Refunds and chargebacks

Refund and chargeback processing works differently based on whether you work with Application fees or with Split payments.

Refunding a payment with application fees

When using Application fees, the connected merchant account is in full control of the payment, and any refunds and chargebacks are also processed on their account.

As a platform, you can create refunds on behalf of the connected account by using the Refunds API with the connected account’s permission. Refunding previously charged application fees is not possible, however.

For more fine-grained control over the refund and chargeback flows, consider using Split payments instead.

Refunding a split payment

When using Split payments, your Mollie account is the owner of the payment and you are therefor responsible for initiating refunds.

You can issue a refund for a split payment by creating a refund on the original payment, like you would with any other payment. By default, the full refund will be deducted from the platform balance. In other words, by default the parts of the payment that were sent to connected accounts will remain untouched.

If you wish to pull back the money that was sent to connected accounts, you can do so by ‘reversing the routes’ when issuing the refund request.

For a full reversal of the split that was specified during payment creation, simply set reverseRouting=true when creating the refund, so that a full compensation is created for every route of the original payment. This flag only works with full refunds, namely a refund of the same amount (or more) than the original payment. For partial refunds and for more fine grained control on how compensations are created see next paragraph.

In the example below we will refund the €10,00 payment from earlier, and pull back the €3,50 and the €4,00 that were sent to connected accounts org_23456 and org_56789.

curl -X POST https://api.mollie.com/v2/payments/tr_7UhSN1zuXS/refunds \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer test_dHar4XY7LxsDOtmnkVtjNVWXLSlXsM" \
    -d "amount[currency]=EUR" \
    -d "amount[value]=10.00" \
    -d "reverseRouting=true"

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Content-Type: application/hal+json; charset=utf-8

{
    "resource": "refund",
    "id": "re_gj08ZdgmVx",
    "amount": {
        "currency": "EUR",
        "value": "10.00"
    },
    "status": "pending",
    "paymentId": "tr_7UhSN1zuXS",
    "routingReversals": [
        {
            "amount": {
                 "value": "3.50",
                 "currency": "EUR"
            },
            "source": {
                 "organizationId": "org_23456"
            }

        },
        {
            "amount": {
                 "value": "4.50",
                 "currency": "EUR"
            },
            "source": {
                 "organizationId": "org_56789"
            }
        }
    ]
    "...": { }
}

Partial refund for a split payment

If you wish to pull back the money that was sent to connected accounts within the creation of a partial refund (namely a refund of less of the amount of the original payment), you can do so by setting the routingReversals array in the request (see create a refund). The to be refunded amount that remains after route reversal is deducted from the balance of your account.

In the example below we will partially refund the €10,00 payment from earlier, and pull back €2,00 and €3,00 from the funds that were sent to connected accounts org_23456 and org_56789. The remaining €1,00 will be deducted from your account.

curl -X POST https://api.mollie.com/v2/payments/tr_7UhSN1zuXS/refunds \
   -H "Authorization: Bearer test_dHar4XY7LxsDOtmnkVtjNVWXLSlXsM" \
   -d "amount[currency]=EUR" \
   -d "amount[value]=6.00" \
   -d "routingReversals[0][source][type]=organization" \
   -d "routingReversals[0][source][organizationId]=org_23456" \
   -d "routingReversals[0][amount][value]=2.00" \
   -d "routingReversals[0][amount][currency]=EUR" \
   -d "routingReversals[1][source][type]=organization" \
   -d "routingReversals[1][source][organizationId]=org_78901" \
   -d "routingReversals[1][amount][value]=3.00" \
   -d "routingReversals[1][amount][currency]=EUR"

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Content-Type: application/hal+json; charset=utf-8

{
    "resource": "refund",
    "id": "re_gj08ZdgmVx",
    "amount": {
        "currency": "EUR",
        "value": "6.00"
    },
    "status": "pending",
    "paymentId": "tr_7UhSN1zuXS",
    "routingReversals": [
        {
            "amount": {
                 "value": "2.00",
                 "currency": "EUR"
            },
            "source": {
                 "organizationId": "org_23456"
            }

        },
        {
            "amount": {
                 "value": "3.00",
                 "currency": "EUR"
            },
            "source": {
                 "organizationId": "org_56789"
            }
        }
    ]
    "...": { }
}

Chargebacks of Split Payments

Whenever one of your split payment gets charged back, your Mollie account will be charged the Mollie fees and the initial compensation to the consumer. Depending on the chargeback amount and on whether the payment was split across one or multiple submerchants, you might be eligible to receive a compensation for the amount that was routed to the other accounts.

Specifically, if the payment was split between you and only one other organization you will be automatically compensated for the amount that was routed to the submerchant, independently of the amount of the chargeback but limited to the originally routed amount.

If the payment was split across multiple submerchants, you will only receive compensations for each of the routes if the chargeback was for the full amount of the original payment (or higher). If we receive a chargeback for a lower amount than the original payment, we will detract the amount from your balance and you will not receive any compensation for it since we can’t know which route should be reversed.

In case you and your submerchant(s) decide to object to the chargeback and can provide enough evidence for it to be reversed, any amount that was compensated to your account from your submerchant’s balances will be returned back to them as soon as we receive the money from the bank.