Refunding Orders
Learning Objective
After reading this guide you should have a better understanding of:
How to refund an order in full
How to refund a part of an order
Contents
Video
Written Guide
Overview
This guide will cover how to refund full and partial orders. It is dependent on your payment gateway as to if you can send funds back to your customer through the admin. If your payment gateway does not allow this, then you will need to go to the software for your payment gateway and send funds back to your customer here.
You should mark your orders as refunded in the admin to confirm to your customer that they have been refunded. This will also ensure reports you run in the admin are accurate.
Refunding full orders
In the Order Status drop-down options, choose Order Refunded. You will then see a pop-up giving you the option to add this item back to the stock levels for this product so that it can be resold.
Click OK to put the item back onto the stock levels or Cancel if you don't want to put the stock back on the site.
You will then see a new drop-down menu option next to the Status field:
Use this drop-down menu to select the reason for the return should you know it.
If your payment gateway does not allow you to refund through the admin, your next steps will be to click on Update Order & Email Customer at the bottom of the screen to end the process and send the Order Refunded email to your customer.
Refunding through your admin
If your payment gateway allows you to refund through the admin, your next steps will be to go to the Transactions tab and select the checkbox next to New Refund Transaction.
Choose the relevant payment gateway option from the drop-down options and then click on the red Start Refund Process. A pop-up will then open where you can choose which elements to refund from the order or edit the amount at the bottom to refund.
You can choose if you want to refund the cost of shipping and check that the amount that you will send back to your customer is the correct value. When you have checked this, click the red Continue with Refund.
You will now see a confirmation screen:
Click Perform Refund Now to give the money back to the customer and end the refund process.
Click on Update The Order And Email Customer in the admin to save the changes you have made to the order and send the Order Refunded email to your customer.
Refunding Partial Order Returns
If a customer has purchased several items, they may return part of the order. In this instance, you will need to split the order in the admin to keep communication clear for your customers. This will also ensure your stock levels are correct and your reports remain accurate.
When you split an order, the admin creates a linked order made from the split products. You can then mark the order status as refunded for the returned items, whilst leaving the other order status as dispatched - essentially treating the slit items as their own separate order.
Once an order has been split, this cannot be undone, so proceed with caution.
Splitting products from orders
At the bottom of the overview screen, you will see the products that have been purchased for the order. To the left-hand side of each product, there is a check box. Place a tick in the box of the products the customer wants to keep and click on the red Split Selected Items underneath:
Once you have clicked on Split Selected Items, the items the customer is keeping will move to a new, linked order and the items to be refunded will stay on the original order. The new split-out order number will display at the top of the page in a yellow bar:
Refunding funds back to your customers can only be made on the original order. Should you need to refund a split order at a later date, you can mark it as refunded and send the email to update the customer, but you will need to refund the funds to the customer through your payment gateway.
Once you have split out the order, go to the original order and change the status to Order Refunded, select the reason for the refund should you know and (where possible) go to Transactions to action the refund back to the customer. Ensure that you select Update the Order & Email the Customer as your final step.
Summary
You can now Refund Orders!
You know how to refund orders in full as well as how to split and refund part of an order.
Further Reading