Buyer Protection on Citadel TCG: What Keeps Your Card Purchases Safe

Your payment is processed securely through Stripe, and the order appears under My Purchases with a status you can follow the whole way: paid, shipped, delivered, completed. When the seller ships, they enter the carrier and tracking number, which then show in your order details — and for high-value orders, tracking isn't optional, it's required. Unless otherwise agreed, professional sellers must deliver within 30 days of the order under EU distance-selling rules. Once the order is marked delivered, you have 7 days to confirm delivery or report a problem, so an order is never silently closed while something is wrong. Checkout itself has guardrails too: some listings carry per-buyer purchase limits, preorder items state their expected ship date before you pay, and where the seller is a professional, prices shown include applicable taxes with a proper per-line VAT invoice behind them.

You report it without leaving the app. On the order page, the "Order did not arrive" report becomes available from 14 days after shipping for tracked shipments, or 30 days for untracked ones, and opening it starts a structured process: the seller has 5 days to respond. A seller can resolve it immediately with a voluntary refund, or provide the tracking evidence — and if no tracking is provided by the deadline, the order is refunded automatically. Where tracking exists, the seller can open an investigation with the carrier, and the case is held for up to 90 days while the carrier traces the parcel. Cases end in a recorded resolution — typically a full refund, a partial refund, a refund from the seller, or a finding in the seller's favor — and refunds go back through Stripe to your original payment method. Report in-app first: the platform requires this route before any card-issuer chargeback.

Before shipment, yes — and with a full refund. You can request a cancellation from the order page; the seller has a deadline to respond, and if they stay silent the request is approved automatically, which cancels the order and fully refunds you. If a paid order simply sits unshipped, you don't have to wait indefinitely: orders that haven't shipped within 7 days of payment can be cancelled directly by the buyer. Once an order has shipped it can no longer be cancelled — at that point the delivery protections above take over, and after delivery you can still use the dispute process or, with professional sellers, the 14-day right of withdrawal. Unpaid orders are simpler still: they can be cancelled outright or left to expire, though repeatedly abandoning unpaid orders can lead to a temporary block from checkout — a protection that keeps listed cards available for buyers who intend to pay.

Every listing tells you whether you're buying from a professional seller (a business) or a private seller (an individual) — a distinction EU law requires — and with professional sellers, EU consumer protection law applies in full. If you're a consumer in the EU or UK, you can withdraw from the purchase within 14 days of receiving the goods, without giving any reason, and the seller must reimburse all payments including standard delivery costs within 14 days of being informed. Goods also carry the legal guarantee of conformity — 2 years from delivery (reducible to 1 year for used goods in some jurisdictions) — so a card that doesn't match its description can be repaired, replaced, reduced in price or refunded. Purchases from private sellers are person-to-person sales where these rights generally don't apply, which is exactly why the labeling matters. If a dispute can't be resolved on the platform, EU consumers can also turn to an authorized Alternative Dispute Resolution entity.

Nobody sells anonymously on Citadel TCG. Before a shop can list a single card, the seller must complete Stripe Connect onboarding — identity verification, including an identification document processed by Stripe, plus payment account setup — and under the EU Digital Services Act (Article 30) the platform collects and verifies seller identity details and re-verifies them at least once every 12 months. Professional sellers who are VAT-registered have their VAT number checked against the EU VIES system, and business buyers with a VIES-validated VAT ID get correct reverse-charge (0% VAT) invoicing at checkout. Citadel TCG is a young, growing marketplace operated by Castellum - Forge s.r.o. in Nitra, Slovakia — it doesn't claim the largest inventory, but every seller behind its listings across all seven supported games has passed the same identity verification, with prices in euros converted automatically to US dollars and British pounds.

New to buying singles online? The guide to buying TCG singles walks through the whole flow, the card prices guide explains how listing prices relate to live European market prices, and the card scanner helps you check what the cards you already own are worth before you shop on the marketplace.