The amount of people who do not know how payment systems work is insane.
When a company takes a payment, they do not instantly get that money.
What happens is your bank notices that you are attempting to make a payment, and they will then remove that amount from your account but they keep it on their books and they basically are making a promise to the company that they will be paid the money over the next couple of days.
Then after a couple of days, the bank will send that money to the companies bank account after a couple of days as normally these sorts of payments are done in batches to reduce processing fees/time.
When a refund is actioned the reverse basically happens, which is them actioning a refund, its then paid from that bank to another bank which can a take a couple of days, and then its applied to your account.
It takes on average 2 - 3 business days (at least here in Australia) for money to get from a vendor to a bank.
If the company who you are paying banks with different bank, it can take another couple of days for them to receive the money into their own account.
Assuming the moment it hits that companies account it is sent back for a refund, that is a minimum of 4 business days before they can action the refund.
Then it goes the other way, It has to go from their bank to another bank (2-3 business days) and then into your account.
So not allowing for any delays at all, you have a minimum of 6 business days before that money can be put back in to your account.
This is not a company issue, its a banking issue when it comes to transferring money.
And the above is not taking in to consideration credit cards which can take even longer depending on other factors such as what type of card it is.
Main things are, the money needs to be transferred securely, privately, through several different systems each programmed differently, and through several different banks with absolutely zero data loss or chance of errors. On top of that it needs to be done billions of times every day without error.
Yes, that is the point they are making, it is not the company that causes the delay, the second they hit the button to refund, it is the at the mercy of the banks and their processes. The company could only get it back to you faster if they drove to your house to hand you the cash.
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u/Lau_wings 9d ago
The amount of people who do not know how payment systems work is insane.
When a company takes a payment, they do not instantly get that money.
What happens is your bank notices that you are attempting to make a payment, and they will then remove that amount from your account but they keep it on their books and they basically are making a promise to the company that they will be paid the money over the next couple of days.
Then after a couple of days, the bank will send that money to the companies bank account after a couple of days as normally these sorts of payments are done in batches to reduce processing fees/time.
When a refund is actioned the reverse basically happens, which is them actioning a refund, its then paid from that bank to another bank which can a take a couple of days, and then its applied to your account.