Gem Candies · Operating Procedures
Essential before launch Procedure 7 of 15

7. Returns and cancellations

Owner
You (solo operation)
Trigger
A customer requests a return, or an order is cancelled before or after shipment; or a customer requests a change or cancellation to a Make Your Ring order already in progress.
Approval
You decide whether the stone returns to sellable inventory, and whether a requested ring-order change or cancellation is still possible.

Procedure — loose gemstone return or cancellation

  1. If already shipped, wait for the physical stone to arrive back before processing anything financial.
  2. Inspect the returned stone against its intake photos and recorded measurements/attributes, checking for damage, alteration, or substitution.
  3. Decide: sellable as-is, sellable after cleaning or reappraisal, or not sellable due to damage — record the decision and the reasoning.
  4. Record the refund amount, return shipping cost, and any other loss (for example, needing to relist at a lower price due to damage).
  5. Only after inspection and decision, log a Returned by client movement against the stone, which returns it to In stock (and, once Shopify is live, set its Shopify inventory back to 1). Never restock before physical inspection is complete. Note what this does and does not do: the stone's history now shows the sale and the return, but the money side is not modelled — the original sale line still shows full revenue, so the refund is recorded in Payments and reconciled by hand.
  6. If not sellable, retire the SKU's "for sale" status but keep the SKU itself — it is never reused (Procedure 1).

Procedure — Make Your Ring order change or cancellation

Needs input — the refund policy specifically for custom ring orders (how much is refundable once production has started) is not yet set. Decide it before the first ring order needs it; do not improvise a refund amount in the moment.
  1. A change or cancellation is only straightforward before the jeweller has started setting the stone (Procedure 5). Once production has started, treat the request under the standard return process above once the finished ring is delivered, rather than as a pre-production change.
  2. Record any additional cost a requested change introduces (e.g. a different setting or size) before agreeing to it.
  3. Apply the approved custom-order refund policy once set (see note above); do not apply the standard loose-gemstone refund terms to a custom ring order without checking whether they actually match.

Required evidence