Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Thunderbolt Tea is run by locals based in proper Darjeeling town. There is no middle man involved and the cost of Tea provided for tea lovers is of utmost reasonable pricing. All tea varieties chosen are of top quality, assessed personally by Benoy and Neelam through vigorous and hundreds of tea tastings done every tea season. We have written a comprehensive reason(s) as to why you should buy your tea from Thunderbolt Tea. Yes, it’s ethically good and that too without digging too deep into your pockets. Please do give it a read.

Yes, you need to register to order teas from us. This enables us to smoothly process your tea orders and attend to problems, if any, and lets us communicate with you. Once you register, you will be able to view your dashboard, see your recent and past orders and hence eases things on your side as well as ours. If you are having registration difficulty, kindly visit one of our updates we wrote to help you register easily – Registration Help!

Since we are locals based in Darjeeling, we only sell one particular Indian Tea brand known as Darjeeling Tea. One brand doesn’t mean just one tea. Darjeeling Tea is a collective name and the name actually is associated with the place, Darjeeling. Darjeeling has various tea gardens and each produce their unique teas which is itself a brand on its own. Yes, well sell single estate Darjeeling, all kinds.

No, we do not sell blended teas. Teas come blended as it is from the individual tea gardens retaining the single estate origin. Blending this single estate with others will loose the single estate value which is crucial for any Darjeeling.

Yes, Darjeeling has different varieties of tea which comes as a combination of two categories – Firstly, each tea comes attached with a tea garden name and Secondly, it falls under a particular season. You can browse our 3 tea seasons under which you will find teas from various tea gardens. Check out our Darjeeling Tea page for explanation or our main Tea Shop page for these seasons. We also have a section on how we can help choose tea for you.

Yes, we ship to almost all countries except countries barred by the Indian government. Some shipping options may not be available for some countries due to services not available. Kindly view our shipping and delivery page for more details.

Seeking Support/Help is easy. First you log into your Account. Once logged in, you can click the “Support Tickets” link from within your Account section or click any support link found throughout our site for instance Contact Us page or the support button below this page.

Once inside the Support section, you will have the option to continue with your existing Support Ticket or you can create a New Ticket. Creating tickets will give you two options:

• General Inquiry: It will assist queries like Pre-sales, specific product, shipping and other queries.
• Purchased Order Specific: This will allow you to query regarding your recent or past tea orders you have placed.

Support

Yes, payments are to be done while ordering either by using your credit/debit cards or other modes available on our site. Yes, all transactions are secure, done by world renowned payment gateways such as paypal etc.

After you entered your payment details and an order Thank you notification seen, you should get an order confirmation email with the details. Alternatively, you can log into your Account and click the “Orders” tab to view details. If none works, you can always write to us using the form at the end of this page. Please note that orders done via 2Checkout will have a pending payment value, but not to worry, if you have successfully done the payment, it will be completed/processed. It’s just that 2Checkout does fraud detection first before actually accepting it. Please allow sometime and it will be processed. Do not double order if you see a pending status.

Yes, of course you can by simply writing to us with your order number and details of further modification eg. add more teas, reduce amount etc. This may incur additional cost for added teas or can reduce the amount if you have reduced the tea. Additional cost to be paid will be billed to you via email. If you have reduced the teas in the order and some amount remain, this will stay in your account as a store credit which you can use to buy teas anytime in the future. However, all this happens after we have communicated and solved the issue.

Important Note: There cannot be any modification of your tea order once the tea has been dispatched from our premises. So, it is imperative to write to us asap. Contact form at the bottom of the page or use our Support page.

Definitely, you can, but it is of utmost importance that you write to us asap because once the tea has been shipped, it cannot be modified. So keep in mind to contact us as soon as possible. Contact form at the bottom of the page or by visiting our Support page.

All retail orders from our online shop are shipped the same day if we get your order one hour before noon. It has to be packed as well and the shipment modes require parcels to be reached by noon so that they in turn can proceed with their desk work.

Sometimes due to volume or complexity of tea orders, additional time may be required for packing. At such junctures, we ship it next day after the teas are done with the packaging.

Teas are shipped according to the mode of shipment chosen by you while placing an order. There are 3 modes of shipping we follow and depending on this allotted time frame your teas will be delivered.

• India Post (Airmail): It can take up to 30 working days.
• EMS Post: It can take up to 20 working days.
• Fedex/etc.: It can take up to 7 working days.

Working days does not include festive etc. holidays and weekend off holidays. We kindly request you to wait for the number of days stipulated for each individual shipping method. If you don’t receive by then, you can always write to us. We are here – Support

Please note that according to our experience, Russian Federation take a little longer time to get the teas delivered in comparison to other countries. Surprisingly, sometimes it gets delivered within the time frame allotted by a carrier and sometimes even earlier, but sometimes it takes more than 30 days. The mystery lies with the Russian customs and how they work. But the good news is none of the tea parcels has gone missing and scores 100% delivery rate.

Tracking your tea order is very simple. Please login to your account and click on the “Orders” tab. You will then see a set of orders done by your. Click on the “View” tab of that particular order and scroll down the page until you see the tracking details. Copy/Paste the tracking number into the relevant tracking site.

Please allow at-least 24 hours for the tracking to appear because we have to manually pack your tea and send it. Sometimes, we do it super fast within a few hours if there is less tea orders in line.

Kindly refer to our Return and Cancellation policy page for further details.

You need to communicate with us before refunds happen – getting into the nitty gritty of things. Alternatively, to initiate a refund, you can do from your Account Dashboard. Once finalized, you have two options:

• Convert the refund amount to store credit or equivalent Coupon amount which you can use anytime in future to buy whatever teas you want to buy.
• Money refund which we will do once you have decided.

Money refunds will be done to your credit/debit card or any other mode you used while ordering. If it is possible to do automatic refund, we will do it, otherwise we will have to refund manually. Kindly allow us one day the refund request has been approved. It can take a few days to reflect your bank statement.

Any complications or things you need to understand more, do use the form at the end.

Thanks for your interest in our wholesale tea. This issue has been covered in our wholesale Darjeeling page. Kindly visit to know more.

Once you sign up for our newsletter entitled “CHAI Patra” (literally means “Tea Letter”), you will be eligible to receive special promos which can save you huge. Apart from discounts, you will also hear tea stories happening on this side of the world. Stay tuned and we will try to keep you happy.

Awe, you don’t wanna do that and miss out on all things “Gold” in your inbox. Well, if you have already made up your mind, its quite simple – in any of our newsletter, at the end there will be an “Unsubscribe” link. You can just click on the link and follow any instructions if any. You are done!