If you paid and did not receive your number, you get your money back. If you received your number, the entry has been delivered and is not refundable — including if you later change your mind, and including if your entry is removed because you broke the rules.

Everything below is that principle applied to specific situations.

A single entry: one image, one permanent number, one place in a competition of 1,000,000. It is delivered digitally and immediately on confirmation of payment. There is no physical item — see shipping.

No number is issued and nothing is charged. A number is only ever allocated after a payment is confirmed by the payment provider, so an incomplete payment cannot produce an entry.

• Payment failed or was declined — no entry, no charge, and you may try again.
• You closed the window before paying — no entry, no charge.
• Payment could not be confirmed — no number is issued. Where a charge was nonetheless taken, it is refunded in full.
• You were charged twice for one entry — the duplicate charge is refunded in full. Deliberately entering more than once is not a duplicate: each entry is its own purchase and receives its own number.

If a payment succeeds but the system cannot issue a number — because the competition filled at that moment, or because of a fault on our side — the payment is refunded in full. You will not be charged for a number you did not receive.

Every confirmed payment without a number is flagged internally for manual reconciliation. If you believe this has happened to you, use the contact page.

If your entry is removed because you did not have the right to submit it, or because it breaches the submission guidelines or the terms of entry, no refund is given.

You warranted at submission that you held the necessary rights. A removal that follows a breach of that warranty is a consequence of the breach, not a failure to deliver what you paid for.

Once payment is confirmed and your number is issued, the entry has been delivered in full. Because the number is permanent and immediately allocated from a finite sequence, an entry cannot be cancelled after allocation, and changing your mind is not a refundable situation.

Asking us to release a number you hold is not possible either. A number leaves the sequence the moment it is issued and is never returned to it.

A number is never given back to the collection. Numbers run in an unbroken sequence and are never reissued, so if one was issued before something went wrong, it stays retired permanently even where the payment is refunded in full.

This is deliberate. The whole proposition is that a number identifies exactly one thing forever; returning one to circulation would mean two entries could hold it over the life of the collection.

If you believe a payment was made in error, or without the cardholder’s permission, contact us before raising a dispute so we can investigate. Payments found to be fraudulent are refunded and the associated entry is removed.

Please contact us first. Raising a chargeback for an entry you received and kept may result in the entry being removed and the account suspended, as set out in the terms.

Consumer law in your country may give you rights that this policy cannot reduce, including in some places a right to cancel a digital purchase. Nothing here removes those rights. Where they apply, they take precedence over this policy.

Refund requests go through the contact page. Include the email on the account and, if a number was issued, the number.