Attending to full/partial refund requests is something you might have been doing as an e-store owner. With customers asking for a full/partial refund for purchased products, you’d have surely met frustration ample number of times. It is through this tutorial that I intend to familiarize you with two handy methods of managing refunds for multiple e-store products.
WooCommerce 2.2- Managing refunds is quite convenient
Product refunds are indeed one of the most crucial aspects of an e-commerce store and with the all new WooCommerce 2.2 and higher versions, you get the flexibility of processing product refunds either directly from within the order(applicable only if the feature is supported by the chosen payment gateway) or you may even opt for doing so using a manual approach.
First off, let’s take a closer look at Manual Refunds
As per the manual refund approach, you can choose to mark the respective product order(here, I’m referring to the one for which the customer has asked for a refund) as refunded. Here, you must be familiar with the fact that refunds extending to products, shipping price and applicable taxes need to be processed directly via the chosen payment gateway.
Just follow the below steps for performing a manual refund:
Step 1– Go to your WooCommerce dashboard-> Orders
A screen similar to the one displayed below will be displayed:
Step 2– On the above page, select the order for which you want to offer the refund and click on ‘Refund’ button placed against the same. A textbox with the label ‘Refund Amount’ would be displayed where you’ll need to enter the amount that needs to be refunded for the respective product order. You may also opt for adding the reason for the refund. Screen for this step will look like the one shown below:
Finally, click on ‘Refund Manually’ button.
So, that’s it. You’re done with manually marketing the respective product as refunded.
One last thing that you need to do here is manually change the Order status for the product to ‘Refunded’. For this, simply go to the Details page of the respective product order as shown below:
On the above screen, within the drop-down list displayed for ‘Order Status’, choose the option ‘Refunded’.
The final screen after refund has been applied to the order would look like this:
Now, let’s get to know the Automatic Refunds approach better
Here is the list of steps that you need to follow for setting automatic refunds for different e-store items/products:
Step 1- Add API keys in the settings available for your e-store’s Payment Gateway
As the very first step, you need to ensure that new settings have been filled up for your payment gateway. For this, simply go to your WooCommerce dashboard-> Settings-> Checkout-> Payment Gateway and enter new values for the API Keys viz: API Username, API Password and API Signature. Here is how the screen for this looks like:
Step 2- Go to WooCommerce admin dashboard-> Orders
A screen similar to the one displayed below will be displayed:
Step 3- Now, click on the grey ‘Refund’ button displayed for the chosen product order.
Step 4- Next, enter the amount you want to refund for the respective order. You may also choose to enter a reason for the refund. Finally, click on ‘Refund $Y via payment_gateway name. An alert box will be shown that the action can’t be undone. Click on ‘OK’ for this alert box. The order screen will now look like this:
Talking about the order status in the back-end; if the refund has been processed for the entire order, then the status would automatically change to ‘Refunded’. Else, if the processing is complete for a partial refund, then the status for the order would not change. A refund note will be displayed for the order, on the basis of the chosen refund type(full or partial). Here is how the Refund notes for the two cases look like:
With that you’re done with performing an automatic refund for a product order(s).
Final Thoughts
With refunds being considered as a hard-to-miss feature for your e-store, I’m sure the above tutorial would aid you in managing full/partial refunds in a hassle-free way. Just go with the flow of steps and you’ll no longer get frustrated with handling multiple refund requests raised by multiple customers.