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Handling Refunds

A reader asks from their own order page. The request comes to you before it comes to us, and it comes with a clock.

A state diagram. A reader's request starts as Requested. The author can approve it, staff can approve it, or the wait can run out — all three reach Approved. The reader can withdraw it, reaching Cancelled. Or the author can object, reaching Objection sent, which BookFunnel staff settle two ways: overriding the objection reaches Approved, agreeing with it reaches Declined. Approved becomes Refunded when staff settle it or the clock does, the only step where money moves. A refund nobody asked for enters at Approved. Refunded, Declined and Cancelled are archived automatically after ninety days and can still be found.
Every path a request can take, and who can move it along each one. Only one arrow moves money.

How a request reaches you

Every buyer has an order page, and on it a way to ask for a refund with a reason. That request lands in Refund Requests in your dashboard. Nothing has moved yet — no money, no e-mail to you saying it is already done.

Your two options

The Refund requests table. Three open rows, each with the order number, the book, the reader's reason, the amount, the date asked, the date it auto-approves, and a status. Two rows say "Awaiting approval" and carry Approve and Object buttons; one says the author already objected and carries only Approve. Below, a table of earlier requests showing Refunded, Declined by BookFunnel, and Approved-not-yet-paid.
The queue. Every open row shows the date it decides itself, in the Auto-approves column — that is the deadline, not an estimate.
ActionWhat happens
Approve The refund is settled. The money goes back to the buyer and the request leaves your queue.
Object You give a reason, and the request goes to BookFunnel to decide. It is a case you are making, not a refusal you are issuing — objecting does not stop the refund by itself.
The Object to this refund dialog. It names the book, says the objection does not refuse the reader but asks BookFunnel to look at the request before deciding, and that they see what is written. Below is a box headed "Why should this refund not be given?" and Send objection and Cancel buttons.
What you write here goes to BookFunnel, not to the reader.

Objecting is for the cases worth a person reading: an order that looks fraudulent, a reader who has asked five times, a claim you can show is wrong. It is not for talking a reader out of an ordinary change of mind.

The clock, and what it does

Every open request shows the date it decides itself. Leave a request alone past that date and it approves automatically — the reader gets their money, and the request is marked as auto-approved rather than as your decision, so the record shows what actually happened.

This is deliberate and it is not negotiable. A refund a reader is owed must not depend on an author reading their e-mail, and "still waiting on the author" is not a state a reader should be able to be left in indefinitely.

An objection restarts the question rather than the clock: it moves to a BookFunnel decision, and that has its own deadline, shown the same way on the same row.

Why do BookFunnel admins get to override refund decisions?

This is a safety valve.

Reading the status

StatusMeans
Awaiting approval It is yours to act on, and the date beside it is when it stops being.
Wait time expired: auto approved. The clock ran out. It was refunded without you, and not against you.
Objection sent You made your case; BookFunnel has it.
Refunded Settled. The money is back with the buyer.

Old requests are archived once they have been finished for a while. They are hidden rather than deleted — tick Show archived in the filters to see them again.

Approving for part of it

Approve does not have to mean all of it. Beside the button there is a box holding the amount the reader asked for — type a smaller number and that is what goes back. The reader got the ebook but the audiobook link was dead for three days: a full refund of the basket is not right, and neither is nothing.

The figure you approve is the figure that gets paid, and you can change your mind up until it settles because approving moves no money. You cannot approve more than the order has left; if you try, you are told what is left.

Refunds nobody asked for

Sometimes the right answer is to give money back before anyone complains — a batch of orders went out with two copies of the same book, say. You can issue a refund against your own order without waiting to be asked, and BookFunnel can do the same across every affected order at once.

These appear in your history as Issued by BookFunnel rather than as something you approved, because you did not. They are not work waiting on you and they never sit in your queue. Everything after that is identical: the money goes back the same way, on the same clock.

Physical products

Identical. A refunded paperback refunds the money on the same clock as a refunded ebook; getting the paperback back is a conversation between you and the buyer, and it is not something the refund waits for. If that worries you, the place to deal with it is the seller note on the product, before anyone pays — see Processing physical product orders.

Reducing them

Nearly every refund request we see is one of two things: a reader who expected a different format, or a reader who could not open what they got. The first is answered by naming the format everywhere, which the checkout now does for you. The second is Troubleshooting.