Refund API

PayHere Refund API lets you refund your existing payment programmatically.

Unlike other PayHere APIs, Refund API is a RESTful API where you can directly send a HTTP Request with POST JSON body to an API end point & process a payment. You will get the refund status from HTTP Response for the above request. This API is secured with OAuth authentication & therefore you need first generate a pair of App ID & App Secret from your PayHere account, derive an Authorization code from them & finally retrieve an Access Token from the Authorization code in order to consume the Refund API.

Please follow the below steps.

1. Create an API Key

1. Sign in to your PayHere account & go to Settings > API Keys section
2. Click 'Create API Key' button & enter an app name & comma seperated domains to whilelist
3. Tick the permission 'Automated Charging API'
4. Click 'Save API Key' button to create the app
5. Once the app is created click 'View Credentials' button in front of the created record
6. Copy the 'App ID' & 'App Secret' values

2. Generate an Authorization code

1. Go to a Base64 encoding site such as [https://www.base64encode.net/][2]
2. Paste the App ID & App Secret you copied from Step 1 above, separated by a colon (:) mark. eg. 4OVx33RVOPg4DzdZUzq4A94D2:8n4VCj25MXp4JLDFyvsE9h4a8qgbPaZUI4JEWK4FCvop
3. Click 'Encode' button & copy the base64 encoded value. This is your Authorization code.

3. Retrieve an Access Token

If you don't already have a valid Access Token, you can retrieve one by consuming following API end point.

Request URL

Sandbox - https://sandbox.payhere.lk/merchant/v1/oauth/token
Live    - https://www.payhere.lk/merchant/v1/oauth/token

Header

Authorization: Basic <Authorization_code>

eg. Authorization: Basic NE9WeDMzUlZPUGc0RHpkWlV6cTRBOTREMjo4bjRWQ2oyNU1YcDRKTERGeXZzRTloNGE4cWdiUGFaVUk0SkVXSzRGQ3ZvcA==

Body

grant_type: client_credentials

The response for the above request will looks like following.

Response

{
    "access_token": "cb5c47fd-741c-489a-b69e-fd73155ca34e",
    "token_type": "bearer",
    "expires_in": 599,
    "scope": "SANDBOX"
}

Retrieve the access_token from the above response.

4. Refund the payment

Consume the Refund API with a valid access_token to refund.

(Please note that in Live environment, this API can be consumed only from the allowed domains you white-listed when creating the Business App in Step 1. If you want to consume this from a Mobile App, write an intermediate API on your domain to initiate the refund request & integrate it with your Mobile App instead of integrating directly with the Refund API.)

Request URL

Sandbox - https://sandbox.payhere.lk/merchant/v1/payment/refund
Live    - https://www.payhere.lk/merchant/v1/payment/refund

Header

Authorization: Bearer <access_token>
Content-Type: application/json

eg. Authorization: Bearer cb5c47fd-741c-489a-b69e-fd73155ca34e

Body

{
  "payment_id" : "320027150501",
  "description" : "Item is out of stock",
  "authorization_token" : "74d7f304-7f9d-481d-b47f-6c9cad32d3d5"
}

If you need to refund a payment, set the payment_id field and remove authorization_token.

If you need to refund a payment authorization, set the authorization_token field and remove payment_id.

The response for the above request will look like following.

Response

If it is a payment refund,

{
    "status": 1,
    "msg": "Successfully processed the refund",
    "data": 560034010257
}

If it is a payment authorization refund,

{
    "status": 1,
    "msg": "Successfully processed the authorization refund",
    "data": null
}

You can retrieve the status_code (1, 0, -1) value from the response to check whether the refund has been failed or success.

Payment Status Codes

• 1 - success
• 0 - error initiating the refund
• -1 - refund failed. check msg for details

data contains the unique refund number for the payment.

Please note that;

• You need to follow Steps 1 & 2 only one time to generate an Authorization code for your app
• You need to follow Step 3 & retrieve a new Access Token only if your current Access Token is expired
• If you already have a valid Access Token, you can directly refund the payment using the same Access Token by following just the Step 4

5. Error Handling

Error messages may returned for above two API end points due to the following reasons. You need to identify them & handle them properly in your application.

Invalid Access Token

{
    "error": "invalid_token",
    "error_description": "Invalid access token: e291493a-99a5-4177-9c8b-e8cd18ee9f85"
}

Access Token Expired

{
    "error": "invalid_token",
    "error_description": "Access token expired: cb5c47fd-741c-489a-b69e-fd73155ca34e"
}

Invalid payment_id

{
    "status": -1,
    "msg": "Error processing refund",
    "data": null
}

Invalid API Authorization (eg. Consuming through a not allowed domain, ect.)

{
    "status": -2,
    "msg": "Authentication error",
    "data": null
}