The seven-day cooling-off period, and when it applies
Section 44 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 gives you seven days to cancel an electronic purchase and be refunded. Section 42(2)(d) of the same Act says that right does not apply to a service that began, with your agreement, before those seven days were up.
Everything we sell starts the moment your payment goes through: a plan or a listing switches on straight away, and credits land in your account straight away. So before you pay, we ask you to tick a box agreeing that your purchase starts immediately and that you will not have the seven-day cooling-off period. The payment cannot go ahead until that box is ticked, and we keep a record of when you ticked it.
That does not lock you in. Plans are charged month by month and you can turn renewal off at any time. You keep the month you have paid for and nothing further is taken. And you can build and publish your whole site without paying anything, so you can see exactly what you are getting before you buy.
How to stop paying
- From your dashboard: open Billing and use “Turn off renewal” at the foot of your plan. It tells you the exact date your plan runs to, and what it costs if anything, before you confirm.
- By email: write to billing@wechoseforever.co.za from the address on your account and say you want to stop.
Either is enough. Turning renewal off is recorded on your billing page, the date your plan runs to, and any final charge, and it stays there. That page is your record, and you can print or save it.
There is nothing to refund, because we hold nothing
Plans are charged month by month. You pay for the month you are in and nothing beyond it, so when you stop there is no unused balance sitting with us and nothing to send back. Your card is simply not charged again, and everything keeps working normally until the month you have paid for runs out.
- Your site does NOT come down. Publishing is free on every account, so stopping a plan changes what you can do, the budget tracker and free messaging stop, and not whether your page is online.
- A vendor's listing does not disappear either. It drops back to the free card, keeping your name, town, price and description in the marketplace.
- Nothing is deleted. Start paying again and everything is exactly where you left it.
We count in whole months and we never take a month away early. A month you have paid for is a month you keep, whatever day you decide to stop.
The one time stopping costs something
A vendor can choose a twelve-month price that is cheaper every month than the month-to-month one, in exchange for staying a year. It is still charged monthly and nothing is paid in advance. If you leave that one early there is a final charge, and it is made of exactly two things:
- One month's notice, at your ordinary monthly price. Section 14 of the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 lets you cancel on 20 business days' notice, and lets us charge for that notice. Your listing stays on its plan through that month, so the notice you pay for is a month you still get.
- The discount you have already had. Section 14(3)(b) of the same Act names discounts granted in contemplation of a full term as exactly the thing a cancellation charge may recover. You took a cheaper monthly rate because you were staying a year; if you do not, those months were bought at the wrong price and the difference comes back.
The rest of the year is not charged, and never will be. We also cap the whole thing: leaving early can never cost you more than seeing the year out would have. Both figures are shown, added up, on the screen before you confirm anything.
On the month-to-month price there is no such charge, because there was no commitment and no discount. A couple's plan is month-to-month only, so this section never applies to a couple.
When the twelve months are up, whether paid monthly or all at once, the plan simply ends. Nothing more is charged, your listing goes back to the free card, and we write to you beforehand and on the day so you can choose month to month or a new twelve months.
If your business is a registered company, section 14 does not apply to you. It protects natural persons, not juristic ones. A twelve-month term bought by a company is genuinely fixed: you can stop using the listing whenever you like, but the term runs to its end date and is not refunded. That difference comes from the Act, and it is stated on the billing page before anything is bought.
If your circumstances are genuinely difficult, a wedding called off, a bereavement, write to us anyway. This page is the rule; we would rather hear from you than apply it blind.
What happens to your site
A paid plan ending does not take your site down. Publishing is free, so the page stays exactly where it is on the same address. What ends is the budget tracker, the marketplace filters and free messaging.
There is one thing that does delete an account, and it is not a payment. An account is kept for as long as it is used. If nobody signs in to a free account for 90 days, and the wedding date has already passed or was never set, the account and everything in it: your site, your photographs, your guest list and your vendor choices: is permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.
We write to you first: a notice 14 days before the date and a final one 7 days before it, and nothing is ever deleted without both of those letters having gone. Signing in from time to time is all it takes to keep an account.
From the day after your wedding we email you every 30 days with a PDF copy of your site attached, so the keepsake reaches you whether or not you ever sign in again. Every one of those carries an unsubscribe link. The notices about the account itself are not part of that. You cannot unsubscribe from being told you are about to lose your photographs.
Either way, export before the date. The Account page in your dashboard gives you a JSON file of your account, your site details, your guest list and your vendor choices, plus links to your photographs, which download separately. It is a copy of your data, not a working copy of your website. There is nothing in it you could put online elsewhere.
Credits are not refundable
Credits are not refundable. Money paid for credits is not returned, not for credits you have spent, and not for credits sitting unspent in your account either. There is no cash-out, no partial refund and no exchange. We say this on the pack itself, beside the price, and not only here.
Credits land in your account the moment you pay, so a pack starts immediately and is bought behind the same tick as a plan: the seven-day cooling-off period described at the top of this page does not apply to it.
Credits do not expire. They stay on your account until you use them.
Returning credits to your account is a different thing from a refund, and we are careful not to call it one. When you write to a vendor your credits are HELD, not spent. If the vendor has not opened your message within 48 hours, or if you take the enquiry back before they do, those credits go back into your available balance. That happens inside your account and no money moves. It is not a refund and it does not stop credits being non-refundable.
Once a vendor HAS opened your enquiry the credits are spent, whether or not they then reply helpfully, and whether or not you book them. What you bought was the vendor's attention, not their answer. That is the honest boundary and it is the most likely thing to feel unfair, so it is stated rather than buried.
The same distinction runs the other way, for vendors. A vendor on the free card spends credits to open a couple's message. If they answer it and the couple never writes back, those credits return to the vendor's balance after 5 days: automatically, with nothing to claim. A vendor who never replies keeps the charge, because opening the message is what they paid for, and a couple who answers even once ends it. As above, this happens inside the account, no money moves, and it is not a refund.
When we do not refund
If we suspend or close your account because you breached our terms or our acceptable use policy, abuse, threats, explicit content, anything unlawful, what is left of your plan is not refunded. This is the one exception to everything above, and it is the only one. It is not a penalty for cancelling; it is what happens when the agreement ends because it was broken.
When we refund without being asked
- If we close your account for a reason that is not your breach of our terms, we refund the unused portion.
- If we materially reduce what your plan includes and you do not want to continue, you may cancel and we refund the unused portion.
- If you were charged in error, we refund the error in full as soon as we find it.
Suppliers
A listing starts the moment your payment goes through, and you tick your agreement to that before paying, so no cooling-off period applies. For a sole proprietor that is the section 42(2)(d) exclusion described at the top of this page; a registered company never had the seven-day right, because the Act protects natural persons only. What happens when you stop depends on how your business is registered.
- If you trade in your own name: a sole proprietor, which most photographers, makeup artists, DJs and celebrants are. You have the same protection as any other consumer, and the cancellation terms above apply to you unchanged.
- If your business is a registered company or close corporation, your listing term is fixed. You can stop using it whenever you like, nothing further is charged and it does not renew, but the remainder of the term is not refunded.
The reason for the difference is not ours: section 14 of the Consumer Protection Act, which gives the right to cancel a fixed-term agreement early, says in its own first line that it does not apply to transactions between juristic persons. We are a registered company and so are you, so the Act leaves the two of us to our contract. We tell you which of the two you are before you buy, on the same screen as the price.
A listing that we remove for a breach of the vendor terms is not refunded, whichever of the two you are. A listing we remove for any other reason is refunded for the time you have not had.
Chargebacks
Please write to billing@wechoseforever.co.za before raising a chargeback with your bank. We would rather resolve it directly, and it is almost always faster.
How to reach us
- Billing questions
- billing@wechoseforever.co.za
- Cancellations
- billing@wechoseforever.co.za