There may come a time that you place an order with us and then change your mind and want to cancel that order. If your order hasn't been processed and shipped out you can login to your account and cancel the order which will void your transaction. If you use Paypal as a payment method your refund or voided transaction should be back in your Paypal account almost instantly. If you choose to pay using our merchant providers service through Authorize.net your refund or void will also be immediate on our end.
What is void vs. refund. Let us clarify it for you. All transactions are captured immediately but batched every night with our merchant provider. A transaction is voided if you cancel your order before your transactions are batched that night. A transaction is refunded if it already was batched.
In the event of a void most respectful banks will credit your account with a pending credit right away. For example: You placed an order for $5 and you cancelled your order before it was batched that evening. You will notice 2 charges on your credit card statement from us. A $5 transaction debiting your account, and a $5 transaction crediting your account. These will remain as pending transactions in your account until they disappear after a few days. Effectively your account balance should not be affected. But that's only if you bank with respectful banks. We personally use Bank of America and we constantly test to see if this is the case, and all our test transactions that we voided are debited and credited immediately. Now we know from angry phone calls from some of our customers that not all banks do this. And we apologize for the inconvenience you go through, but please note that inconvenience is caused by the bank you use. (Sure they'll deny it, but please trust us we have no reason to lie to you or hold on to your money, banks on the other hand have every reason to hang on to whatever they legally can for however long they legally can)
On another scenario, say you placed your order, and your transaction was batched. This means it can no longer be voided. Get in touch with us. If we haven't shipped your order we will issue a refund back to your card (we can issue store credit if you wish to get something else). Again as soon as a refund is initiated a respectful bank will receive it as a pending transaction temporarily crediting your account. That refund we initiate is withdrawn from our account every night when we take a batch. It is then up to your financial institution to make it available to you. With most respected banks you'll see the transaction refunded immediately, but from angry calls and emails we know there are some banks that will hang on to that money for as long as they legally can before making it available to you.
One last scenario that we face too often. Our system is designed to reject your transaction if the billing address you provide when placing your order does not match your credit cards billing information. This is a fraud screening we use. If you are using your own credit card you should know it's billing address. Our system checks whether there is a match with the information your bank has vs the information we were provided. Here is what happens when you enter your card information but make a mistake in your billing information. Your bank approves the transaction and puts a hold for that amount to your account. Our end sees the transaction and immediately rejects it. Again with most respected banks you will see a counter transaction crediting your account immediately as a secondary pending transaction. We use bank of America and our tests do show that if we enter a wrong billing address when attempting to charge our cards at our site, a reversal transaction is issued immediately which keeps our account balances unaffected. But from experience we know we get emails and phone calls from our customers saying we charged their account 4 times. If you retry placing a transaction 4 times with the wrong billing address you will see 4 separate pending transactions in your account. None of which will remain in your account. If you are banking with a respectable bank you will also see 4 reversal transactions. But we are fully aware there are banks out there that will not give their customers that reversal credit. We apologize for the inconvenience your banking institution puts you through.
We are just a customer of Bank of America, and we are not paid to endorse their services. We just wanted to let you know our experience banking with them to try to explain to you that we will take care of your refunds immediately, however it is your banking institution that may try to inconvenience you for a few days. We understand your frustration and we invite you to question your banks business practices. Please note we cannot call your bank and explain the situation to them. We've done this in the past and were given the usual runaround. It is ineffective. The most effective way to safeguard yourself against these inconveniences is to choose a bank that puts you as a top priority. Again we do accept PayPal, and we recommend you use PayPal to avoid all of these mishaps which you might face with Banks. (We are not endorsed by PayPal either, we just like to put in a good word about services we are Happy with using)
We hope you've found this article informing. We are here for your convenience. We thank you for being a customer of ours.
