Putting an order right, and the windows that close

The swap and send-back service is described as a seller-side guarantee that the agent administers. The window runs five days from the stored state, and the page spells out that five days are a hundred and twenty hours, and the count opens at the next full hour once the status flips. Miss it and the page says the request may not be accepted.

There is a published list of what the service does not cover, and it is long: made-to-order goods, anything whose packaging, tags or accessories you asked to have removed, newspapers and periodicals, anything bought second-hand, anything sourced outside mainland China, hosiery and underwear, adult goods, food, book orders of fifteen copies or more, and sealed goods that would have to meet a special repacking standard. Where a request is accepted, return postage inside China is yours, and on goods the seller did not ship free you carry both legs.

The paths differ sharply depending on how far the order has travelled, and the published timings are worth knowing before you ask.

• Waiting to be processed. Cancel from the order view; the money returns to the account balance immediately.
• Being processed. Cancel from the order view; if nothing has been bought yet the refund lands in the balance inside a working day.
• Already purchased. Raise it on the order; the agent asks the seller. If the seller has not dispatched, the page puts the refund at about three days from the seller's confirmation.
• Seller says it is sent but it is not moving. Same route, with a published figure of about seven days once the seller confirms.
• Stored, inside the window. A return or a swap, at the timings above.

The service standards add two commitments on the agent's side: an order is to be bought within a day of your confirmation or top-up, a cancellation in the processing state is handled within a day, and a cancellation after purchase is checked with the seller within two days.

Three covers are offered at the point you submit a parcel: delay, customs hold, and loss or damage. The delay cover is the only one with a published formula, paying a fifth of the shipping cost when delivery runs past a route-dependent threshold of thirty or forty days from dispatch. Whether a given destination can buy cover at all is answered by the estimator rather than by the policy page.

Without cover there is still a compensation standard per route, claimed through support. The exclusions on both sides are where the detail lives: delays caused by weather, war, epidemics, a customs inspection, or a recipient who did not collect are outside the delay cover; losses caused by a recipient's own failure to sign are outside the loss cover; and a customs hold caused by refusing to cooperate with clearance is outside the customs cover. Fragile goods are named as eligible for loss claims but not damage claims, whether or not the packing was reinforced.