Background

Within PPRO's transaction model, refunds are synchronous.

That means there is an immediate API response from the PPRO API with the technical success or failure of a refund. But this technical success may not mean funds were really delivered to the consumer's bank account.

This discrepancy is mainly due to the refund mechanism provided to PPRO by the online payment method. Some online payment methods provide a native refund functionality and take over if there are issues. For other online payment methods, PPRO provide the refund functionality where the payment method itself does not.

Refund Funding Status

PPRO's API handles the complexities of refund handling with one of two paths:

Refunds where the scheme provides the refund handling

For this path, the FundsState of the SUCCEEDED refund is NotExpected, which means that no further funding status is expected. The refund is considered complete.

Refunds where PPRO provides the refund handling

For this path the FundsState of the SUCCEEDED refund is WAITING, which means that PPRO has sent the funding request and is waiting for a result. WAITING can change to one of two future statuses:

• If the consumer is funded, the FundsState changes status to SENT, implying that the consumer was funded and the refund is complete.
• If the consumer is not funded, the FundsState changes status REJECTED, implying that the consumer's bank or another party outside of PPRO rejected the funding request. In this case, rejected refunds are refunded to PPRO's customer. The merchant and consumer will need to arrange a refund outside of the PPRO system. This is because PPRO can only send funds to the banking details that are on file from the original transaction.

Tracking FundsState

PPRO's processing (recon) files provide a daily update of any refunds whose status has changed in the last 24 hour (UTC) period.

We recommend that you parse these files on a daily basis to track any refunds where the FundsStatus has moved from WAITING to SENT or REJECTED. For more information on these files, see here.

👍

Note

PPRO does not allow refunds to be polled for their status changes. Use the recon files for updated refund funding statuses.

👍

Note

As PPRO evolves its funding reporting: there are cases where the FundsStatus of a NotExpected refund could become SENT at a later date. This is because PPRO can get additional data from an online payment method, when available, to update PPRO's internal reporting.