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Metrics type: Supporting Metrics • Category: Payment Gateway

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At a glance

Daily series of refund value issued through Viva Payments. Surfaces refund pattern shape (post-sale spikes, end-of-month batches, “free returns” promo aftermath) that the period summary hides.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Viva Payments data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A pan-EU fashion DTC brand on Smart Checkout, 30-day free returns, generous post-sale window. 90-day window 02 Feb 26 to 02 May 26.
What the merchant should notice:
  1. Refunds lag sales by ~ 14, 21 days. A spike in mid-March refunds maps to a sale 14, 21 days earlier (typical “tried it, didn’t fit, returning at the end of the policy window”). Fashion’s standard return-window pattern.
  2. Mondays are the highest refund day. Customer service teams process the weekend’s return-request backlog on Monday. POS in-store returns over the weekend also get keyed on Monday. This is operational, not behavioural.
  3. Sale-end + 14d / 21d / 30d are predictable spikes. Map sale dates → expected refund spike dates. If your refund spike is bigger than expected, the sale’s product-quality or sizing was off.
  4. Multi-currency, separate lines. GBP refund line shows separately from EUR line; don’t conflate.
  5. Sentiment alert at 2σ catches single-day outliers. A normal Monday is EUR 800; an anomaly day at EUR 4,000 will alert. Useful for catching customer-service outages where 100 returns process in one batch.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in the Viva Payments Dashboard: viva.com/business/account/login. Closest comparable view:
Viva Business → Sales → Refunds (date filter, set granularity to “Daily”)
The Sales → Reports → Net Sales view also shows daily refunds as a deduction overlay. Why our number may legitimately differ from the Viva Dashboard: Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

A spike day, what likely caused it? Three usual causes: (1) post-sale return-window expiry (sale 14, 30 days ago), (2) customer service batch processing accumulated requests, (3) a single very-large B2B refund (e.g. cancelled wholesale order). Why is Monday always higher? Operational, weekend return requests get keyed Monday morning. How do I match a refund spike to its sale? Look at the sale calendar 14, 30 days before the spike. Apparel returns peak at 14 days; electronics 21, 30; large-format goods 7, 14. My refund trend is rising while sales are flat, what’s happening? Rising refund-rate trend without a refund-volume increase usually means baseline customer behaviour shifted. Check (a) recent product launches with quality issues, (b) sizing-feedback patterns, (c) competitor offering free returns (you’re matching, returns rise). Multi-currency, single chart? Per-currency lines stacked. Don’t read total off one line. Smart POS in-store returns appear here? Yes. POS card-present refunds fire a refund transaction to Viva and contribute to this trend. JP Morgan ownership change anything? No.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Refunds Over Time is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Viva Payments and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.