CU Ecommerce Refunds – making your customer happier and everyone safer

One clear indication that we are bouncing back from the unprecedented times of 2020-21 is that CU Ecommerce is as busy as ever. Units across campus are organizing new events – everyone from Learning in Retirement to Ravens to conferences of all kinds. Some of these are even in person – imagine! (And of course, these are made as safe as possible thanks to Carleton’s rigorous health and safety protocols.)

Of course, things change and sometimes events are cancelled or individuals are compelled to cancel their attendance. In the event you wish to issue one of your customers with a refund, you can use this form in order to request this.

The crucial items of information are the cardholder’s name, the reference number of their purchase, and of course, how much of a refund you wish to issue. We made this latter part easy by giving you the option to select Full refund or to enter an amount of your choosing for a partial refund.

Occasionally, a whole event is cancelled and the number of refunds is sizeable. ITS is limited in the number of resources it can dedicate to this task so please bear in mind it can take a while for refunds to be requested by us, and even longer for the credit card company to then act on our request. If you have a set of refunds that exceeds fifteen or so customers you can create a spreadsheet of the customer details with all the information for each that is requested on the form:

• Credit Card Holder’s Name
• Reference number of purchase (This is the 16 to 18 character, alpha-numeric reference number which appears on all your customer’s receipts as  Ref.)
• Date of purchase (DD/MM/YYYY)
• Amount of Refund (in C$ including taxes if any were included)

This can be sent to the ITS Service Desk via the ITS Help portal. In the request you make you should include the name of the event/ecommerce project and the name of the department.

Now is also a great time to revisit your cancellation/refund policy. (For some of you now would be a great time to create your first-ever cancellation/policy.) Need to see an example of a well designed and written refund policy? You can take a look at the Department of University Advancement’s refund policy for inspiration. Remember that as well as the other reasons for offering refunds, nowadays people want the reassurance that if they exhibit any signs or feel any symptoms of COVID-19 they can cancel with confidence.

As we say, it’s great that so many events are being brought back this year such as in-person Ravens games (purchase your tickets here!), while some great Carleton offerings never went away – they just went online, like Learning in Retirement. We are looking forward to helping more and more events either go back to in-person or transition temporarily online!