Refund Policy

The short version

Who issues the refund

For an ordinary refund, the organizer does, through their own Stripe account. If you want a refund, the organizer of the event is who to ask. A cancelled event and an event moved more than 6 months later are the exceptions, covered under if the event is cancelled and if the event is moved.

Where the money goes back to

To the original payment method. There is no store-credit or alternate-refund path in Encore’s checkout.

What happens to the service fee

Service fee is non-refundable, except if the event is cancelled or postponed more than 6 months. If your ticket is refunded for any other reason, you get the ticket price back and the service fee you paid on top of it is not returned. That holds whether the whole order is refunded or only part of it. The fee covers running the Platform and the card processing cost on the sale, and we keep it when an organizer refunds a ticket. A law that requires the fee back where you live also overrides this.

The service fee is the line you see at checkout before you pay. The organizer chooses the amount they refund, so an organizer who wants you to be whole can refund the full amount you paid. That is their decision and their money: we still return nothing, and the extra comes out of the organizer’s own balance rather than ours. Ask the organizer, not us, if that is what you are after.

If the event is cancelled

If an event is cancelled, every order for it is refunded in full to the card it was paid with, and that refund includes our service fee, unless the event was cancelled because of a natural disaster, civil disturbance or another impediment nobody could foresee. In that case the ticket price is refunded and the service fee is not. An organizer asks us to cancel an event and we review the request, usually within 3 to 5 business days. Sales are paused while it is open. A ticket the organizer had already refunded on its own before we approved the cancellation was an ordinary refund, so the service fee on it is not returned. Where the law of the place an event is held limits what a ticket seller may keep when an event is cancelled, we follow that limit.

You do not need to ask; the refund starts once we approve the cancellation. Stripe does not return its card processing cost on a refund. When the service fee is part of the refund, we pay that cost, not you and not the organizer.

We start the refund from the organizer’s Stripe account. How fast it shows on your card statement is up to your card issuer, and is often 5 to 10 business days. If you do not see it after that, write to us.

If the event is moved

If an event’s start is moved more than 6 months later than it was when you bought your ticket, you can ask for the service fee back from your ticket page, within 90 days of the change. If an event is cancelled and the service fee on a ticket was not part of the refund, the same request is open for 90 days after the cancellation, except where the cause was outside the organizer’s control as above. We review each request, and an approved one goes back to the card you paid with.

If the date moves by 6 months or less, your ticket works on the new date and the service fee is not refunded. Whether you can get the ticket price back is up to the organizer’s refund policy and the law where you live.

Tickets someone sent you

An organizer cannot refund a transferred ticket from the Orders screen, except when the event is cancelled. A refund made directly in Stripe still cancels the holder’s ticket. A refund always goes back to the card that paid, so refunding a transferred ticket would pay the person who sent it and cancel the ticket of the person who holds it. If the event is cancelled, the refund goes to the card of the person who paid. If the person who paid disputes the charge with their bank, the ticket can be cancelled even after it was transferred.

What we do not guarantee

Outside a cancelled event, an event postponed by more than 6 months and the oversell case below, we do not promise a refund. Whether you are entitled to money back is a matter between you and the organizer, governed by their own refund policy where they publish one, or by the consumer-protection law that applies to you. We have not adopted any further refund rule of our own.

Any jurisdiction-specific refund disclosure required at the point of sale is unsettled: Unresolved placeholder: [[JURISDICTION-SPECIFIC REFUND DISCLOSURE]].

The oversell refund we start ourselves

If our systems oversell a ticket type, meaning they sell past capacity because of a race or a fault, we refund the affected line automatically and do not issue the ticket. That refund includes the fee you paid on those tickets. An oversold ticket is never delivered, so no fee was earned on it. It is a correction of our own error.

If you are an organizer

• You decide refunds, and you are solely responsible for every refund owed on your events. You pay them from your own Stripe balance, and you set the refund policy your buyers are held to. Keep enough money in your Stripe account. If a refund takes your balance below zero, Stripe may take the difference from your bank.
• Card processing is not charged to the buyer as a separate amount, and it does not come out of your ticket price. We pay it out of our own fee, so you receive the ticket price you set. A chargeback is still filed against your account.
• Cancelling an event is a request we review, usually in 3 to 5 business days. Sales pause while it is open. If we approve it, every buyer is refunded from your Stripe balance. When the service fee goes back to buyers too, we send you back our fee and Stripe’s card cost, so you are out the ticket price only. If the cause was outside your control, buyers get the ticket price and the service fee is kept.
• Our service fee isn’t refunded on individual refunds. Refund the ticket price, not the total the buyer paid. Your Stripe account is debited for exactly the amount you refund, and you received the ticket price, so refunding the ticket price leaves you level. Refunding the full amount the buyer paid means you are covering our fee for them out of your own balance. Stripe’s dashboard offers the full charge by default, so this is a number to change rather than accept.
• If you move an event more than 6 months later than the date buyers bought for, they can ask us for the service fee back. That cost is ours, not yours.

The contractual version of this page is section 4 of the Terms.