Refund Processing System

A refund request usually shows up at an inconvenient moment — a kirtan singer cancels the night before, a retreat has to shift its dates, or one attendee simply can't make it and asks for their money back. BrightStar can handle these situations either manually, one order at a time, or automatically according to a policy you set ahead of time, so you're not stuck choosing between ignoring every request and personally approving every single one. This article walks through both paths: how a refund actually moves through the Orders screen, what happens to the fees on each side of the transaction, and what an automated policy takes care of on its own.

BrightStar gives you three ways to make something right for a ticket holder, and each behaves differently underneath. A full refund returns the entire ticket price to the customer; BrightStar's own fee on that order is credited back to your account, though Stripe's processing fee is not, since that follows Stripe's policy rather than BrightStar's. A partial refund returns a specified amount instead of the whole price, with the fees adjusted proportionally to match — this is the option built for service credits or goodwill gestures, where something went wrong but not badly enough to unwind the entire transaction, and the customer is still going to attend. A credit is different again: instead of sending cash back, it places a balance on the customer's account. That's the option meant for an event reschedule or for a buyer who plans to attend something else you're running, since the value of their original ticket carries forward rather than disappearing into a bank transfer and having to be repurchased from scratch.

Not every refund needs a human to click a button. If you change an event's status to Cancelled, BrightStar automatically issues a full refund to every ticket holder and sends each one an email that includes the reason for the cancellation — useful when a venue falls through or a facilitator can't travel and you need every attendee refunded at once instead of working through orders one by one. You can also configure a refund window policy under Settings → Refund Policy, stating something like "full refund until 7 days before the event." Requests that come in inside that window are approved automatically, so you're not reviewing every request that already matches a policy you've already decided on. There's a separate, optional rule for no-shows too: if an event has ended and a ticket was never scanned at the door, you can turn on an automatic refund for that ticket rather than requiring the attendee to ask for one and wait on your reply.

Even a full refund isn't free to process. Take a $100 ticket that, once BrightStar's fee and Stripe's processing fee are added, comes to a $103.19 charge — made up of a $2.74 BrightStar fee and a $3.19 Stripe fee. When you issue a full refund on that order, the customer gets the entire $103.19 back, and BrightStar credits its $2.74 fee back to your account, since that fee never really left the platform in the first place. Stripe's $3.19, though, stays with Stripe. That's not a BrightStar decision — Stripe simply doesn't return its processing fee on refunds — so the net cost of that particular refund to you, the organizer, works out to $3.19, even though the customer is made completely whole.