How to deal with refund where buyer has invalid payment method and refund doesn't go through?

Selling on Amazon FBM
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We occasionally run across this issue on Amazon.

Buyer returns order. We refund order. It immediately shows as pending on the order page. Within 12 hours or so, the pending message is no longer there but the refund wasn’t done. From what I understand, this normally happens when the buyer has an incorrect or old payment method on their account and thus can’t receive the refund unless they update that.

My issue is we’ve gotten claims on these in the past where I’ve represented that the refund was indeed processed several times but didn’t go through because of no fault of our own. Thus, it should not count on our ODR. However, they’ve always been denied and our ODR took a hit.

Maybe open a case documenting this for this particular order number so there is documentation that the refund was correctly attempted by us?

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I’m pretty sure I remember reading on the NSFE a while ago that it was suggested to try to do the refund via an Adjustment file upload. They had said that they had success with the refund going through that way a few times, and if it didn’t work, they had the upload history to point to as proof that they tried. I haven’t had to deal with this issue myself to be able to say if this actually works or not but wanted to share a possible solution.

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I don’t have this issue, but I process nearly all my refunds through my inventory management program so it all goes through feeds. Maybe that’s why.

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Thanks, I will try this now!

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Melissa, question, do I have to put the sales tax amounts in the associated tables, too? Or does Amazon auto refund that on the templates based off the item price and item shipping adjustment I put (as Amazon auto refunds those when you refund from the order details or refund page)?

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Amazon should handle the tax.

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Great question, and I am not sure since it has been a few years since I have done a refund via the adjustment file. I would leave the tax field blank, do the upload, check the order details page to see if it shows the tax refunded as well, and if it doesn’t, you can do a separate upload to just refund the tax.

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I think it worked…YOU RULE.

Thank you a million, this is one of the reasons I love this site!

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Great to hear! Love when some of the random info in my head is actually helpful to someone lol

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