Selling Out During Checkout

What happens when a competition sells out in the moment between a customer reaching checkout and their payment being processed, and how the automatic refund to site credit works.

The short answer: if a competition runs out of available numbers in the brief moment between a customer reaching checkout and their payment being processed, the whole order is cancelled and the customer is automatically refunded to their site credit (their wallet). You do not need to do anything. This is expected behaviour on very popular competitions that sell out fast.

This is rare. It almost always happens only on a competition that sells out in the few seconds while a payment is being completed, so there are no longer enough free numbers left to fulfil the order.

Although this is documented here under instant win games, it applies to any competition where tickets are given random numbers, not only instant win games.

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What the platform does automatically

Everything below happens on its own, with no action needed from you.

1. It never part fills the order. The customer is never left with, say, 7 of the 10 tickets they paid for. It is all or nothing.

2. It frees up any numbers that were set aside. Numbers that had been lined up for that order are released again, so nothing is locked away or lost. They become available for other customers.

3. It reverses the whole order, even multi competition orders. If a single order contained tickets for more than one competition and just one of them cannot be fulfilled, the entire order is reversed. That includes tickets that were successfully allocated for the other competitions in the same order. The whole order succeeds together or is refunded together.

4. It refunds to site credit, not the card. The money lands in the customer's wallet balance, ready to spend on another competition straight away.

5. It marks the order as Refunded and adds a note. The note explains the order was refunded to the wallet because there were not enough tickets to allocate. That note is how you can tell at a glance this was an automatic sell-out refund rather than a manual one.

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How the refund amount is worked out

• A normal card or PayPal order: the customer gets the full order total back as site credit.

• A part-paid order (where the customer used some wallet credit and some card): both portions are refunded into the wallet. For example, if they paid £8 from their wallet and £12 on card for a £20 order, the full £20 comes back as site credit.

• The refund is always capped at the original value of the order (the order value before payment, less any discount that was applied). A customer can never receive more credit than the order was actually worth.

• A free entry (an order that genuinely cost nothing) has nothing to refund, so no credit is issued. The order is still cancelled and marked as refunded.

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What this means for you

The customer has not lost out. Their money is sitting in their site credit, ready to use on another competition.

• An order showing as Refunded with that sell-out note is normal and expected. It is not a sign of a payment fault or something you need to chase.

• It is worth letting your support team know this can happen on very popular competitions that sell out fast, so they recognise it if a customer asks why they have credit instead of tickets.

To learn more about how site credit works and where customers see their balance, see the pages below.

Site Credit & WalletsWallet & Withdrawals