Accepting KakaoPay as a merchant

Inbound wallet transactions carry currency conversion and cross-border assessments alongside the acceptance fee. Whether your customer is billed in your currency or theirs decides the rate applied and who earns the spread. That is a commercial decision usually made once at integration and never revisited.

Everything above is about money coming in. Money going back out behaves differently on an inbound wallet, and that is where this category quietly costs more than its fee suggests.

A refund on a cross-border wallet transaction converts a second time. The customer paid an amount in their own currency that was converted into yours; the refund converts back at whatever rate applies when it is issued, which is rarely the rate that applied when they bought. On a small order nobody notices. On a larger one, or in a week when rates moved, the customer receives visibly less than they paid, has done nothing wrong, and contacts you about it.

Three questions for your provider, and they are not the obvious ones. Is a refund executed at the original transaction rate or at the rate of the day. What happens on a partial refund, since the split is not always proportional. And how long does a refund take to reach the wallet, because on inbound methods that is frequently longer than on a card and your service promise probably does not know it.