Payments and privacy
Refunds, chargebacks, and Coin adjustments
Payment Dispute Evidence and Virtual Item Adjustments
This notice explains how Noveltree may handle transaction evidence, Coin availability, refunds, reversals, payment inquiries, and chargebacks reviewed by Apple, Google Play, RevenueCat, Stripe, PayPal, a payment network, or another authorized payment channel. It supplements the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Virtual Items Policy. Mandatory consumer and privacy rights continue to apply.
What may happen
- Noveltree may provide minimized, transaction-specific evidence to the applicable provider under the consent and legal bases described below.
- A pending review may temporarily make the remaining Paid Coins attributable to that payment unavailable. The review does not by itself create a negative balance.
- A confirmed refund, reversal, or chargeback may reverse the corresponding Coin credit and may create a negative Paid Coin balance if credited Coins were already used. If the payment is restored, Noveltree restores the corresponding treatment described below.
- Detailed evidence is kept only as long as reasonably necessary for the stated dispute, appeal, security, accounting, and legal purposes. The operational target for the detailed packet is 24 months after case closure, subject to the retained minimized records described below.
1. Apple consent and other provider processing
When you create an account and affirmatively accept the Terms of Service, which link to and incorporate the relevant Privacy Policy and Virtual Items Policy disclosures, you give account-level consent for Noveltree and RevenueCat to provide Apple with transaction-specific purchase, delivery, consumption, and refund-preference information if Apple reviews a refund request. Noveltree does not ask for a separate evidence checkbox or repeat this consent at every Coin purchase. A Coin-purchase clickwrap may separately require acceptance of the applicable Virtual Items Policy and purchase terms.
This Apple consent is recorded with the applicable legal versions, provider scope, time, acceptance source, IP address, and user agent. You may withdraw it for future Apple refund reviews in Privacy settings without losing the ability to read or buy Coins. Withdrawal does not affect processing already completed lawfully before withdrawal or financial records Noveltree must retain.
Noveltree stops relying on withdrawn Apple consent for future evidence submissions. For Apple reviews handled through RevenueCat, Noveltree also sends a per-customer instruction not to handle refund evidence. If that provider instruction cannot be delivered immediately, it is retained in a retry queue and the app identifies the update as pending until synchronization succeeds.
Google Play, Stripe, and PayPal dispute evidence is handled separately as ordinary transaction, fraud-prevention, abuse-prevention, dispute-response, and legal-claims processing. It is not controlled by the optional Apple consent setting, and Noveltree does not ask for a separate evidence checkbox at those checkouts.
2. Information used and shared
Noveltree may provide the applicable payment or entitlement provider with minimized, transaction-specific evidence such as the provider order or transaction identifier, Coin package and amount, successful delivery, the amount or percentage attributed as consumed, unlock or Sticker-use event types and timestamps, transaction-relevant access logs, purchase IP address, device or coarse-location signals, receipt, product description, the legal and refund terms accepted for the account or shown at purchase, and relevant support communications. Apple evidence is provided only while the Apple consent described above is active; the other provider processing described above does not depend on that Apple setting.
For Apple reviews handled by RevenueCat, the provider currently supplies Apple with consent, delivery-status, sample-content, and refund-preference fields. Noveltree's detailed FIFO Coin-allocation packet is used for the Google Play, Stripe, and PayPal paths described in this notice, not sent to RevenueCat as that packet.
Noveltree does not provide chapter text, annotations, private-library files, full reading history, or unrelated activity as payment-dispute evidence. Where exact attribution cannot be established, Noveltree will omit an exact consumption percentage rather than guess.
3. Automated assistance and human review
Noveltree may use rule-based automated systems to match a provider case to a purchase, calculate a documented Coin-consumption allocation, assemble evidence, automatically select whether Noveltree will approve, remain neutral, accept, or challenge the request, and submit that response before a provider deadline. These systems do not determine your legal rights or the provider's final decision.
Noveltree's default policy is facts-first. We may challenge a request where records establish delivery and attributable use and approve or accept a known failed, duplicate, or undelivered purchase. With zero attributable use, Google Play receives a neutral response while Stripe or PayPal claims may be accepted automatically. If Apple consent is absent or withdrawn, Noveltree instructs RevenueCat not to handle the future Apple refund evidence request. Uncertain attribution, incomplete records, and exceptional cases remain neutral or are routed for authorized human review, depending on the provider workflow.
4. Coin freezes, reversals, and negative balances
A request for review does not by itself create a negative Coin balance. While a provider reviews a request, Noveltree may temporarily make the remaining Paid Coins attributable to that payment unavailable so they cannot be spent twice. Other eligible Coins remain available.
If the provider confirms that funds have been held, withdrawn, refunded, reversed, or charged back, Noveltree may provisionally or finally reverse the corresponding Coin credit. The reversal may create a negative Paid Coin balance when some or all of the credited Coins were already consumed. Future Paid Coin credits first reduce that deficit before becoming available for new purchases, unlocks, Stickers, gifts, or storage features.
If the payment is restored or the dispute is resolved in Noveltree's favour, Noveltree will restore the corresponding Coins, release related creator royalty reserves, and remove the related restriction. Previously consumed content is not automatically relocked merely because a review opened, although access may be restricted where the final refund, fraud, abuse, law, or provider rules require it.
5. Transaction attribution
Coins are fungible virtual items rather than individually numbered units. For transaction-specific accounting, Noveltree assigns Paid Coin spending to the oldest available paid Coin deposit first and preserves that allocation when the spend occurs. This first-in, first-out convention is an accounting rule. Legacy activity that cannot be reconstructed reliably is marked uncertain and is not represented to a provider as exact.
6. Retention and questions
Detailed evidence is retained only as long as reasonably necessary for the dispute, appeal, security, accounting, and legal purposes described in the Privacy Policy. Noveltree's operational target is deletion of the detailed packet 24 months after case closure, while retaining minimized financial outcomes, provider references, and integrity hashes for applicable financial-record periods.
Questions or privacy requests may be sent to support@noveltree.ca.