danclassfit

[steep wedge]

Not as an automatic part of the refund process as far as I know but you can do things like debit their account or withold future funds from them to make up that difference. How are your refunds initiated here? Are the express accounts initiating them from their Stripe Express Dashboard? Or is your code making an API request for them to be able to do this?

[late basin]

Mostly automated. In our instance we're offering a booking platform. If the end user drops out of a class which they've already paid for, and it meets the user's refund policy we automate a refund.

Great for the business and user, but we get hit with the fees.

Originally we looked into auth and capture to avoid this but feel it might be difficult to explain to our business customers why they can't see money from a booking until later

Looking for other options that avoid us paying for these refunds. Around 1% of our revenue, so not huge, but trying to figure out where we can add a few % and thought there might be something around refunds?

[steep wedge]

Gotcha. So if your code is initiating the refund I think that will make it easier, though I'm not immediately coming up with ideas.
If your platform account and express accounts are in the same region, you can debit the accounts before initiating the refund, which will take funds from their balance, if available, and then attempt to charge their bank account on file if not. https://stripe.com/docs/connect/account-debits

And to explain my other request in more detail, something else that I have seen is that the platform will take the hit on the refund at first but note "This account owes me $5" and then add additional application fees to future payments on the connected account until they get the $5 back

[late basin]

OK very helpful - thanks for that