Refunds

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Ideally, your customers won’t ask you for a refund. But if they do, issuing refunds in Ontraport only takes a few clicks.

In this lesson you'll learn:

How to locate a contact’s purchases
How to quickly process refunds
Tips for issuing partial refunds

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Transcript

Hopefully your customers won't ask for refunds often. But when one does, it only takes a few clicks. Here's how to issue a refund, what Ontraport records, and what to check afterward. Invoices and payments replace what we used to call transactions. So you refund an invoice, or the payment on it. Open the contact's record and click the Purchases tab. It's available on Plus and above. In the Invoices section, select the invoice and click Refund. You can only refund an invoice that's closed, which means it's been paid. You can also refund from the Payments section. Select a payment with an Applied status and click Refund. It does exactly the same thing. When you refund, you can choose to send the customer a refund receipt email with the details. If you'd rather not open the contact, you can find the same invoices and payments in the Invoices and Payments collections under Sales. Or use the actions menu in the Transaction Logs report. Ontraport adds a payment record with a negative amount for the refund. In Purchase history, the product is marked Refunded, and the invoice balance drops to zero. The invoice itself is Closed. On accounts created before September 2025, it shows as Refunded instead. You can switch those to Closed, to match QuickBooks and Xero, under profile icon, then Administration, then Legacy features. That change can't be undone. Each payment gateway has its own refund rules, and they decide whether Ontraport can send the refund through it. So the first time you refund, check in your gateway account that the money actually went back. If a refund fails, contact your gateway's support team. One exception to know about: the PayPal Legacy gateway only allows refunds through PayPal itself. Process the refund in PayPal, then mark it refunded in Ontraport so your records match. Refunding isn't the same as voiding. Refund gives the customer their money back. Void cancels an invoice without deleting it, so the record stays but your account ignores it. And if a customer never paid, Write off marks the invoice as bad debt. More on that in the next lesson. A few things to tidy up. If the customer is also cancelling a subscription or payment plan, go to Subscriptions and payment plans, select the open order, and click Delete to cancel its recurring payments. If it gave them membership site access, remove that too. If a partner referred the sale, the commission adjusts. If you haven't paid the partner yet, it's subtracted from what you owe them. If you already paid them, it becomes a negative commission, a clawback, once you approve it. And to automate the follow-up, use the Gets a refund on a product trigger or goal. To keep an eye on refunds across your business, hover over Sales and click Reports. The Sales report shows how many sales were refunded, and Product Sales Logs can point to products with buyer's remorse. On the Trends Dashboard, on Plus and above, the Sales chart can show the number or dollar total of your refunds over time. So: select the closed invoice or applied payment, click Refund, confirm it in your gateway, and tidy up subscriptions, access and commissions. Next up: what to do when a card is declined, in Declines and collections.