Credit Cards and Refunds

When it comes to credit cards the very first thing to understand is that the payment that you receive is for your product or service, whether that is a registration for a car show, a club membership, a ticket, a t-shirt, or whatever else you are selling, however, in the payment system it is just a payment and it is not linked in any sort of virtual way to what it was used to purchase other than you seeing a name of something purchased and a name of a purchaser in the payments screen.

This is a really important concept for you to understand as you start to accept payments in Middletwin.

The reason it’s important is because if you refund a customers payment, or issue a partial refund, that only impacts the customers payment. You will still need to go into Middletwin and make any changes to the data that are needed to reflect the refund. For example, if a customer wants a refund for a car registration, and you go to payments and issue a refund, you will still need to go into the registrations for the event and delete the registration.

Testing

When you are setting up an event you will undoubtably want to test out the customer experience of registration. When doing this you can go into the Show Settings for the event and turn on test mode, its the first setting.

When you do this, and save the show settings, you will see on the landing page where all the icons are the words “This event is in test mode”

A clear indicator that the event is in test mode, and you will see on the public facing event panel that the event is in test mode

Test mode will allow you to run through the processes of registration, ticket purchases, and vendor/swap space purchases but will skip past the payment screen allowing you to complete everything without incurring a credit card charge.

If you also want to test out the credit card charge you can keep the test mode turned off in the show settings, however we ask that you do not use the credit card refund function to reimburse your self for any charges greater than $1, just write a check out from your club/event bank account to yourself.

Customer Refunds

Of course the customer always gets what they want, if the customer wants a refund on a credit card or a partial refund you need to do that without hesitation, but if your customer will accept a check refund or an exchange, you should try to offer that as well.

You can always put language in your purchase agreement policy for your event that all refunds will be in the form of a check that will be mailed out within 7-10 business days, most customers would be agreeable to terms like that.

Trying to avoid credit card refunds helps Middletwins merchant rating.