An NFT purchase can fail due to other buyers purchasing the same NFT. This is also known as a [execution reverted].
When this happens, the wallet attempting to buy the NFT automatically receives a refund for the ETH, since it was not used for the NFT purchase.
You can check your refund by reviewing the transaction on Etherscan.
Etherscan is the best way to check your refund for your transaction. This is because the refund is an internal transfer, which is not tracked by a wallet’s activity feed.
Here is an example of a wallet that received a refund:
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This wallet intended to buy multiple NFTs for a total transaction cost of 0.044 ETH.
One purchase of 0.014 ETH failed. The last line is in this Etherscan transaction shows our “Universal: Old Universal Router” smart contract refunding the person 0.014 back to their wallet. -
Note that the “Transaction Fee” is 0.011 ETH. This is the amount paid to Ethereum validators for validating the transaction on the blockchain.
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Select “State” to view the balance of the attempted buyers wallet before and after the NFT purchase failed.
The attempted buyers wallet spent 0.030 ETH.
This is the cost of the NFTs they received (0.019 ETH) plus the network fee (0.11 ETH). This means that did not spend ETH on the NFTs they didn’t receive.
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