Refund policy

Machinetrail offers a 14-day, no-questions-asked refund on every single report. This matches the EU Consumer Rights Directive (Directive 2011/83/EU, Article 9) baseline and goes beyond it: even where the digital-content exception in Article 16(m) would let us refuse a refund, we still honour the 14 days.

The badge you see on the checkout page (“Money-back guarantee”) is a literal description of this policy, not marketing fluff.

Email refund@machinetrail.com with:

• •Your Stripe receipt (forwarding the receipt email is fine).
• •The VIN/PIN/serial you ran (so we can match the report).
• •Optional: a sentence on what went wrong, so we can fix it for future buyers.

We will acknowledge within one business day and process the refund within five business days.

Refunds are processed to the original payment method via Stripe. Stripe typically takes a further 5 to 10 business days to post the credit to your card or bank statement; the exact time depends on your card issuer.

Any reason within 14 days. You do not need to justify your request. We track refund reasons internally only to improve the product, not to gatekeep refunds.

We treat two situations as “skip-the-queue” cases and handle them ahead of the normal five-business-day SLA:

• •Demonstrably wrong VIN decode — e.g. the make, model, or model year in the report does not match the physical plate. You get a priority refund plus a free re-decode once we fix the underlying data issue.
• •VIN cannot be decoded at all — the report returned essentially empty. Refund processed within 24 hours.

We may still grant a refund as a goodwill gesture after 14 days, particularly if the issue is a Machinetrail-side data error. Email us and we will look at the case on its merits.

Please email us before raising a Stripe or card-issuer chargeback. Our refund process is faster and easier for both sides than a chargeback, and a chargeback inflates Stripe's dispute rate for the merchant without speeding up your refund.