Terms of service

1. Who you are dealing with

A family, not a company with departments. Our mother is a 神婆, a spirit medium. Our younger sister runs the paper offering shop in Hong Kong and does the writing and the burning herself. One of us runs this website.

Nothing is subcontracted to a third party. The flip side of that: we are a few people, and we answer email at Hong Kong hours.

The party you are contracting with is:

• Operator: Shen Po Son (神婆個仔), run by the owner personally; the packets are written and burned by his sister at her paper offering shop in Hong Kong
• WhatsApp / telephone: +852 6073 0264
• Email: shenposon@gmail.com
• Reply hours: Monday to Sunday, 09:00–18:00 Hong Kong time (UTC+8), every day of the year
• Business Registration number: not listed yet — it goes in this line once settled, and the date at the top changes with it

2. What we do, and what we will not claim

What we agree to do is narrow and concrete: prepare an offering packet, write on it the name or the form of address you give us, take it to be burned, and send you the photographs.

We make no claim whatsoever about what follows — not luck, money, health, safety, fertility, immigration outcomes, exam results or court cases.

Nobody can demonstrate any of that, so anyone who offers it is selling you something other than an offering. We also will not tell you that something bad happens if you skip a year. That kind of selling is off the table here.

3. Sending the form does not charge you

The price is settled and published: HK$638 (about US$82) per packet, all four the same. What is not built yet is the paying part — this site has no checkout, and pressing the submit button moves no money at all.

The form tells us which packet you want and whose name goes on it. We then email you the burning arrangements and how to pay. Writing begins after your payment is confirmed, not before.

Up to that point there is no contract, no charge and no obligation. Walking away costs you nothing and needs no explanation.

4. Timing, and how to read it from your time zone

How the shop actually works: on ordinary days, orders are usually burned within about three days. Around Qingming, the seventh month and Chung Yeung it takes longer, because that is when the shop is busiest.

The fastest we have managed is an order in the morning, burned that afternoon. That is a rush case and the outer limit of what is possible — not a service level we offer.

Then the part you are actually waiting for. The two photographs go up on your order's tracking page within three working days of the burning. Working days here means any day: the shop opens Monday to Sunday and does not close for public holidays, so a long weekend at either end does not push your photographs back.

End to end, on an ordinary week: order, confirm payment, and you are usually looking at the photographs inside a week. At festival peaks, allow longer — and order early rather than late.

All dates and times are Hong Kong time, UTC+8. Hong Kong does not observe daylight saving, so the gap between your clock and ours only changes when yours does.

5. We burn in batches and we say so

The shop makes one trip to the furnace each day, between three and six in the afternoon. So it is one batch a day — not "we wait until enough orders pile up".

Writing is done individually, for each order. Burning is done together. We separate those two sentences deliberately, because blurring them is how this kind of service misleads people.

Some services imply a private ceremony for your order alone. We cannot do that, and we will not imply it. One furnace, one pair of hands.

6. What you actually receive

Photographs. Two of them, and no video. Each answers a different question:

1. A close photograph of your packet, taken individually, showing the name or form of address you chose, plus your order number. This answers: is this actually mine?
2. A photograph of the whole batch together, taken at the shop or in front of the furnace before burning, with yours among them. This answers: did mine actually go to that fire?

The second is the one that matters. Without it, a photograph of a written packet and a photograph of a furnace are two unrelated pictures.

Why there is no video, and no picture of the flames themselves: where the burning is done, a camera making a scene of it is not welcome, and we are not going to make things awkward for the people there for the sake of a clip. So we photograph the packets and nothing else — no hands, no faces, nobody on camera. Other services offer footage; we are not going to pretend we can.

Note: the second photograph is a batch image, so other customers' packets are in the frame. The reverse is equally true: yours appears in the images other customers receive. Ordering means you know this.

Before the batch photograph reaches you, we mask out by hand any name that is not from your order. How that is done, and where it can fall short, is set out in section 6 of the privacy policy. Section 7 below explains the other option: not putting a full name on the packet in the first place.

At the date of writing there are no real photographs on this site and image storage is not switched on, so this section describes a settled design, not a service already running.

7. Names, and what script they can be in

This one has a definite answer, so it sits here in the terms rather than buried in an article.

Chinese, English or pinyin all work. Chinese is the most common and the safest choice, but if all you have is "Grandpa Chan" or a passport spelling, that is enough to proceed.

You can also give a form of address instead of a name — "my late father", or a collective form covering a whole family line. That is a traditional option, not a compromise we invented.

If you would rather a full name did not appear in the batch photograph, choose the form of address. You still get both photographs; the batch shot simply has no full name in it.

8. Price, currency and payment

HK$638 per packet. All four, the pet packet included, cost the same. They are not tiers of a product; they differ in who the offering is addressed to, and that is not something to charge differently for.

Everything settles in Hong Kong dollars. The “about US$82” you see on this site is a rounded conversion at 7.8 HKD to the dollar, put there so the figure means something to you at a glance. It is not a second price, and it is not what anyone charges.

If you pay with a card issued outside Hong Kong, the exact amount that leaves your account, the rate used and any foreign-transaction fee are decided by your own bank — not by us, and any such fee is not money we receive.

Ordering more than one packet is simply HK$638 times the number of packets. The order page adds it up in front of you.

HK$638 is the whole of it. There is no minimum order, no service charge, no handling fee, and no tax added on our side. One packet is a perfectly normal order.

There is no rush option, at any price. Orders are written in the order they arrive, and no amount of money moves one up the queue — which is the only version of this that is fair to whoever is behind you.

How we take payment at the moment: in Hong Kong, PayMe or FPS (Faster Payment System); from overseas, PayPal (paypal.me/ShenPoSonHK — no PayPal account needed, a card works directly). When your order arrives we email you the exact way to pay and the amount. Paying on the order page itself is being set up and will be stated here once it works.
Your own bank may still add a foreign-transaction fee at its end, as described above. That is between you and your bank; it is not a charge from us, and we do not receive it.

9. Changes, cancellation, and our mistakes

Changes: as long as we have not started writing, you can change anything — spelling, packet type, date. One email is enough.

After burning, nothing can be changed. That is not policy, it is physics. Ash is ash, and no packet can be told apart from another once burned.

If we get it wrong — misspelled a name, burned on the wrong day, lost the photographs, or simply did not do it — that is on us, not on you. We do the whole thing again at no charge: written again, burned again, photographed again, nothing more to pay.

The window for raising it is seven days from the day your photographs go up. An email or a WhatsApp message saying what is wrong is enough; no form, and no explaining why it matters to you. Seven days because the photographs show you immediately whether we got it right, and because after a few weeks we can no longer tell which batch was yours.

Why it is set that way, since “no refunds” deserves a reason rather than a shrug: writing and burning are one-way work, and there is no object to send back. Rather than take your money and argue about it later, we say it plainly — the money stays with the offering, and the offering waits for you. This is the owner's policy, not a line we added afterwards to sound tidy.

10. Orders we will turn down

• Requests that we promise a result. If we cannot promise it, we will not take money for it.
• Messages meant to curse, harm or harass a living person, or anything unlawful.
• Volume beyond what the shop can genuinely burn at a festival peak. We would rather close the list early than take your money and then stall.

In any of these cases we will tell you plainly that we are not taking the order, rather than accepting payment and sorting it out later.

11. The burning happens in Hong Kong, not where you live

This is worth stating because it is often the reason people look for a service like ours in the first place.

The offering is burned at our shop in Hong Kong, under Hong Kong rules. Nothing is burned at your address, and nothing is shipped to you.

So the fire rules, tenancy clauses and condominium bylaws that stop people burning at home do not apply to what we do for you. If you were planning to burn something yourself as well, that is a separate question with four layers to it.

12. The articles on this site are not rulings

We research what we publish and mark clearly where sources run out. But practice genuinely differs by region, dialect group and family.

If what your grandmother taught you differs from what we wrote, that does not make either of you wrong.

Nothing here is religious authority, legal advice or medical advice. Whether you may burn anything where you live is governed by your local rules, not by us.

13. Changes to these terms

The photograph turnaround, the remedy for our mistakes and the cancellation position were all settled on 6 September 2026 and are written into the sections above. Two things are still open: the day card payment goes live, and the day the Business Registration number is added. When either lands, this page changes and the date at the top changes with it.

A change in price would be recorded here too. Nothing gets altered quietly.

Orders already placed are governed by the version in force on the day you ordered. We will not apply new terms backwards to a decision you already made.

14. Law, disputes, and how to reach a person

Your local consumer rights stay yours. Nothing on this page is intended to remove a right you have under the consumer law of the country you live in.

If something goes wrong, email shenposon@gmail.com first. A person reads it. We are a few people in one time zone, so allow a day or two.

If you would rather speak to someone: WhatsApp or call +852 6073 0264, 09:00–18:00 Hong Kong time (UTC+8). Work out the difference from your own clock before you dial — Hong Kong does not move for daylight saving.

These terms are governed by the law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and if a dispute ever had to go to court it would go to the Hong Kong courts.

We would rather it never got that far, and we will say why plainly: if you are in Vancouver or Sydney, flying to Hong Kong over an offering packet is not a remedy you can realistically use. So we are not going to hide behind that clause. Talk to us first — email or WhatsApp, in your own words. Nearly everything at this scale is fixable that way, and we would rather fix it than win it.

None of this takes away the consumer rights you already have where you live, as stated at the top of this section.

How we handle personal data — what we collect, why, and how to have it deleted — is in the privacy policy.