Refunds are handled by our payment provider Stripe, eola has no access to your bank details.
It can be frustrating for both you and your customers when you need to issue a refund. Make sure to have a clear and robust cancellation and refund policy to cover you and use credit vouchers where possible. Research shows that >50% of vouchers go unclaimed and you retain the original payment.
It's frustrating for you as it likely means a day without pay and if there is 1 refund there are likely a few for that session. From your customer's perspective, even in a world where we are spending more and more online, there is a significant delay in receiving a refund compared to the money being taken instantly from their account.
When setting up your eola account, the account and business details (including bank details) are submitted via Stripe and eola has no access directly to your bank account. Therefore when you issue a refund the following process takes place:
- eola refunds the customer from our Stripe balance
- Refunds can take 5 to 10 business days, we can access an ARN after 3 days the customer can pass it to their bank to track the refund
- Before your next payout, eola will deduct the refund amount from your available balance
The above process can take the available balance shown on the Payouts dashboard into a negative amount. In this scenario, the next time you receive a payment from a customer this amount will be used to clear the negative balance first. If your account is in a negative amount for more than 30 days, we will contact you to discuss repayment options.
All payments received through the system for; bookings, charges, invoices, memberships and voucher (all types), will be paid out 3 days after the funds clear. Therefore if you would like to increase the speed of the refund, you can simply BACS the customer from your bank directly. Do not forget to still cancel the booking or deduct funds from the voucher within eola to make space available on the session or prevent the voucher from being using online.