Refunds

Learn how to process refunds.

You can refund a transaction easily with our APIs. To initiate a refund, send a request to the refund endpoint with the transaction ID in the URL. You can also specify the amount to be refunded in the body if you wish to make a partial refund.
The refund amount will be deducted from your available balance. Additionally, you can attach a note to the refund by specifying comments.

Node.js

// Install with: npm i flutterwave-node-v3

const Flutterwave = require('flutterwave-node-v3');
const flw = new Flutterwave(process.env.FLW_PUBLIC_KEY, process.env.FLW_SECRET_KEY);
const response = await flw.Transaction.refund({
    id: transactionId,
    amount: amountToRefund,
    comments: "Product out of stock.",
});

The above code will initiate the refund process, and you will get a similar response to the one below:

{
  "status": "success",
  "message": "Transaction refund initiated",
  "data": {
    "id": 75923,
    "account_id": 73362,
    "tx_id": 908790,
    "flw_ref": "URF_1577867664541_3572735",
    "wallet_id": 74639,
    "amount_refunded": 6900,
    "status": "completed",
    "destination": "payment_source",
    "meta": {
      "source": "availablebalance"
    },
    "created_at": "2021-01-24T09:18:37.366Z"
  }
}

Refunded transactions can have different statuses depending on the payment type. Here are other refund statuses.

Refund status	Explanation
complete	General status for completed refunds.
completed-bank-transfer	Status for completed bank transfer refunds.
completed-momo	Refund status for completed mobile money transactions.
completed-mpgs	Refund status for completed card transactions.
completed-offline	Status for refunds completed manually outside of the Flutterwave application, e.g., Point-of-Sale or cash transactions.
completed-preauth	A subset of completed-mpgs. This is the refund status of preauth card transactions.
pending-momo	Status for pending mobile money refunds.
processing	Status for refunds that are currently being treated. This is a transient state between initiated and completed refunds.