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Cancel or refund

Return the funds to the shopper when you are not sure whether the payment has been captured.

If you want to return the funds to your shopper, but are not certain whether the payment has been captured or not, use the Cancel or Refund functionality. 

This will either: 

  • Cancel the payment – in case it has not yet been captured. 
  • Refund the payment – in case it has already been captured.

If you have an Adyen for Platforms integration, note that the /cancelOrRefund endpoint does not accept split instructions. If you want to provide instructions on how to split the refund, we recommend that you:

  1. Check if the payment has been captured.
  2. If not captured yet, make a /payments/{paymentPspReference}/cancels call. If already captured, make a /payments/{paymentPspReference}/refunds call.

Do not use the /cancelOrRefund endpoint for payments that involve multiple partial captures.

Cancel or refund a payment

To issue a cancel or refund, make a request to the /cancelOrRefund endpoint. You need to specify: 

  • merchantAccount: The name of your merchant account that is used to process the payment.
  • originalReference: The original pspReference of the payment that you want to cancel or refund. This reference is returned in the response to your payment request, and in the AUTHORISATION webhook event.
  • reference:
    Optional
    Specifies a unique identifier for payment modification. The reference field is useful to tag a partial cancel or refund for future reconciliation.
{
    "merchantAccount" : "YourMerchantAccount",
    "originalReference" : "9313547924770610",
    "reference" : "YourModificationReference"
}

You will receive a /cancelOrRefund response containing: 

  • pspReference: The PSP reference associated with this /cancelOrRefund request.
{
    "pspReference" : "8863534564726784",
    "response" : "[cancelOrRefund-received]"
}

CANCEL OR REFUND webhook

To know whether your request to cancel or refund the payment was successful, you need to receive CANCEL_OR_REFUND webhooks.

If you have enabled CANCEL_OR_REFUND webhooks, we will send you a webhook event once  we have processed your request to cancel or refund the payment. This event contains:

  • eventCode: CANCEL_OR_REFUND.
  • originalReference: the PSP reference of the original payment.
  • pspReference: the pspReference from the reversal response.

  • success: indicates the outcome of the refund validations. Possible values:

    • true: Adyen's validations were successful and we sent the refund request to the card scheme. This usually means that the refund will be processed successfully. However, in rare cases the refund can be rejected by the card scheme, or reversed. For information about these exceptions, see REFUND_FAILED webhook, and REFUNDED_REVERSED webhook.

    • false: the refund validations failed. The webhook includes a reason field with a short description of the problem. Review the reason, fix the issue if possible, and resubmit the refund request.

{
   "live":"false",
   "notificationItems":[
      {
         "NotificationRequestItem":{
            "additionalData":{
               "modification.action": "refund"
            },
            "amount":{
               "currency": "EUR",
               "value": 1025
            },
            "eventCode":"CANCEL_OR_REFUND",
            "eventDate":"2022-02-03T15:14:15.004Z",
            "merchantAccountCode":"YOUR_MERCHANT_ACCOUNT",
            "originalReference":"VK9DRSLLRCQ2WN82",
            "paymentMethod":"mc",
            "pspReference":"TF995R5G6L2GWR82",
            "reason":"",
            "success":"true"
         }
      }
   ]
}

For more information about the included fields, see the CANCEL_OR_REFUND webhook reference.

See also