Refund an Order Yourself

Refunds are something you handle yourself inside BrightStar — you don't file a request and wait for someone else to act on it. You open the order, choose full or partial, and confirm; the money returns to the card that paid. This matters most in the moments that actually happen at gatherings: someone can't make the retreat after all and asks for their deposit back, a kirtan door volunteer flags a duplicate purchase, or a festival gate discovers a ticket was bought twice by mistake. In all of these, the fix lives in the same place — the order itself — and the same action is reachable from two different starting points in your dashboard, so you can begin from the event or from the person, whichever you already have open.

A full refund on BrightStar returns the refundable portion of the order — the ticket subtotal plus any custom fee you charged, less discounts already applied and anything you've already refunded on that order. The BrightStar platform fee and the payment processing fee are not part of that figure, because the processor that took the payment doesn't return its own fee when a charge is reversed. That's why a full refund is often a smaller number than the total the buyer originally paid, and it's worth accounting for if you expect a meaningful refund rate on a given event.

Partial refunds work against that same refundable total, and they accumulate. BrightStar keeps a running record of what's already gone back on an order, so a second or third partial refund can never exceed what's left to give. Once an order has genuinely been refunded in full, it's blocked from further refunds — there's nothing left to take back. An order that's only been partially refunded stays open, so you can return to it later if, say, one ticket on a multi-ticket order was refunded first and another follows.

Your payout is reconciled at the same moment you issue the refund, not later. If the order's money hasn't reached your Stripe account yet, BrightStar simply reduces the amount still pending transfer by the refunded share — nothing is clawed back after the fact, because it was never sent. If the money has already been transferred, a matching share of that transfer is reversed instead: a full refund reverses the whole transfer for that order, and a partial reverses in proportion to what was actually refundable, not to the full amount the buyer paid.

Occasionally a reversal can't be completed. When that happens, the buyer still gets their refund — that part never depends on your payout status — and the shortfall is recorded against your payout with a reason attached, rather than being silently absorbed or silently charged back to you later without explanation.

Refunding an order is not only a money movement. The refunded tickets themselves are marked refunded, so anyone checking the guest list or scanning at the door sees accurate status rather than a ticket that looks valid but has actually been returned. If the event uses assigned seating, the seats on that order are released back to the seating chart automatically, so they become sellable again without you having to go in and manually reopen them. If people are on the waitlist for that event, a spot-opened notification can go out to let them know a place has become available. If an affiliate earned a commission on the order, a commission refund email goes out too, so they aren't left thinking they're owed a balance that no longer exists once the sale behind it has been reversed. The buyer's refund confirmation and your own notification are both transactional messages, which is why they go out regardless of anyone's marketing email preferences — they're a record of what happened to money, not a promotion.