Cancelling and Refunding Orders

How cancelling an order affects site credit, instant win winnings and your card or PayPal gateway, and the choices you make along the way.

Cancelling a completed order is a deliberate action with a few choices attached, not a one-click refund. When you cancel an order you decide, separately, whether to give the customer their money back as site credit and whether to claw back any instant win prizes that were paid as site credit. Putting real money back on a customer's card or PayPal is a separate job you do inside your payment provider. Take it step by step and you will always know exactly where the money has gone.

Cancelling an order cannot be undone. It deletes all of the order's tickets and resets any instant wins on it. Make sure you have the full picture before you confirm.

When the Cancel option appears

The Cancel Order button only shows on orders that are marked complete. Open the order from Admin > Orders, click into it, and you will find Cancel Order in the actions.

The two money choices

When you click Cancel Order, a confirmation box appears. It warns you that the order will be cancelled, its tickets deleted, and any instant wins reset. It also gives you two separate tick boxes. Both are off by default, and each one does something different, so read them carefully.

1. Refund to the customer's site credit

"Refund [amount] to customer's site credit"

This is optional and off by default. The site credit refund only happens if you tick this box.

• Ticked: the full order total is added to the customer's wallet balance as site credit, which they can spend on future entries or withdraw.

• Left unticked: no site credit is added at all.

This is the box behind the idea that "a refund goes to the customer's wallet". It is only true when you choose it.

2. Remove site credit winnings

"Remove site credit winnings if any"

This is a completely separate choice. If the cancelled order contained winning instant win tickets that paid the customer site credit, ticking this box pulls that credit back out of their wallet, because the order, and therefore the win, is being undone.

• Ticked: any instant win site credit from this order is removed from the customer's wallet.

• Left unticked: the customer keeps those winnings even though the order is cancelled.

These two boxes are independent. You can refund the order to credit without removing winnings, remove winnings without refunding the order, do both, or do neither. Decide what is fair for the situation before you confirm.

If the customer has already spent their winnings

There is one situation that will stop a cancellation in its tracks. If you tick Remove site credit winnings but the customer has already spent some of that credit, so their wallet balance is now lower than the amount you are trying to claw back, the cancellation will not go through.

You will see an Insufficient Balance message showing how much credit is available versus how much would need to be removed, with a prompt to untick Remove site credit winnings if any to continue.

In plain terms, you cannot quietly pull back money the customer no longer has. Your realistic options are:

1. Untick the box and let the customer keep the winnings, then cancel the order.

2. Sort the balance out another way first, then come back and cancel.

Card and PayPal refunds are separate

This is the most important thing to understand. The two tick boxes only move site credit around inside Rafflex. They do not push real money back out through your card or PayPal gateway.

If the order was paid by PayPal or Cashflows and you want to give the customer their actual money back, you still need to log in to that payment provider and issue the refund there yourself. To make sure you do not forget, the cancellation note on these orders is tagged with a reminder that a manual refund may be required.

So cancelling an order and refunding the real payment are two different jobs. Always decide up front whether you are giving the money back as site credit, as a real card or PayPal refund, or both.

Payments confirmed after a competition has ended

Sometimes a customer's payment is only confirmed after the competition they were buying has closed. This can happen if they took a long time at their bank or PayPal. RaffleX never issues tickets for a competition once it has ended, so these orders are handled for you automatically. There is nothing for you to cancel.

• Card payments. If every competition in the order had ended, the whole order is refunded to the customer's site credit and marked Refunded. If only some had ended, the customer gets their tickets for the competitions that are still open, and the value of the ended ones goes back to their site credit.

• PayPal payments. The whole order is refunded to the customer's site credit and marked Refunded, even if only some of the competitions in it had ended. No tickets are issued, so the customer can use the credit to enter again.

• Site credit payments. No credit is taken for the ended competitions, so the customer's balance is left as it should be.

• Free entries. No tickets are issued for the ended competition. Nothing was paid, so there is nothing to refund.

In each case a note is added to the order explaining that tickets were withheld because the competition had already ended when payment was confirmed. The customer's wallet history also shows the refund with the same reason.

These automatic refunds go to site credit. If a customer would rather have their money back on their card or PayPal, refund them inside your payment provider as described above, and remember to adjust their site credit so they are not refunded twice.

What you will not have to worry about

• Deleted customer accounts. If the customer's account has since been deleted and you tick the refund box, there is no wallet to credit, so the credit refund is simply skipped and the cancellation still completes. The order note records that the credit refund was skipped because the account was deleted.

• Knowing what happened later. Every cancellation writes a note onto the order spelling out exactly what was decided: whether credit was refunded, whether instant win credits were withdrawn or kept, and whether a manual gateway refund may still be needed. You always have a record.

As long as you read the two tick boxes before confirming and remember that real card and PayPal money is refunded separately inside your payment provider, cancelling an order is straightforward and fully traceable.

Related pages

Wallet & WithdrawalsSite Credit & Wallets