Refunds and order chat

When something goes wrong with an order, two things exist: a refund you issue on your own Stripe account, and a chat thread on the order itself so you can talk to the customer without either of you giving out a phone number.

Refunds

You issue a refund from the order in your admin, or from the Orders screen. It can be the full amount or part of it. Stripe processes it on your account, back to the card the customer paid with. Delitero does not decide, issue, or fund any refund.

The order only shows as refunded once Stripe's webhook confirms the money actually moved. Nothing in the product asserts a refund optimistically, because a refund that says it happened and did not is worse than a slow one.

Delitero's 5% on that order is not returned. The order was sold and the service was rendered. Stripe does not return its processing fee on the original charge either. This is stated the same way on Pricing, in the refund policy, and in the terms, so it cannot be a surprise.

Who on your team can refund

You set that. Staff can be given no refund authority at all, managers a ceiling (a percentage of the order, a dollar cap, or both), and an owner no limit. The limit is enforced on the server for every path that can issue a refund, so the rule holds whether the person is in the admin, on the Orders screen, or in a chat thread. A manager sees the headroom they have left before they act, rather than finding out by being refused.

Order chat

Chat is per order and off unless you switch it on. A customer can open a thread from their order status page; you answer from the Chats inbox in the admin. Nobody exchanges a phone number and nobody needs an account.

While a delivery is out, the driver carrying it can be in the thread too. A driver sees the conversation and any photo the customer sends, and never sees the order total, the tip, or any refund amount: the money side of the ticket is not projected to them at all. That is enforced on the server, not hidden in an interface.

Refunds from inside a chat

A thread is usually where a refund gets agreed, so you can offer one there: a flagged item, half, the full order, or an amount you type. The offer is a message the customer can accept, and accepting it issues the refund on your Stripe account like any other. The same role limits apply, and a staff member without refund authority does not see the button.

How long a thread lives

Chat is deliberately short-lived, because a support thread that lives forever is a liability rather than a feature. A thread you resolve is archived four hours later. A thread with no messages resolves itself after a day. Nothing survives longer than a week from when it opened. Archived threads are no longer readable in the product.

The exception is abuse. If anyone reports a thread, a copy of it, with its images, is preserved for 90 days, separately from the live thread, so a report can still be looked at after the thread itself is gone. Reporting is available to everyone in the thread, including a driver, and a driver can still report after the delivery is finished, because that is usually when someone realises they need to.