Refunds: what you decide, and what the law decides

Refunds are the part of selling online where venues most often assume a platform has taken a decision away from them. On Mosey, almost none of it has been.

This page is the line between the two: the refunds you decide, and the small set where the law decides and Mosey carries it out.

Mosey does not decide your refunds

The contract for a meal, a ticket or a voucher is between you and your customer. Mosey processes the payment on your behalf through Stripe and can carry out a refund mechanically, but it is not the counterparty and it does not adjudicate.

In practice that means a refund request from a customer reaches you, with the details, and you decide. There is no support team overruling you and no policy that refunds over your head on a judgement call.

The exception: a statutory right you cannot refuse

There is one exception, and it is worth understanding because it is not a Mosey policy; it is Irish and EU consumer law, and it would apply whether Mosey existed or not.

A consumer buying online has 14 days to withdraw from undated digital content. On Mosey that covers:

• Gift vouchers
• Promotion tickets
• A membership's first cycle

You cannot decline this the way you can decline a discretionary refund, because it is not a request. Mosey honours it directly rather than routing it through you, which is the honest implementation: routing a right the trader must honour through the trader's discretion leaves you one decline away from a breach.

Which purchases are exempt from the 14-day right?

Anything tied to a specific date is exempt under Article 16(l) of the Consumer Rights Directive, the same exemption that covers concert tickets and flights:

• Event tickets
• Reservations
• Gathering deposits
• Food trail tickets

Nobody can buy a ticket to your Saturday supper club and withdraw on the Friday under a statutory right. Your own cancellation terms apply instead, and you set them.

This matters in both directions. A venue that believes the 14-day rule applies to event tickets gives away money it did not owe; a venue that believes it applies to nothing refuses a voucher refund it was legally required to give.

Only facts, never judgements

Where Mosey does refund automatically, every condition is something that can be checked rather than weighed:

• inside the 14 days, and
• completely unused (no part redeemed), and
• no waiver was given on that purchase, and
• for a gift, the recipient has not been told yet

If any of those fails, it stops being automatic and becomes an ordinary refund request, which reaches you.

That last condition is worth dwelling on. Withdrawing a gift after the recipient has been told pulls a present out of somebody else's hands, and that is not a decision to make from a rule.

A membership's first cycle is refunded in full where no benefit was used, which is more generous than the law strictly requires, because working out what a fortnight of a supper club membership was worth is a judgement, and the automatic path does not make judgements. A part-used cycle comes to you.

Can buyers waive the 14-day right to withdraw?

On the products where the right applies, you can ask the buyer to waive it. Set your refund policy to immediate access and a tick box appears at checkout.

That is deliberately a per-business decision rather than a platform default. Mosey does not impose a waiver on everybody, and a venue that never touches the setting is compliant by default: the buyer keeps the right.

The waiver is recorded against the individual purchase, never read from your current setting. Changing your policy later cannot retroactively strip the right from somebody who was never shown a box. That is not an implementation detail; it is the difference between a lawful waiver and a paperwork exercise.

Dated leisure is never offered a waiver, because there is no right there to waive.

Writing a cancellation policy that holds

For everything the statutory right does not cover, your own terms are what applies, and they are only worth having if a customer saw them before paying.

Two things make a policy hold up. Be specific about the window: "48 hours" is enforceable in a way that "reasonable notice" is not, and it is the number a customer can actually plan around. And say what happens to the deposit, because that is the only part anybody is really asking about.

The other half is discretion, and it is worth keeping. A policy is a floor, not a ceiling: a regular who cancels a birthday because somebody is in hospital is a customer you refund regardless of what the terms say, and nothing on Mosey stops you. What the terms protect you from is the person who books four restaurants for the same Saturday and decides on the day.

What happens to commission when you refund?

• Your commission is unwound. You do not pay a fee on a sale that did not happen.
• The money returns from your Stripe account, where it went in the first place.
• A full refund undoes what the sale gave: the loyalty visit, a consumed voucher, a promotion ticket. A partial refund leaves those alone.
• A chargeback is yours, in your Stripe account, as it would be if you had taken the card directly.

Related guides on refunds and payouts

• Getting paid: where the money lives and how commission is taken
• Sell gift vouchers: where the right applies, and the waiver
• Sell event tickets: where it does not
• Run a venue membership: the first-cycle rule
• What Mosey costs: every rate on one page