Overview

Refunds are reversals to customers. Online payments often involve the mechanism of refunds. There are various scenarios due to which a refund is raised:

Instances when an online transaction fails yet the money is debited from your customers bank account.
Your customer purchased something online, made the payment, and cancelled the order due to reasons such as a defective product.

You can reverse the partial or the entire payment back to the customers source account. Refunds are processed based on the payment method used by the customer. You can only initiate refunds against orders where payments are successful.

If the beneficiary account is inactive or frozen, refunds cannot be processed. You may have to contact the customer for alternate bank account details. You need to have a sufficient balance in your recharge account to initiate a refund. If you do not have sufficient balance, click RECHARGE to view the account details to which you need to transfer funds.

You can initiate refunds from the dashboard or use our APIs.

To initiate a refund from the dashboard,

Go to Payment Gateway Dashboard> Transactions> Payments.
Search for the transaction you want to initiate a refund for, and click Initiate Refund.

Refund Types

Cashfree Payments supports three types of refunds:

Standard Refund

A standard refund or a normal refund is a refund type in which the refunds are processed to your customers bank account within 5-7 working days.

Instant Refund

Instant refund processes the refunds immediately to the customers bank account.

Batch Refund

In scenarios when you want to process many refunds at a time, you can use batch refunds to process the refunds in one go.

Refund Status

When you trigger a refund, a refund goes through various states, they are listed below:

Refund Status	Description
PENDING	This state indicates that the refund is pending.
SUCCESS	This state indicates that the refund is processed successfully to the customer account.
CANCELLED	This state indicates that the refund has been cancelled.
ONHOLD	This state indicates that the refund has been put on hold.
FAILED	This state indicates that the refund has failed. A few reasons why refunds fail are listed below: 1. If the beneficiary account is inactive or frozen, refunds cannot be processed. 2. If there is no sufficient balance in your account.

List of refunds APIs

The table below lists all the refund APIs along with their description.

API Name	Description
Create Refund	Use this API to initiate a standard or an instant refund.
Get All Refunds for an Order	Use this API to fetch all the refunds processed against a particular order.
Get Refund	Use this API to fetch the details for a specific refund processed on your Cashfree Payment account.

Set Refund Speed (Preferences)

The preferences option allows you to configure the speed at which the refunds are processed for your customers.

To set the refund speed,

Go to Settings> Preferences>Refund Speed.

Set the refund speed. This is the speed at which all the refunds are processed.

Standard Refund: The default speed in which the refunds are processed. If you select this option, all the refunds are processed to your customers bank account within 5-7 working days.
Instant Refund: You can process refunds instantly to your customers bank account using this option.

If you wish to refund instantly, you will be charged a small instant refund fee. Click Enable Instant Refund and Save Changes.