1. What this policy covers

This policy explains what happens when you ask for a refund, and what happens when you cancel or downgrade a paid plan on Occupied.co.za. It covers everything you can pay for on the platform: your Standard or Premium subscription, any Featured promotion you bought for a listing, and discounted payments where a coupon applied at checkout.

It works together with our Terms of Service, our Privacy Policy, and the pricing information shown on our Pricing page. Payments are processed through PayFast, the South African payment gateway. Where a refund request is a claim under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 (see section 12), we follow the route described there.

2. Refunds: the 7-day window

A full refund is available if you request it within 7 days of payment. The window applies per completed payment: your first subscription payment carried its own 7-day window, and each monthly renewal payment carries a fresh 7-day window of its own.

After 7 days from a payment, that payment is non-refundable. Cancelling a subscription after the 7-day window does not create a refund — see section 6 for what cancellation does instead.

3. What happens after a refund

What is removed depends on what you paid for:

• Subscription refund (Standard or Premium): your plan reverts to Free, and the listing stays live with all Free-tier features. Any paid extras your tier provided stop working because the tier is no longer paid.
• Featured promotion refund: the promotion is removed from the listing it was promoting, and the listing continues as a normal, non-featured listing.

We do not disable the whole listing after a refund. A refund takes away exactly what you paid for — nothing more.

4. How to request a refund

Email bookings@occupied.co.za within 7 days of the payment, telling us the email address on your account and the date of the payment. There is no refund button on the site: refunds are processed manually by us, normally through the PayFast portal or our banking portal, and we confirm by reply when the money is on its way back.

If a coupon was part of the payment, the refunded amount is the coupon-adjusted total actually paid — you are refunded what left your account, not the undiscounted price.

5. If something went wrong with your payment

A payment that shows in your bank statement but never activates your plan is not a refund question, it is a fix-it-now question — email us and we will trace it with PayFast. If you left the PayFast checkout at its cancel step you will land back on our informational payment cancelled page: nothing was activated and nothing will renew, so there is nothing to refund.

6. How to cancel your subscription

You can cancel any time, yourself, with no notice period and no cancellation fee: go to your subscription management page and press Cancel. That switches off auto-renewal immediately — no further renewals are billed.

Your plan stays paid-up and fully benefit-ready until the end of the period you paid for; when that period ends, your listing continues on the Free plan's limits. On our side we stop the standing plan through the PayFast Subscriptions API. If PayFast cannot be reached at that moment, you will see an on-screen notice asking you to also delete the subscription in your PayFast dashboard — that is the only manual step you may ever need to take.

Because cancellation stops future billing rather than ending current benefits, cancelling is not a refund claim. The 7-day refund window in section 2 is what applies to money already paid.

7. Cancelling from the PayFast side

You can also cancel the recurring plan from your PayFast dashboard. That is equally valid: when PayFast tells us the subscription was cancelled, we mark your subscription cancelled and send you a cancellation email. Your benefits run to expiry of the period you paid for, exactly the same as cancelling from the manage page.

8. Downgrading to Free

The subscription management page also offers Downgrade. Downgrading to Free takes effect immediately: your listing drops back to the Free plan's limits and any Featured promotion ends with it — Featured is a paid-period benefit, so it does not survive a switch to Free (it would have ended at its scheduled lapse anyway).

9. When your subscription ends

If a period ends without a next payment (cancelled, expired, or a renewal that did not go through), the subscription is marked expired by a daily check. You then get a 7-day grace period: your listing stays visible and your benefits stay on for those 7 days, in case you meant to renew. Only after the grace period lapses do listings deactivate.

Reactivating is the reverse of cancelling: pay for a plan again on the pricing page and your listing comes back.

10. Billing periods

Monthly subscriptions renew automatically each month via PayFast until you cancel. Yearly subscriptions are a single manual payment per year and run until their expiry — for yearly plans there is no auto-renewal to switch off.

11. Coupons and discounts

Coupon discounts are locked into the exact amount of the payment at checkout. Any refund is therefore of the discounted amount you actually paid (see section 4). Redeeming a coupon does not create rights to further free periods if the underlying payment is refunded.

12. Your rights under the Consumer Protection Act

This policy is written to be consistent with the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008. Where the CPA applies to you — for example its cooling-off rights, or your right to cancel a fixed-term agreement — and you ask for a refund through that route, we will handle it reasonably and in line with the Act's rules and timelines. This paragraph is an acknowledgment, not the full text of your statutory rights; the Act itself, and the National Consumer Commission's website, are the definitive sources.

13. Who we are

Operator: Andre Nel — bookings@occupied.co.za
Postal address: Carlton Street, Jukskeipark, Johannesburg, 2188
Company registration number: 2001/034619/23

Questions about a specific payment or cancellation are fastest through bookings@occupied.co.za. General platform questions are answered by the Terms of Service.