Introducing tracking codes for refund operations
Every refund now ships with a tracking link your customer can open without signing up — and when they do sign up, the balance is already waiting.
Refunds are the moment a customer is most likely to disappear. They are owed money, they want it now, and any friction you put in front of them — a login, a verification email, a download — will make them write a review you do not want.
We built tracking codes to remove that friction entirely. Every refund issued through Indigo Escrow gets a short, copy-pasteable code and a public URL. The customer can paste the URL into a browser without an account and immediately see who issued the refund, how much it is for, what it is for, and when it was created. No login, no email loop.
The magic happens when they decide to claim it. Signing up with the email the refund was issued to automatically attaches the tracking code to the new account. The balance is already on their dashboard the first time they log in. We watched a customer go from 'where is my refund' to 'thanks' in fourteen seconds during user testing.
Under the hood, tracking codes are just rows in a small Postgres table with a public, read-only view exposed through a stable URL. The interesting design choice was to keep them unguessable but human-friendly — eight uppercase characters drawn from an alphabet that excludes O, 0, I, and 1. They are short enough to read over the phone and long enough that brute-forcing them is uninteresting.
If you operate any kind of refund or escrow flow, the lesson generalises. Make the happy path public, signed, and stateless. Save the account for the moment the customer actually wants one — which, it turns out, is the moment after they have their money.
