Privacy policy

• Your account — name, username and email address. Your password is stored only as a one-way hash; we cannot read it, and neither can anyone who obtains the database.
• Delivery addresses you save, and a copy attached to each order — so editing your address later never rewrites where past orders went.
• Orders: what you bought, what it cost and its status.
• Your cart and wishlist, including books you asked to be notified about.
• Buyback requests — the book, the condition, what we offered, and the UPI id if you asked for a bank payout.
• Store credit as a list of movements, so every rupee added or spent has a record you can see on your own page.
• Reviews you write, shown publicly with your display name.

Card numbers. Payments go through our payment provider’s own window. Card and UPI credentials are entered there and never reach our servers, so there is nothing of that kind for us to lose.

Without your agreement we set no analytics or advertising cookies. Your browser holds:

• Your session — the tokens that keep you signed in. Signing out removes them and revokes them on our side.
• A guest cart, if you add books before signing in. It stays in your browser until you sign in, at which point it merges into your account cart and the local copy is cleared.
• Your cookie choice, and — only if you press “Accept” on the cookie banner — cookies from Google Analytics and the Meta Pixel, which tell us which pages and books people look at, what goes into carts and which of our ads led to an order. They receive page addresses, product ids and order values, never your name, address or payment details.

These always go, because they are about something you did:

• Order confirmation, and updates when an order is packed, shipped, delivered, cancelled or refunded.
• Progress on a return, or on a book you offered to sell us, and store credit added to your account.
• An answer to a question you asked about a book.
• Account and security: confirming your e-mail address, a password reset link when you ask for one, and a notice when your password or e-mail address changes or your account is deleted.

These you can switch off in Settings, or with the link at the foot of each one:

• Alerts: a book you saved is back in stock, a used copy arrived, a price dropped, an author you follow has a new book, a book you asked us to stock has arrived, or a sale you asked to be reminded about has started.
• Offers and reminders: one reminder about a cart you left, occasional offers, and a request to review a book you bought. These are off until you switch them on — we only send them to people who have said yes.

Our payment provider, to take payment and issue refunds. Our email provider, to deliver the messages above. Our hosting and database provider, which stores the data described here over an encrypted connection.

We do not sell your data. If you accepted analytics cookies, Google and Meta receive the browsing and order events described above to measure our site and ads; without that agreement they receive nothing.

The contact page asks for your name, e-mail address and, if you wish, a phone number, and what your message is about (and which order or book, if it is about one). We use them only to answer you. The conversation is kept so you can read it in your account (Help & messages) and so we can follow it up; our staff may add private notes to it. Please do not send card numbers, passwords or one-time codes: any we see are removed. You can add up to three photos (of a damaged book, say); we strip their metadata. If you choose to share your chat with the shopping assistant, our staff read it. A link in our e-mail opens the conversation without an account; it works for 90 days after the last message. “Where is my order” (order number and e-mail) shows status and courier only. When a conversation is finished we keep it for a year, then erase your name, e-mail, phone, words and photos, keeping only its reference, topic and dates. Deleting your account erases it at once, and it is part of the file you can download.

When you press “Use my current location”, or allow it when your browser asks on your first visit, your browser sends your approximate position to our server. We cut it to about 100 metres, ask a public map service (OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim) which PIN code that is in, and keep only the PIN code, on your device, to show delivery times and charges. On the address form it also suggests your street and area, for you to correct. We do not store your coordinates or that suggestion, and the map service sees our server, not you. You can say no and type a PIN code instead; to change your mind, use your browser’s site settings.

What you type into the assistant is sent to an outside AI service (Groq), which processes it in the United States to write the answer. Before it leaves our servers we remove phone numbers, e-mail addresses, card, Aadhaar and PAN numbers, UPI ids and OTP/CVV values, but please do not type them. When you are signed in, the assistant may also be given the details of your own orders so it can answer questions about them. We have switched on the provider’s Zero Data Retention setting, so it does not store what is sent. We do not keep your chat in our own database. The same service reads a photographed booklist when you use “order from a booklist”, so the photo goes to it too; please do not photograph anything but the list.

Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 you may see what we hold about you (Settings, “Download my data”), correct it (your profile and addresses), have it erased (Settings, “Delete my account”), withdraw a consent you gave (Settings, e-mail preferences), name a nominee to act for you if you die or cannot act (Settings), and complain (below). You must be 18 or over to have an account; we do not knowingly hold data about children.

What we keep after you delete, and why:

• Orders, invoices and payment records — for the period the GST law requires (until seventy-two months after the due date of the annual return for that year, longer if a proceeding is pending). They stay linked to your anonymised account.
• Logs of how our systems were used — at least one year, as the DPDP Rules 2025 ask, and at least 180 days under CERT-In’s directions; then they are erased.
• A record that you agreed to the terms and notice (which version, when), without your name or contact details, so we can show consent was given.
• Statistics and fingerprints as described below.

If personal data is lost or stolen we tell the Data Protection Board of India and the people affected, as the law requires, and report the incident to CERT-In.

In Settings you can download everything we hold about you as one file, and delete your account yourself. Deleting removes your addresses, reviews, wishlist, cart, alerts and notifications, and closes the account so it cannot be signed in to. It forfeits any unspent store credit, so spend it first.

Orders are kept, without your name on the account, as long as we are required to keep sales records, because they are also our accounts. An account with an order on its way, an open return or an open sell request can be deleted once those finish.

When an account is deleted we also keep two things, and nothing else. First, plain statistics with no name, e-mail, phone or address in them: the month you joined, how many orders and how much, which state and which book categories. They help us understand how the shop is used. Second, for a limited period (currently one year), one-way fingerprints of your e-mail address and phone number, which cannot be turned back into either. They let us recognise misuse of the shop, such as a repeat sign-up for a first-order offer, a referral loop or a cash-on-delivery order refused again and again under a new address. After that period the fingerprints are erased; the statistics stay. We do not keep your profile, and we do not contact you after you delete your account.

Contact us to correct anything that is wrong.