What happens when something goes wrong

Our refund and dispute policy, written before we have a single order to argue about.

How the money moves

You pay MilkMom, and MilkMom keeps hold of it. The seller ships within three days, frozen and tracked. You open the box, check the bags against the listing, and confirm. Only then is payment finalized.

That single arrangement removes most of what has always been ugly about buying milk from a stranger. There is no cash in an envelope, and no bank transfer to a name you can't verify. If a seller ever asks you to pay outside MilkMom, that is not a shortcut and it is not shyness about fees – it is the oldest tell in this market, and the protection on this page stops at the platform's edge.

What always gets refunded

• It never arrived. Chasing the courier is our job.
• It leaked, split or came up short. The whole order or the affected bags, your choice.
• The dates don't match. The disclosure sheet is locked the moment a sale starts, so what is written is what is owed.

Photographs and a tracking record settle them, and we would rather decide them in an afternoon than run a hearing.

The hard one: "I don't think this is human milk"

In 2015 researchers found cow's milk mixed into roughly one in ten samples bought from anonymous classifieds sites. We wrote about that study ourselves, at length.

So what happens when you open a box and something feels off?

You get your money back. Same speed, same completeness, no interrogation about how sure you are.

The seller doesn't pay for it. We do, from a fund we set aside out of our own fee for exactly this. That decision is deliberate and we would rather explain it than bury it: milk that has spent a week in a buyer's freezer cannot be tested to any useful conclusion, because a test tells you what is in the carton today and nothing about whose hands put it there. Any platform that debits a named woman's earnings on an unprovable accusation has built a machine for destroying its own sellers, and every seller worth having will work out the risk before we do.

The report goes on file anyway. This is the part that does the work. One report is noise. A second report about the same seller, from a buyer with no connection to the first, is a pattern – and a pattern is something we can act on, because we can go and buy her milk ourselves and have it tested under conditions nobody can argue with. If it comes back adulterated she is removed permanently, every buyer of hers from the previous three months is refunded, and in the UK her local council food safety team hears about it from us.

How the testing will work

Cow's milk in human milk is genuinely easy to detect. Bovine DNA testing and cow's-milk protein tests are ordinary work for a food laboratory, and they pick up small amounts reliably – the two milks are not subtly different substances.

The difficulty was never the chemistry, it was the custody. So when we open, MilkMom will buy anonymously from a share of active sellers every quarter and test what turns up, weighted toward new accounts and anyone with a report on file. We will publish the count and the results, including the quarters where we find nothing at all, which we expect to be most of them.

Sellers can also pay to have a batch tested and show the result on a listing, if they want to. It will never be compulsory, and a seller without one is not under suspicion.

What doesn't get refunded

• Changing your mind. Frozen milk can't go back on a shelf, and there is no returning a raw food that has already made one journey.
• Your baby didn't like the taste. Some perfectly good milk tastes soapy or metallic after freezing – it's lipase, it's common, and it is not a fault in the milk or the seller. The storage guide covers it.
• It thawed after it got to you. Once a box has been sitting in the porch all afternoon, the cold chain is nobody's fault but the doorstep's. We'll still look after you the first time.
• Anything arranged off MilkMom. No held payment, no protection, no exceptions.

Human milk is a raw food. Careful handling reduces the risk. It does not remove it, and a refund policy is not a safety net for a decision you weren't comfortable with in the first place.

If you're the one selling

This page is as much yours as the buyer's, and the promises run in your direction too.

• Nobody takes your money on somebody's say-so. Your balance moves only on evidence: tracking, photographs, a lab result from a sample we controlled, or your own account of what happened.
• A first report leaves no mark. Not on your rating, not on your profile, not on your badges. You'll be told plainly that it happened and that nothing has been done to your account.
• Only upheld disputes are ever public. An accusation is not a record, and we won't publish one as though it were.
• You get to answer before any investigation concludes, and if it clears you we say so in writing and pay for the audit order at full price.

The reason for all of it is not sentiment. An accusation of tampering with milk sold for a baby lands on a woman with her name and face on a profile, and in the UK on her food business registration too. That is not a star rating, and it can't be handed out on a hunch.

48 hours, and what happens after

You have 48 hours from delivery to confirm, and that is when the seller gets paid. It is a payment schedule rather than a deadline on you. Problems raised within the first 30 days are still dealt with on the same terms, out of the same fund, and nothing on this page removes any legal right you have against the seller – in the UK a seller registered as a food business is a trader, with everything that ordinarily implies about goods being as described.

Every claim is acknowledged within a day, including the ones we're going to turn down, and refunds reach your card within five working days of a decision. At the size we are starting at, a person reads all of them.

Common Questions