Reimbursing payments via PayPal, Stripe and other online credit card payment gateways

One of our participants has paid by credit card online, but has decided in the meantime not to participate.

How can I reimburse the participant fee / a part of her / his fee?

A German version of this article is available.

All online payments are made and processed in external payment systems, not in ConfTool.
Therefore, the refunds have to be issued in these payment systems, too.

That is why you cannot reimburse payments via ConfTool.
Instead, you have to log in to the payment system and reimburse the payment there.

In general there are three different workflows to reimburse payments:

A)   For PayPal, Ingenico (also called Ogone/Postfinance/PayEngine/PayTool) and for Stripe payments, please log in to your payment system account, search for the corresponding payment and cancel it there. You can usually also refund a partial payment if you want to charge/keep handling fees. For further details, have a look at the documentation of your payment system. Please note: These systems automatically send a message about the refund to ConfTool Pro and the participant will then also automatically receive an e-mail about the refund from ConfTool Pro.

B)    The payment gateways Saferpay, ePayService Bayern, GiroCheckout, Cielo, Monetico, GoPay, SimplePay and Razorpay provide an option to reimburse payments via your ConfTool installation. When a payment is refunded in ConfTool, the system sends a message directly to the payment gateway to perform the corresponding refund. The checkbox "Submit Refund to Gateway" has to be enabled, when you click on the button "Refund Payment" (image 1).
Please note that this function may have to be enabled in by the gateways provider first. This is especially the case for Saferpay. If it's not enabled, you will receive an error message when you try to refund the money and refunds have to be done in the payment system (see next section). Please contact the provider of your gateway for further information.

C)   For all other payment systems:
1.   Log in to the payment system, search for the payment and issue the refund or partial refund.
2.   There is no automatic message sent from these payment systems to ConfTool Pro about the refund!
       Therefore, log in to ConfTool Pro as administrator / organizer, search for the participant and
       go to "Payments" and create a new "Credit" by entering the refund as negative amount in
       order to store the refund in ConfTool, too (see image 2).
       ConfTool Pro will then send a corresponding message to the participant.
       Please note: Do not delete the details about the original payment in ConfTool; just create the new credit entry to reflect the refund.
3.    Finally, the participant's registration should be processed or canceled to accommodate his/her booking as required.

Important: Do not ask participants to cancel their payments or ask for a refund by their banks, as you will then have to pay substantial "chargeback" fees" (usually about €40), while a refund from the merchant (you) to the client (your participant) is usually free of charge, and you will usually even get back the payment/bank fees. If participants have already canceled the payment, ask them to reverse it so you can refund the payment.