Refund your customers directly without having to go through PayFast Customer Services. Currently the Merchant Refund feature is available for our two most popular payment methods, credit & cheque cards and Instant EFTs. In the future, we will extend the Merchant Refund feature to our other supported payment methods.
Log in to your account or register for one if you’re new to PayFast.
From the Transactions drop-down menu select ‘History’.
Locate the purchase transaction to be refunded and select the refund icon in the far right column.
On the refund transaction screen, select if the refund type is a full or partial refund of the original transaction amount.
Enter the amount of the refund and the reason for the refund.
The buyer will receive a refund confirmation email.
Please note the following:
- Refunds are not allowed on debit cards. If attempted you will receive the bank response code 62.
- Credit and cheque card refunds can take up to 7 and 10 business days, and Instant EFT refunds between 2 and 3 business days, to reflect in your customer’s account due to risk checks that are performed by banks.
- If you receive an error when processing a refund for an international credit card, you should organise to refund using an alternative method like store credit. For more information on this visit this page.
- The refund will come directly out of your PayFast wallet, so refunds can only be processed if you have sufficient funds available.
- From 1 October 2026 each refund will have a processing fee of R2 (excluding VAT).
- Some refunds might reflect as a debit on the account holder’s bank statement. For more information on this visit this page.
- A refund is final and non-reversible.
- If there is a pending payout on the buyer account it will block the processing of a new refund. If assistance is required to cancel a pending payout, please contact support.
For refunds on all other payment methods, please continue to email merchantsupport@payfast.co.za the relevant payment details.
If you are a buyer and would like to request a refund on a payment you have made, read more here.