If your website accepts online payment — a dietitian's consultation fee, a consultant's retainer, a real estate agent's booking deposit — Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree and every other Indian payment gateway will not activate your account until four specific pages are already live: Contact Us, Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, and a Refund and Cancellation Policy. The last one is the page most small business websites in India are missing, and it's usually the single reason an otherwise-ready application gets stuck in review.
A founder builds a website, adds a "Pay Now" or "Book a Slot" button, connects a payment gateway, and expects to be live within a day or two. Then the gateway's onboarding team asks for a link to the Refund and Cancellation Policy, and there isn't one — because nobody mentioned it needed to exist before the payment button did.
This isn't a bureaucratic afterthought. Every licensed Indian payment aggregator has to demonstrate to its own banking partners and regulator that the merchants on its platform are real, identifiable businesses with clear terms, not anonymous storefronts. The four pages below are how they check that, one merchant website at a time.
"KYC Pages" Is What Gateways Call These Four Pages, Not Just ID Documents
Payment aggregators use the term KYC pages for the four website pages they check during merchant onboarding — not because they're collecting identity documents from your visitors, but because the aggregator itself needs to see that a real, identifiable business with clear, specific terms is operating behind the payment button before it will let money move through its gateway.
Four Pages Must Already Be Live Before A Gateway Will Approve Your Account
Every major Indian aggregator asks for some version of the same four pages during onboarding. The wording varies gateway to gateway, but the substance doesn't.
| Page | What It Must Show | Common Mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Contact Us | A real phone number, email address and physical address for the business | Only a WhatsApp button, with no email or address anywhere on the site |
| Terms & Conditions | What service is actually being sold and the basic terms of engagement | A generic template copied from an unrelated kind of business |
| Privacy Policy | How a visitor's personal data is collected and used, per the DPDP Act | Missing entirely, or a foreign template that never mentions Indian law |
| Refund & Cancellation Policy | Exactly when a payment is refundable, partially refundable, or not, and by when | Missing entirely — the single most common reason an application stalls |
A Refund Policy Is A Different Document From Your Privacy Policy
Many small businesses that added a Privacy Policy after the DPDP Act came into focus assume they've now covered "the legal stuff" and stop there. A gateway reviewer is checking for something else entirely: a Privacy Policy covers what happens to a visitor's data; a Refund and Cancellation Policy covers what happens to a visitor's money. They sit next to each other in the footer, but they answer completely different questions, and a gateway will not accept one in place of the other.
A refund policy a customer can actually understand is worth more than one that sounds airtight and answers nothing.
A Consultation Fee And A Booking Deposit Need Different Refund Language
The mistake most small businesses make isn't skipping the page — it's copying one that describes a different kind of payment than the one they actually take. A dietitian charging for a one-hour consultation and a real estate agent taking a token booking amount are not the same transaction, and a generic policy usually only fits one of them, if either.
A consultation-fee business typically needs a clear cancellation window — for example, a full refund if cancelled more than 24 hours ahead, and a partial refund or reschedule option inside that window. A booking-deposit business, like real estate, more commonly structures the deposit as partially refundable up to a defined milestone (before paperwork begins, for instance) and non-refundable after. Neither number here is a legal requirement — they're common patterns, not rules — so the right numbers for your business are whatever you actually intend to honour, ideally checked against your own contracts or a professional's advice before you publish them.
The same policy page, two ways
"No refunds will be issued under any circumstances" — a single line, pasted from an unrelated e-commerce template, that doesn't describe how the business actually handles a genuine cancellation.
"Consultations cancelled more than 24 hours in advance are fully refunded within 5 business days; cancellations inside 24 hours may be rescheduled once at no charge." Specific, checkable, and true to how the business runs.
What A Refund And Cancellation Policy Page Actually Needs
A page that satisfies both a gateway reviewer and an actual customer needs to answer the same handful of questions clearly, not impressively.
State exactly what is being paid for
A consultation, a booking deposit, a retainer — "our services" is too vague for a gateway reviewer or a customer to act on.
Give a specific cancellation window in hours or days
"Reasonable notice" isn't a number. "More than 24 hours before the appointment" is.
State what happens at each stage — full refund, partial refund, or credit
Cover the case inside the window and the case outside it separately, not as one blanket rule.
Say how a customer actually requests a refund
A specific email address or a defined process — not just "message us on WhatsApp," which a gateway reviewer won't treat as a real process.
Commit to a processing timeline
"Approved refunds are processed within 5–7 business days" tells a customer what to expect and reads as a real policy, not a placeholder.
Match every number on the page to how the business actually operates
A reviewer, and eventually a customer, will test whether the policy matches reality — make sure it does before it goes live.
Copying Another Business's Refund Policy Creates A Second Problem
A policy pulled from an unrelated business's website usually describes a transaction that isn't the one actually happening — a product return window on a page for a service-based consultation, or vague language that a gateway's own reviewer flags as inconsistent with the business type declared during onboarding. Beyond the approval delay, a policy that doesn't match reality is also the one a genuinely unhappy customer is most likely to quote back later, at the worst possible moment to be discovering it says something the business never actually intended.
Specific And Checkable Beats Polished And Vague
This blog keeps returning to a version of the same argument — about case studies, about pricing, about privacy policies — that a specific, checkable detail earns more trust, and more approvals, than a vague or borrowed one. Hashika Vyas DT, a Mumbai-based clinical dietitian, and Hamara Ashiyana, a real estate brand built from zero to a #1 Google ranking, both grew on the same pattern: real, specific claims about their own work, not generic ones borrowed from somewhere else. A Refund and Cancellation Policy page is the same idea applied to the one place on a website where vagueness has a direct, measurable cost — a stalled payment gateway application.
Questions business owners ask about refund and cancellation policy pages
Do I need a Refund and Cancellation Policy page if I only take payment by WhatsApp or bank transfer, not a payment gateway?
The strict requirement comes from the payment gateway's own KYC review, so if you never connect a gateway like Razorpay, PayU or Cashfree, no aggregator will block you for missing the page. It is still good practice to have one the moment you take any advance payment or booking deposit, gateway or not, since it is the page a customer looks for when they want to know if their money is refundable — and the day you do add online payment, the page needs to already exist.
Which small businesses in India actually need this page?
Any business applying for an account with an Indian payment aggregator needs a Refund and Cancellation Policy as part of onboarding — this covers a dietitian taking consultation fees online, a consultant taking a retainer deposit, or a real estate agent taking a token booking amount. Consumer protection rules in India also expect clear, accessible cancellation terms wherever a business takes payment in advance, though the exact requirements can depend on your business structure, so a compliance professional is worth consulting for anything beyond a straightforward service fee.
Can I just write 'no refunds under any circumstances' on this page?
An absolute no-refund clause with no exceptions at all is one of the more common reasons a gateway's KYC reviewer sends an application back for revision, and it can also be challenged later by a customer or a consumer forum as an unfair term. A policy that states specific, reasonable conditions — a cancellation window, a partial-refund tier, a genuine circumstances clause — tends to clear review faster and hold up better than a blanket refusal.
Where should the Refund and Cancellation Policy link actually appear on my website?
In the footer, next to Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions, so a gateway reviewer and a visitor can both find it from any page. If your site has a booking form or a payment button, linking to the policy right next to that button as well — not just in the footer — is worth the extra minute, since that is the moment a customer is most likely to actually want to read it.
Do I need to hire a lawyer to write this page?
For a straightforward service business with one or two payment scenarios — a consultation fee, a booking deposit — a specific, plainly written page describing exactly how your business actually handles cancellations is usually enough to satisfy a gateway's KYC review. This isn't legal advice, and if your business takes larger advance payments, runs subscriptions, or works through franchise-style agreements, a brief review by a compliance professional is a sensible investment before you publish the final wording.
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