is the most common thing that goes wrong in printing and it happens to professional designers too. We check every upload for resolution, bleed and colour and we flag what we can find — but we cannot know that a number is out of date or that a name is spelled two ways.

So: if it was your file, we will help you correct it and print it again at the normal points price. If our checks missed something they should have caught, that is ours — and it is a free reprint.

Commercial printing is a mechanical process and a few things are expected rather than faults:

• Colour on a lit screen is never exactly ink on paper. A print is judged against the proof you approved, not against a monitor.
• Small shifts between print runs, and between paper batches of the same stock.
• A trimming tolerance of [OWNER: state the trim tolerance you accept, e.g. ±Xmm].
• A quantity tolerance of [OWNER: state the over/under-run you accept, e.g. ±X% on quantities above Y — this is the number the short-delivery claim above points at].

Anything outside those is a defect, and a defect is a reprint.

Points that are released or returned always go back to the balance they came from. They are not converted into money, and we cannot pay them out to a bank account, a card, or another person’s account. A cancelled order does not turn points into cash, because points are not cash to begin with.

[OWNER DECISION: if an order can be part-paid in money at checkout, state here what happens to that payment when an order is cancelled before production. Releasing held points is automatic; money already taken for a job that never printed is a separate question and needs an answer before launch]

Almost everything on this page is faster as a conversation than as a claim. Write to [OWNER: orders email address — must match /contact] with your order number and we will tell you exactly where your job is and what your options are.

These terms sit alongside our Terms & Conditions. How to prepare artwork so a reprint is never needed is in the artwork specs guide.