Why do refunds happen?
Refunds from Partner Stores are extremely rare and can happen for any reason, including the following...
❌ Cancellations
We try to keep cancellations at a minimum, however, they can occur. For example, the merchant could accept an order for an item and then realize it is out-of-stock because their inventory system did not update.
♻️ Returns
Returns are one of the only situations where a refund is welcome. If you, the creator, decide to return an item and request a refund from the merchant, the merchant will refund the money back to us.
In that case, you receiving an email about an incoming refund means that the merchant accepted and received your returned item and has provided you the refund you wanted.
🚚. Delivery Failed
Sometimes couriers fail to deliver items. Partner Stores do provide you automatic tracking but sometimes you are not home to accept the parcel or the courier gets confused. In this case, items can be returned to the sender and the sender (i.e. the merchant) will issue a refund.
❓ Other Reasons
The above are just examples of reasons, however, commerce is complicated and refunds can happen for a multitude of reasons. We at Throne are often not told about the exact reason for the refund, just that the refund has occurred.
How do I identify which item has been refunded?
We will relay all the information we get from the merchant to you. However, sometimes we only get information that a refund has happened and not which item was refunded. As such, there are two ways we react when we receive a refund from the merchant.
We DO know which item has been refunded
If we know which item has been refunded, we will do two things...
Step 1: We will set the item's status to transferred
Step 2: We will add a note to the item
This is a note that you will be able to view in the item details that tell you that the item has been refunded by the merchant.
We DON'T know which item has been refunded
If we do not know which exact item from a particular order has been refunded, we will allow all items from the order to keep their current status. However, we will add a note to all items in this order that we have received a refund for the order.
This will let you often infer which item was refunded. Assume you have an order of 3 items, one costing $20, one costing $40 and one costing $80. If we receive a refund for $22.95, we will add a note to all three items saying that we received this refund. If you then check on the $20 item in the future, you will be able to guess that this item was probably refunded.
What happens to the refund?
Luckily, we now have the Throne Balance to solve this problem (read more about the Throne Balance here). This means we will credit the entire refund amount directly to your Throne Balance so you can re-use it.
The steps that happen when we receive a refund are the following...
We update your items. If we know which item has been refunded, we set it to "transferred". Otherwise, the items in the order will keep their previous status. All items will receive a note that a refund for this order has arrived.
We will notify you. We will send you an email that a refund has arrived.
We will credit you the refund. We will credit you the refund straight to your balance without you having to do anything.