Doorstep and swaps

• Who moves the box
• The two-minute check
• If something is missing or damaged
• Changing your mind
• What we can still help with

Who moves the box

When you press the buy stamp on a product page you land on the listing for that bot, and everything from that point — payment, packing, the courier and the delivery window — belongs to the store that takes the order. Delivery speed, shipping cost and the countries served are set there and can change without us hearing about it.

The two-minute check

Open the box over a table. Count what the listing said was inside: the bot, the remote if it has one, the charging cable, the instruction sheet. Look for a cell already fitted on the nanos and skitters. Put the USB cable in before anything else, because a charge takes under an hour and a flat bot is the number one reason somebody thinks a new creature is broken.

If something is missing or damaged

Go to the order page of the store you bought from and raise it there, with a photo if the box or the bot took a knock. They hold the order record and they are the only ones who can send a replacement or take the item back. Doing it through the order page is also the fastest route — it skips a step we would only have to redirect you through anyway.

Changing your mind

Return windows, who pays the postage and what counts as unused are all set by the store that sold you the bot, and they are written on your order page. As a rule, keeping the packaging until you have run the bot once makes a return far less painful if it turns out the floor in your house is the wrong floor for it.

What we can still help with

If the bot arrived fine but is not behaving — sliding off a wall, walking in circles, dying after ten minutes — that is ours. Write to the bench and describe the surface and the cell, and we will tell you whether it is a fault or a floor.