Terms & Policies

BengaliBooks (বইঘর) is an online Bengali bookstore operated by Sumit, based in India. The website is bengalibooks.com.

We source books from College Street, Kolkata and deliver them across India. Ordering, payment and delivery are coordinated over WhatsApp.

For anything to do with your order, your data, or these terms, reach us at support@bengalibooks.com or on the WhatsApp number shown on our Contact page. For data protection purposes, BengaliBooks is the Data Fiduciary responsible for the personal data described in Part 4.

This single document covers three things: the terms on which you use bengalibooks.com and buy from us, the privacy notice explaining what we do with your personal data, and our cookie notice.

Part 1 to Part 3 are the terms of use and sale. Part 4 is the privacy and cookie notice. Part 5 covers the legal machinery.

Reading and browsing the site means you accept Parts 1, 2, 3 and 5. Your personal data is handled on the basis of the consent you give at specific points, described in section 22, and never on the basis of browsing alone.

You must be 18 or older to create an account or place an order. Under Indian contract law a minor cannot enter a binding contract, so orders must be placed by an adult.

If you are under 18, a parent or legal guardian must place the order and hold the account. See section 23.

By placing an order you confirm that the details you give us are accurate and are yours to give, or that you have permission from the person they belong to.

You can browse and buy as a guest. An account is optional and adds order history, order tracking, saved addresses, your reading library, reading preferences, and the ability to post reviews.

Keep your login details to yourself. You are responsible for activity under your account, and for keeping your contact and delivery details current.

You can ask us to delete your account at any time. We will delete it, subject to section 21, which explains what we have to keep and for how long.

Use the site lawfully and for your own personal, non-commercial use. Do not:

- give false or misleading information, or order using someone else's details without permission; - interfere with the site, its security, or other people's accounts; - upload malicious code; - scrape, copy or systematically extract the catalogue, our descriptions, or customer reviews, including for the purpose of training or fine-tuning machine learning models, without our written permission; - resell our data; or - misuse offers, discounts, reviews or account features.

We may restrict, suspend or close access where we reasonably need to, to protect the store, our customers, our suppliers or the site itself.

Placing an order on this site is a request to buy, not a completed sale. Nothing is binding until we confirm it.

The sequence is:

1. You place the order on the site. 2. We check availability, the current price, and whether we can source the book. 3. We contact you on WhatsApp with the final price and a payment request (usually a UPI QR code). 4. You pay. 5. We confirm the order once payment is received. 6. We dispatch, then deliver.

If we cannot source a book, or something material changes between steps 1 and 3, we tell you before asking for any money. You can then take an alternative or cancel at no cost.

All prices are in Indian Rupees and include applicable taxes unless we say otherwise on the page.

Prices shown on the site are indicative. The price we confirm on WhatsApp at step 3 is the one that applies, because sourcing cost and edition availability at College Street can change between listing and sourcing. If the confirmed price is higher than the listed price, you are free to cancel at that point, at no cost.

Delivery is free on orders of ₹500 and above. Orders below ₹500 carry a delivery charge of ₹50. The charge is shown in your cart and at checkout before you place the order. There is no minimum order value.

If an obvious pricing or listing error appears on the site, we will tell you before confirming and you can cancel.

There is no online payment on this website today. We do not collect or store card numbers, UPI IDs, or bank details here.

After we confirm availability and price, we send a payment request on WhatsApp. The default is payment in full before dispatch. We may agree a part payment or a different arrangement with you in writing on WhatsApp, at our discretion, for a particular order.

We may add on-site payment methods later, through a licensed payment provider. If we do, the same sequence in section 6 applies and the available methods will be shown at checkout. Payments handled by a third-party provider are also subject to that provider's terms.

We will never ask you for your UPI PIN, card PIN, CVV, an OTP, or any password. Anyone who does is not us. Do not share those with anybody claiming to represent BengaliBooks.

We buy from publishers, distributors and bookshops in and around College Street, Kolkata, usually on weekends. Books shown on the site are sourced to order rather than held in a warehouse.

That means availability can change after you order. An edition can sell out, a print run can end, a publisher can delay, or the exact edition we listed can turn out to be different in stock.

Where that happens we contact you and offer an alternative edition or a different book. You choose whether to accept, or to cancel. If you cancel before paying, nothing is owed either way. If you have already paid, section 12 applies.

The books we sell are sourced within India.

We try to describe books accurately, but listings can carry errors or go out of date. Covers, editions, publishers, page counts, ISBNs, bindings and printing details may differ from what is shown, and a physical copy can differ slightly from the image.

Some cover images on the site are placeholder blocks rather than the real cover artwork.

Where a difference is material to your order, we tell you before confirming.

We deliver across India. We source on weekends and dispatch after that, so you usually hear back within 2 to 3 days on availability.

Enter your PIN code on a book page or at checkout to see an estimated delivery window. That window is an estimate, not a promise. Delivery can be affected by sourcing delays, courier delays, weather, holidays, incomplete address details, or events outside our control. If a date is going to slip, we tell you on WhatsApp before it does, not after.

Give us an accurate address and phone number. If a delivery fails because the details you gave were wrong or incomplete, a further delivery attempt may carry an additional charge, which we will tell you about before we arrange it.

You can cancel any time before we confirm your order, at no cost and with no cancellation fee.

After confirmation, whether we can cancel depends on how far sourcing, packing or dispatch has gone. Ask us on WhatsApp and we will deal with the request reasonably.

Where a refund is due, we send it back to the account or UPI ID the payment came from, within 7 working days of agreeing the refund. We do not charge a processing fee on refunds we owe you.

Nothing here removes a right you have under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 or any other law that cannot be contracted out of.

If a book arrives damaged, or it is not the book you ordered, tell us within 3 days of delivery at support@bengalibooks.com or on WhatsApp.

Send clear photos of the book and the packaging, and a short video if the damage is hard to photograph. Keep the book and the packaging until the claim is settled, because the courier may need to see them.

Once we have looked at it, we will replace the book, or refund it, whichever fits the situation. We pay the return cost where the fault is ours.

We will still consider a claim made after 3 days where there was a good reason you could not tell us sooner.

We do not accept returns simply because you changed your mind after the order was confirmed. Books are sourced individually for each order, often as a single copy bought specifically for you.

This is separate from section 13, which always applies where the book is damaged or wrong, and separate from your statutory rights, which we cannot and do not exclude.

Where gift packaging is offered, the options and any charge are shown during checkout.

Packaging materials vary with what is available, so what arrives can differ slightly from the photographs. Gift packaging does not change anything in sections 12, 13 or 14.

With an account you can keep a reading library: books you want to read, are reading, or have finished. You can also rate and review books you have bought.

What you post must be your own, honest, and about the book. It must not be unlawful, defamatory, abusive, threatening or impersonating, must not infringe anyone's copyright, trademark or privacy, must not contain someone else's confidential information or malicious code, and must not be advertising, spam, or an attempt to manipulate ratings.

We may remove or hide content that breaks these rules. We may also verify that a reviewer actually bought the book.

You keep ownership of your reviews, ratings and other original content. Posting it does not transfer copyright to us.

By posting, you give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to host, store, reproduce, display, format, moderate and use that content to run, improve and promote BengaliBooks, including quoting it on book pages, in emails and on social media.

If you delete your account or a review, we stop publishing it. We may keep it in an anonymised or aggregated form, for example in an average rating, where the original content is no longer identifiable as yours.

Your moral rights as an author are unaffected. Where we quote a review publicly we attribute it as you posted it.

This part is our privacy notice under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP). BengaliBooks is the Data Fiduciary. You are the Data Principal.

We collect only what you give us or what the site needs to work:

- Name, WhatsApp number, email address, and an optional phone number, to identify you and to coordinate your order. - Delivery address, city, state and PIN code, to deliver the books. - Order and payment records (what you ordered, what it cost, what has been paid), to fulfil the order, to handle after-sales questions, and to meet tax and accounting obligations. - Messages you send us through the contact form, WhatsApp or email, to answer them. - Your reading library, reading preferences and genre interests, if you choose to use those features, to personalise your library and to help us decide what to stock. - Your reviews and ratings, to publish them. - Consent records (what you agreed to, when, and which version of this document was live), to prove consent was given. - Your IP address and basic technical information, to apply rate limits and to keep the site secure.

Your cart lives in your own browser until you place an order. We cannot see it before that.

We do not require your gender or date of birth. We do not sell or rent your personal data to anyone, in any form.

We use these providers to run the store. Each is bound to use your data only to provide its service, and each has its own privacy policy.

- Neon: our database, holding orders and customer profiles. - Vercel: website hosting, image storage and rate limiting. IP addresses are processed at Vercel's edge. - Brevo: sending order emails, account emails and newsletters. - Google Analytics 4 and Microsoft Clarity: website analytics, loaded only if you accept analytics cookies. Clarity records anonymised interaction data, including page interactions. - Cloudflare: DNS and protection for our admin area. - WhatsApp (Meta): the channel we use to confirm your order, take payment and arrange delivery. - Courier and logistics partners: we pass them your name, delivery address and phone number so they can deliver.

We may also disclose personal data where a law, a court or a lawful authority requires it, or where it is needed to establish or defend a legal claim.

Our database is hosted in Singapore. Some of our providers process data in other countries, including the United States and the European Union.

This means your personal data is transferred outside India. We do this to run the service, we only use established providers with published security and privacy commitments, and we transfer only what the provider needs. Section 16 of the DPDP Act permits transfers except to countries the Central Government restricts. If a restriction affects a provider we use, we will move that processing.

We keep personal data only as long as it is needed, then delete it.

- Order and customer records: 2 years after your last order, for after-sales support and accounts. Where tax or accounting law requires a longer period for financial records, we keep only the records that law requires, and only for as long as it requires. - Consent records: for as long as we may need to prove consent, and for the limitation period of any related claim. - Analytics data: 14 months. - Search and login logs: 14 months, then pruned automatically. - Reviews: until you delete them or ask us to. - Cookie consent: 180 days, after which we ask you again.

If you withdraw consent or ask for deletion, we delete what we hold unless we are legally required to keep it. We will tell you which parts we have kept and why.

We ask for your consent by a clear, separate action, never by silence and never by browsing. Today that happens at these points:

- At checkout, where you tick a box to accept this document and to allow us to contact you on WhatsApp about your order, and can separately opt in to marketing emails. We record the type of consent, the version of this document, the time, and the IP address. - On the cookie banner, where you accept, reject, or choose which categories to allow. - On the newsletter form, where subscribing is itself the opt-in.

Under the DPDP Act you can:

- ask what personal data we hold about you and who we have shared it with; - ask us to correct, complete or update it; - ask us to erase it, where we are not required to keep it; - withdraw a consent you gave, at any time. Withdrawing is as easy as giving it: use the Cookie settings link in the footer for cookies, the unsubscribe link in any newsletter for marketing email, or write to us for anything else; - nominate another person to exercise these rights on your behalf if you die or become incapable of exercising them yourself; and - complain to us, and then to the Data Protection Board of India if we do not resolve it.

Write to support@bengalibooks.com or message us on WhatsApp. We acknowledge within 48 hours and answer within 30 days. We may need to check who you are before acting on a request, to make sure we are not handing your data to somebody else.

Withdrawing consent does not undo anything we lawfully did before you withdrew it, and it may stop us providing part of the service. For example, withdrawing WhatsApp contact consent for an open order means we cannot confirm or deliver it.

BengaliBooks is not intended for use by anyone under 18. Accounts and orders are for adults.

We do not knowingly collect personal data of a child without verifiable consent from a parent or legal guardian, and we do not track children, profile them, or serve them behavioural advertising. If we learn that a child has created an account or placed an order without that consent, we delete the account and the data.

We sell books written for every age, including books meant for adult readers. We do not verify a buyer's age at checkout, so a parent or guardian decides what is suitable for a child in their care.

If you believe a child's data is with us, tell us at support@bengalibooks.com and we will remove it.

We protect your data with access controls, encrypted connections, two-factor protection on our admin area, per-endpoint rate limiting, and a strict rule that authorisation is checked on the server for every request.

No system is perfectly safe. If a personal data breach affects you, we will tell you and report it to the Data Protection Board of India without undue delay, as section 8(6) of the DPDP Act requires. We will tell you what happened, what data was involved, and what to do about it.

We show a cookie banner on your first visit. Nothing optional loads until you choose.

- Strictly necessary: your cart, session, security and rate limiting. These always load, because the site cannot work without them. - Analytics: Google Analytics 4 and Microsoft Clarity. These load only if you accept. They tell us which books and pages people open and where the site is confusing. - Marketing: not in use today. If we ever add it, it will sit behind its own tick on the banner.

Change or withdraw your choice at any time using the Cookie settings link in the footer. Your choice is remembered for 180 days, then we ask again. You can also block cookies in your browser, though parts of the site will stop working properly if you block the necessary ones.

We record your cookie choice so we can prove it was made, and so we honour it on your next visit.

Some messages are part of the service and are not marketing. We send them whether or not you subscribe to anything: order confirmations, availability updates, payment requests, dispatch and delivery updates, review invitations, password resets and account or security notices.

Marketing email, such as new arrivals, is separate and opt-in. Every marketing email carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing takes effect immediately. Unsubscribing does not stop the service messages above.

WhatsApp is our main channel for anything to do with an order. We message you about your order, not to advertise.

The BengaliBooks name, the বইঘর mark, the logo, the site design, our original text, our book descriptions, our graphics and our code belong to us or are licensed to us. You may use the site for your own personal, lawful purposes.

You may not copy, adapt, republish, sell, systematically extract, or make derivative works from our material without written permission, except where the law allows it. That includes using the site or its content to train or fine-tune a machine learning model.

Book titles, cover artwork, blurbs, author names, publisher names and their trademarks belong to their respective owners. We show them to identify and sell genuine copies of those books, which is what section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957 allows. We claim no ownership over any of it.

If something on this site infringes your copyright, trademark or other right, write to support@bengalibooks.com with:

- what the work is, and proof that you own it or act for the owner; - the exact page address where it appears; - what you want us to do; and - how to reach you.

We acknowledge within 24 hours and act on it within 15 days. The same route applies to a complaint about a customer review or any other content posted by a user.

We may refuse, hold or cancel an order where we reasonably suspect payment fraud, identity misuse, abuse of offers, repeated false claims, unauthorised account use, or manipulation of reviews and ratings. We may ask for extra verification before we go ahead.

Where the law requires it, or where it is needed to stop fraud or protect people, we cooperate with payment providers, couriers and law enforcement.

We try to keep the site up and working. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted or free of errors.

It may be unavailable for maintenance, updates, infrastructure or third-party failures, security incidents, network problems, or anything else outside our reasonable control. We may change, suspend or drop features as the store develops.

Information on the site is here to help you find and buy books. We do not promise that every description, publication detail, recommendation, review or availability marker is complete or current. Where an error affects your order, we fix it before or during fulfilment, and we tell you.

To the maximum extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss arising from your use of, or inability to use, this site.

For any single order, our total liability is limited to the amount you actually paid for the affected product or order.

None of this limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. Nothing in this document takes away a right the law gives you as a consumer.

We are not responsible for delay or failure caused by something genuinely outside our reasonable control: courier and logistics disruption, internet or telecom failure, payment system outages, supplier or publisher problems, natural events, government action, public emergencies, or strikes.

Where a delay like this affects your order, we tell you, and you can cancel and take a refund of anything you have paid for the undelivered part.

Talk to us first. Most problems are settled in a WhatsApp message.

Write to support@bengalibooks.com or message the WhatsApp number on our Contact page. Mark it "Grievance" and include your order number. We acknowledge every grievance within 48 hours and resolve it within 30 days.

If we cannot resolve it, you can take it to the appropriate consumer forum, the Data Protection Board of India for a data protection complaint, or any other authority with jurisdiction.

These terms are governed by Indian law. Disputes are subject to the courts at Kolkata, West Bengal. That does not stop you as a consumer from filing before the District, State or National Consumer Commission where you live or work, which section 34(2)(d) of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 entitles you to do.

We may update this document as the store changes. The current version is always on this page, with the date it was last updated at the top.

Changes apply from the date they are published and do not change the terms of an order we have already confirmed, unless the law requires it.

Where a change materially affects your rights or how we use your personal data, we will tell you directly and, where consent is needed, ask for it again rather than assume it. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated terms of use. It does not, by itself, count as consent to a new use of your personal data.

If any part of this document is found to be unenforceable, the rest still stands, and that part is read down to the narrowest reading that works.

If we do not enforce something straight away, we do not lose the right to enforce it later.

You may not transfer your rights under these terms to anybody else. We may transfer ours if the business is transferred, and your rights are unaffected.

This document is the whole agreement between us about the site and your orders, and replaces the separate terms and privacy pages we published before August 2026.

These terms are formed electronically. Section 10A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 makes an electronic contract as valid as one on paper.

Browsing the site means you accept the terms of use in Parts 1, 2, 3 and 5.

Before you can place an order, you tick a box confirming you have read and accept this document. That tick is recorded with the date and time, the version of this document that was live, and the IP address it came from.

Your personal data is processed on the consent you give at the points listed in section 22, which you can withdraw at any time.

Questions about any of it: support@bengalibooks.com.