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Returns with Authorize.net

Overview

Authorize.net is a popular solution for ecommerce transactions. It's used by a wide variety of businesses to process online payments from credit cards, e-checks, or sites like PayPal. While Authorize.net works for a wide variety of people in a wide variety of situations, it has a couple quirks. For this article, we'll talk about how it handles returns.

Returns with Authorize.net

When using Authorize.net, you are unable to process a capture and return on the same day. If you're not familiar with what all that means, we'll break it down for you here.

"Capture" refers to when money spent on a purchase is transferred from the customer to the seller or "merchant". For example, if someone buys a sweater for 20$ from your website, the process of that 20$ leaving the customer's account and entering yours is the capture. A return, meanwhile, is what you would expect: the process of returning funds in exchange for a purchased product.

Authorize.net cannot handle both of those transactions on the same business day. If the customer who purchased that sweater decided later that day that they didn't really want it, the return transaction would not be processed on that day.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us with a support request.