Cancellation and refund SMS: confirming that an order was cancelled or the money returned

The short answer: when an order is cancelled or money is refunded, the customer wants to know three things: that it is done, how much is coming back and how, and when, under your company's rules. A short SMS, sent the moment your system records the cancellation or refund, saves a lot of calls from worried customers.

The messages, one by one

Moment	Example
Cancellation confirmed	Order no. 8812 has been cancelled as requested. You will not be charged.
Cancelled, out of stock	Sorry: order no. 8812 was cancelled because the item is out of stock. Your money will be refunded.
Refund started	We have refunded 1,500 USD for order no. 8812 to your original payment method. Allow up to 5 working days.
Refund completed	Your refund of 1,500 USD for order no. 8812 is complete. Thank you for your patience.

The time in the example is only an example. Write the time your company really takes for each payment method. A deadline promised by SMS and then missed earns you a complaint.

When you are the one cancelling

If your company cancelled (out of stock, address outside the delivery area, payment declined), say why in one sentence and what the customer can do: pick another product, order again, call your team. Remember they cannot reply to the SMS: include a phone number, an e-mail address or your website.

Do not leave old messages behind

A cancellation often leaves texts still waiting: the delivery reminder, the collection notice. If your system scheduled them through the API with send_at, cancel them with POST /v1/sms/messages/{id}/cancel while they are still scheduled. If the credits had already been taken, they go back to the balance, and the answer says how many in credits_returned. A message that has gone out, or is going out, cannot be cancelled: the API answers 409 with not_cancellable.

1	Your system records the cancellation of the order.

2	It looks up the scheduled texts for that order (which is why you keep each one's id) and cancels them.

3	It sends the cancellation SMS, with its own Idempotency-Key, such as order-8812-cancelled.

4	Later, when the refund is complete, it sends the last message.

Sent the cancellation to the wrong person, or with the wrong amount? A sent SMS cannot be deleted, but it can be corrected well: see what to do after an SMS with a mistake.

Want cancellations and refunds to tell the customer on their own? See Transactional SMS.

See Transactional SMS

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