Refunds: a practical playbook.

Put a single short paragraph in your event description that covers: (a) under what conditions you’ll refund, (b) the cutoff date, and (c) anything that doesn’t come back. For example, if you pass the Jamrats fee on to buyers, that line isn’t part of a refund. Buyers who see this rarely go to their bank. They just email you.

A refund returns what the buyer actually paid for the tickets, after any coupon. The $0.99 Jamrats fee on those tickets is not refunded, however soon you issue the refund. If you absorb the fee, a refunded ticket costs you its fee. If you pass it to buyers, they get back the ticket price but not the fee line.

That makes the fee a small, known cost to plan around. If there’s a real chance you’ll have to cancel (an outdoor show in a wet month, an unconfirmed headliner), count the fee on every ticket sold as money you won’t see again, and decide your cancellation point before you go on sale. Then answer refund requests promptly anyway: the speed won’t change the fee, but it does keep buyers from filing a bank dispute.

If a buyer purchased six tickets and two can’t make it, refund those two tickets. Don’t refund the whole order. You can refund individual tickets on an order, and the rest stay valid and scannable. Refunds are always for whole tickets (you can’t enter a custom amount), a ticket that’s already been scanned can’t be refunded, and an order with an open bank dispute can’t be refunded while the dispute runs.

Cancel the event from your dashboard. Before you confirm, it shows how many paid orders will be refunded and the total. Cancelling stops ticket sales straight away and refunds every paid order in the same action, out of your connected Stripe account, even if the event was marked non-refundable. Each buyer gets back what they paid for their tickets. The Jamrats fee isn’t refunded, so if you passed it on, that line stays with the charge. Buyers whose refund goes through get an email telling them what happened.

The event’s payouts are held until the refunds clear, so the money to fund refunds stays in your account instead of going out to your bank. If any refund doesn’t go through, the dashboard tells you which orders failed, and the event’s payouts stay on hold while any are outstanding. Contact those buyers yourself, the same day, in your own words. Don’t leave anyone to discover a cancellation on social media, or a missing refund by checking their bank.

If a refund fails, you have 14 days from the cancellation to get the buyer their money. Jamrats doesn’t refund on your behalf, before or after that deadline. Any refund you don’t make stays your debt to the buyer, and they can dispute the charge with their bank.

A bank dispute (also called a chargeback) is when a buyer asks their card issuer to reverse the payment. It appears in your dashboard with a place to submit evidence and a deadline, which is short, so don’t sit on it. Submit the receipt, your messages with the buyer, the scan record if they showed up, and the refund policy from the event page. The card issuer’s decision is final, so make the evidence airtight the first time.

Buyer no-shows.No automatic refund. They bought the ticket. If you’d prefer to refund as goodwill, do it after the event from the order page.

Events outside your control.Weather cancellations, public-health orders, venue closures: if you cancel the event, every paid order is refunded. If you postpone instead, follow the policy you posted. If you didn’t post one, a full refund for anyone who can’t make the new date is the fair default and the one least likely to end in a bank dispute.

Complaints about the event itself.Sound was bad? Headliner cancelled? That’s an event-quality issue, not a payment issue. Engage with the buyer; most accept a refund on some of their tickets or a discount code for your next event.