Overpayments

Learn about how to avoid overpayments educate your customers with best practices for paying on-chain.

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Written by OpenNode Support
Updated over a week ago

What is an overpayment?

When you generate a checkout for a product or service with OpenNode, your customer may accidentally enter a larger than required amount of Bitcoin to complete the checkout, resulting in an overpayment.

Why do overpayments happen?

Overpayments can happen for a variety of reasons, from simply entering an incorrect amount to pay, to miscalculating on-chain fees.

Best practices & how to avoid overpayments

Encourage payers to use a proper Bitcoin/Lightning mobile wallet rather than paying from an exchange

Mobile wallets are purpose-built to manage network fee payments; exchanges are not. Because of this, it is best practice to instruct payers to use a Bitcoin/Lightning wallet application to complete payments by either scanning the QR code or copying/pasting the BTC address.
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Send the BTC amount, not the fiat equivalent amount.

OpenNode payments are priced in bitcoin, not fiat. Attempting to pay an OpenNode checkout with an amount priced in fiat currency, rather than an exact bitcoin amount, is one of the most common ways that payers end up overpaying.
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The reason for this is that wallets, exchanges, and OpenNode may use slightly different bitcoin prices from one another. The example below shows a demonstration of different prices with an exchange (in this case, Cash App):

The reason exchange-using-payers have higher rates of failure is that the payer often is required to manually input the amount being sent. This sometimes leads to discrepancies between the paid amount and the requested amount. Having the payer verify the amount being sent (including network fees) will increase the likelihood of a successful payment.

How to resolve overpayments

If OpenNode has an email on file, the payer will receive an email so that they can request a refund for the overpaid amount.
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πŸ‘‰ Learn more about overpayments for payers


Have Questions? Let us know!

In the case of any payment discrepancies, OpenNode will respond to merchant inquiries on a case-by-case basis. You can reach us at support@opennode.com or use the chatbot at the bottom right of any OpenNode page, 24/7.

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