The difference has nothing to do with agents
It would be reasonable to assume that refunding an agent order is more complicated than refunding an ordinary one. It is not. By the time a return happens the agent is long gone, and the person asking for their money back is an ordinary customer with an ordinary complaint. The difference comes from the rail the money travelled on. It would be exactly the same if a person had paid you in stablecoins directly, with no agent involved anywhere. A card refund works by running the original payment backwards. You tell your processor to refund the order, and the payment network reverses the movement along the path it came. The money is pulled out of your account and pushed back to your customer’s card, usually some days later, by somebody else’s system. A blockchain has no reverse. When the payment reached you it was a completed transfer, and there is no instruction that undoes a completed transfer. This is not a restriction anybody chose to place on you. It is simply how the rail works, and it applies equally to your customer, to us, and to everyone else.A refund is a payment you send
That is the whole idea, and once it lands the rest follows easily. You are not reversing the original payment. You are making a second, separate payment in the opposite direction. The closest familiar thing is cash. The customer hands the item back across the counter and you hand the money back: two movements, rather than one movement undone.What that changes in practice
There are four practical consequences, and none of them are difficult. You need somewhere to send it, and you already have that. The wallet address your customer paid from is recorded against the original order, and that is where the refund goes back to. You need the money to be available. This is the one that catches people out. If you convert everything into your bank account the moment it arrives, there is nothing on hand to refund with. Most businesses settle into keeping a working balance that comfortably covers whatever their returns normally run at, and converting the rest. You control the timing completely. There is no processor to submit to and no clearing period to sit through. When you decide somebody gets their money back, the money moves when you send it. Partial refunds are simply smaller refunds. There is nothing special about them. You send back whatever you have agreed, whether that is the whole order, one item out of four, or a goodwill gesture on the delivery charge.Doing it through an Agent Wallet
If your Prism settlement address is a Finance District Agent Wallet, refunds are considerably less work, because you can raise one from Prism rather than going away and making a transfer by hand. You raise the refund against the original order and say how much is going back. The request goes to your wallet, which sends the money to the address the payment came from. You are not copying wallet addresses between screens, and nobody is retyping a long string of characters correctly on a Friday afternoon. You can also work in the wallet’s own interface, where your balances, transactions and payments all sit together. That is the place to go when you want to look something up, check that a refund went out, or send money that is not attached to an order at all.If you use your own wallet
If you settle to a wallet you look after yourself, refunds are yours to make directly, and nothing is prepared for you. You open your wallet, take the address from the original order, and send the amount you have agreed, the same as any other transfer you would make. That works perfectly well, and plenty of businesses run this way. It does put the care on you: checking the address is the right one, and checking the amount before it goes. Keep your own note of which order the transfer belongs to, too, because the wallet has no idea what it was for.Telling your customers
It is worth one line in your returns policy: refunds are sent back to the wallet the payment came from. Most customers will never think to ask, and most would not mind either way, but the one who does care will ask before buying rather than after. Saying it plainly also heads off the conversation where somebody is waiting for money to appear on a card they never used. Your timescales are worth stating as well, and you can afford to be generous with yourself here, because you are not quoting somebody else’s clearing time. A refund reaches your customer about as quickly as their payment reached you.Keeping your records straight
Each refund is its own transaction with its own record, separate from the payment it relates to. That is a little different from a card refund, which usually appears attached to the original. Here you have two entries, money in and money out, each with its own reference. Tie them together with your own order number and your accounts stay easy to follow later, when somebody asks what happened on a particular order.Where to go next
Your First Agent Order
What an agent order is, what you see in your admin, and why it is closer to
an ordinary order than it sounds.
Cashing Out to Your Bank
Converting what you keep into ordinary currency, and how much to leave
behind for returns.