Epic Games to add ‘undo purchase’ button for Fortnite Item Shop refunds, with a catch
With the Fortnite Battle Royale Item Shop receiving heavy scrutiny and backlash from many players, Epic Games are taking steps to try and make everyone happy.
The major controversy currently facing Fortnite’s Item Shop is that there is no feature that asks players to confirm their purchases prior to the sale of a cosmetic item going through.
The way the shop works now, and has always worked, is once a player is on any cosmetic item’s page, one press of the ‘Purchase’ button immediately initiates the sale.
This has become a problem for many players, primarily those on console, as any accidentally press of the designated button will cause an item to be purchased with no way to cancel the transaction.
There is currently a way to refund items in Fortnite, but the process requires the player to use up one of their three lifetime refund tokens, assuming they have any left on their account.
The current self-refund system in Fortnite can only be used three times on a single account.Fortunately, Epic Games are looking to help fix this issue by adding a “undo purchase” button in the Item Shop, which will allow players to cancel their previous transaction.
The new feature will have a catch however, as players will only have up to five minutes to use on their previous purchase, and cannot use it after they’ve already loaded into a match since making the purchase.
Here is the full announcement message for this new button, courtesy of a developer’s post on Reddit:
We neither want to add friction for players nor do we want to benefit from accidental purchases or players regretting a purchase.
Our initial solution for this was to add a refund token system.
As an ongoing iteration, we are going to introduce an “undo” button to the store page that allows you to easily refund without using up a token within a 5 minute time window, assuming you haven’t started a match since purchase.
The reactions to the announcement of this new feature have been mixed, with Reddit users commenting their arguments for why they are for or against an ‘undo purchase’ button.
Some believe that all of this can be avoided if Epic simply added a confirmation page after the ‘purchase’ button was clicked on a cosmetic item’s page.
Others claim that this new feature would not only essentially serve as a confirmation step, but also as a safety net since players can still “accidentally” confirm the same way they incidentally clicked to make the purchase in the first place.
On this screen, there is no extra confirmation step for purchasing an item after the ‘Purchase’ button has been clicked.As of now, Epic are yet to announce when this new feature will go live in Fortnite, although it could be as early as the v8.10 update, which is set to go live on March 12.
It’s important to also note that the addition of this new button will not affect the self refund system that’s currently in place, which will continue to function as normal.