refund order in woocommerce - featured image

How to Refund Order in WooCommerce

Are you looking for a way to enable refunds on your orders and products? Looking for ways to automate the refunding process or do it manually? Then you’ve come to the right place. In today’s tutorial, we will be explaining to you how to refund an order in WooCommerce.

Yes, you can easily issue refunds for your customers due to the flexibility of WooCommerce. Additionally, we’ll also be looking into how you can improve and manage the refund process as well as block users from refunds.

But first, let’s take a look at the importance of enabling refunds for your WooCommerce orders.

Why should you refund orders?

Returns from customers are bound to happen in any business. There’s always a possibility for user dissatisfaction or issues with the products themselves. While there are always improvements that can be made to minimize returns or enable a good return or RMA process for your customers, there are always benefits for enabling refunds for your orders too.

Customer Trust

Refunds help build customer trust, which is a key part of running a WooCommerce store. If there’s a guarantee for a refund on the products of your store, it is less risky for your customers to try your product in case of any dissatisfaction. That in itself is a boost in conversions that you can rely on for more sales.

Moreover, surveys also suggest that over 76% of customers believe that free returns and refunds are important considerations in buying products.

Refund Policies and Consumer Rights Laws:

Not allowing refunds might put you on the wrong side of the law if you’re not careful. According to the consumer rights law in the European Union, all traders must allow refunds, RMA, or replacement of the product if it turned out to be faulty. Furthermore, customers have the right to cancel and refund products from an online service within 14 days without any justification.

Similarly, many places in the US require retailers to openly state their refund policy to the customers before selling their products, even though the refund laws in the US do not necessarily enforce refunds from the seller. And if you’d like a better conversion rate, it is better to show that you provide refunds instead of outright denying it.

These are some of the major points to why it is quite necessary to enable refunds for orders. Moreover, a rushed and disorganized refund may cause you or your customers to lose money. So, it is very important that you know how to refund an order in WooCommerce and manage the process.

How to Refund Order in WooCommerce:

You can choose to refund an order in WooCommerce either Automatically or Manually. The automatic approach lets you refund your customers using a payment gateway’s refund options. Whereas, the manual approach lets you transfer the money by yourself.

Let’s look at how you can refund an order in WooCommerce automatically first. But before you start, make sure that you have set up WooCommerce properly on your WordPress website without missing any steps.

How to Refund Order in WooCommerce Automatically:

You can choose to automatically process your refund using the WooCommerce orders page. This will change your WooCommerce order status and reverse the charge on your customer’s order.

However, you will need to integrate your payment gateways first. If you need help with it, we have a couple of guides for setting up your payment gateway:

We will use Stripe as our payment gateway for this tutorial. But, you can use the payment gateway you use for your online store.

After integrating the payment gateway, go WooCommerce > Orders from your WP Admin Dashboard. Then, click on the order that you’d like to refund. The order details will be displayed.

refund order in woocommerce - orders page

Here, scroll down under Order Summary and you will be able to see a Refund option right under your order subtotal.

refund order in woocommerce - refund button

Next, all you need to do is add the refund amount based on your refund policy, the reason for a refund, and select if you’d like WooCommerce to automatically restock the refund items or not.

Then, you also need to choose whether to refund manually or automatically. Since we used Stripe as our payment gateway, we’ll click on the Refund Via Stripe option. It will automatically refund the amount.

After you confirm the refund, it will be processed and your order status will be changed to refunded. As soon as the refund is processed, your customer should receive details regarding their refunds on their account payments. And that’s the steps required to refund an order in WooCommerce automatically.

refund order in woocommerce - automatic refund processing

 

How to Refund Order in WooCommerce Manually:

Sometimes, your customer can pay through bank transfers or alternative means without using payment gateways like Stripe or Paypal. In these cases, you might have to manually refund the amount instead. Thankfully, the process is somewhat identical to the automatic approach with just some additional steps.

Once again, go to WooCommerce > Orders from your WordPress dashboard and click on the order you’d like to refund. Then scroll down to the Order summary and click on Refund.

Now, add in your refund amount and reason and click on Refund manually instead.

refund order in woocommerce - refund manually

Accept the refund confirmation sent by the page and WooCommerce itself will list the order and the products as refunded.

However, you will have to manually transfer the money to the customer using your preferred payment method or gateway. Once you do so, you need to manually set the Order Status as Refunded from the order details to finish the process.

Now all you need to do is manage the transfer to your customer and you should be done.

refund order in woocommerce - change order status

Important Points To Remember When Handling Refunds and Returns:

While processing a refund order in WooCommerce is very easy, you also need to set up some strict rules and regulations when you’re managing your refunds. Fraudulent returns are always an issue with any service that provides refunds to customers.

Additionally, if you don’t provide proper details about how a product works and what it does, you may see an increase in the number of refunds issued too. This is always a bad thing for any business.

So, we’ve compiled a list of important concerns and tips you should consider when managing refunds. Let’s take a look at some of them:

1) Have a clean, easy to understand Refund Policy page:

It is crucial to ensure that your refund policy is visible, easy to read, and concise. Adding your refund policy to the product details, cart page, and even checkout page is also quite common to make the customers fully aware of it. Some online stores tend to add their Refund policy page to the header and footer menus of their website as well.

Similarly, your refund policy page should explicitly mention the return process time, conditions for partial or refund, and the products to which it applies.

Online stores like Amazon and Best Buy have quite a good example of return policy pages. Even we at Quadlayers have a dedicated page for policies on refunds, returns, and other licenses for our products. You can even mention them in FAQs, similar to what we have done if you like.

2) Make the return process easy and accessible:

The process of returning products must be quite easy as well. Whether it’s just a simple email or a customer ticket system, you will see more returning customers. The convenience of trying out new products and returning them if it doesn’t appeal to your customers is also one of the top priorities for them.

Remember that the return process for your customers should be as easy it is for you to refund them in WooCommerce. You can even test refunds beforehand to see how easy the process is. It’s quite similar to testing orders in WooCommerce.

3) Manage Customer expectations using product details:

Managing customer expectations is an important step in ensuring lower returns over time. Your product descriptions and details must include what is included and not included in the product as well as what the product can and can’t do. This ensures that your customers have exact expectations of the product and don’t end up returning it.

You can also update or customize the product page if you see a rising trend in increasing customer returns. Just make sure that you add the proper features while updating the product details.

4) Keep a lookout for fraudulent returns:

It’s also a good practice to keep track of your product return requests and product condition during the refund period. Keep track of your orders and returns as well as customers that tend to return products frequently.

You can also add a disclaimer to your refund policy page reminding customers that you have the right to deny returns for any fraudulent returns.

5) Track Reasons for Refunds and Improve the Products accordingly:

Tracking the products that are returned frequently and the reasons for their returns are also equally important. It helps you to figure out the weaker parts of your products and businesses with ease. You can further use this data to improve the products and increase their sales in return.

This is an important detail especially for software/application developers and SaaS providers. Fortunately, you can use refund tickets for them and find out the features that your customers were looking for before returning them. Then, these features can be added to your products in the future which can also give you a competitive advantage over your business competitors.

Bonus: How to Block Users from Refunds

If you have a no refund policy on your WooCommerce website, you can also choose to disable refunds for all your orders. This ensures that your staff do not accidentally refund an order or accept a return from your customers.

To do so, we can simply add a custom WooCommerce code snippet to our child theme’s functions.php file. So, make sure that you backup your WordPress website as we will be editing one of the delicate files of your website. Any unnecessary changes to it might cause further problems on your website.

We also recommend you to create a child theme for any code snippet customization since updating a WordPress theme may remove additional codes from your functions.php file. But If you use a child theme instead, all your changes stay even after updates and any changes can be reverted in case of any issues. We even have a list of best child theme plugins for WordPress if you need help to create one.

To add our custom code snippets, Simply open your WP Admin Dashboard and go to Appearance > Theme Editor. Then, click on the functions.php file on the Theme Files at the right sidebar.

refund order in woocommerce - functions php

You can use the following code in the editor to block users from refunds. Simply edit the 4th line to add roles to disable refunds for. This means that any role that you add to this code will have their refund button under order summary hidden.

add_action('admin_head', 'hide_wc_refund_button');

function hide_wc_refund_button() {

global $post;

if (!current_user_can('administrator') && !current_user_can('editor')) {
return;
}
if (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'post.php?post=') === false) {
return;
}

if (empty($post) || $post->post_type != 'shop_order') {
return;
}
?>
<script>
jQuery(function () {
jQuery('.refund-items').hide();
jQuery('.order_actions option[value=send_email_customer_refunded_order]').remove();
if (jQuery('#original_post_status').val()=='wc-refunded') {
jQuery('#s2id_order_status').html('Refunded');
} else {
jQuery('#order_status option[value=wc-refunded]').remove();
}
});
</script>
<?php

}

This code without any editing will disable refunds for Administrator and Editor roles. However, if you want to block Shop Managers from refunds, you can change the code by adding & !current_user_can(‘shop_manager’) to the code.

So, our new code becomes:

add_action('admin_head', 'hide_wc_refund_button');

function hide_wc_refund_button() {

global $post;

if (!current_user_can('administrator') && !current_user_can('editor') !current_user_can('shop_manager’)) {
return;
}
if (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'post.php?post=') === false) {
return;
}

if (empty($post) || $post->post_type != 'shop_order') {
return;
}
?>
<script>
jQuery(function () {
jQuery('.refund-items').hide();
jQuery('.order_actions option[value=send_email_customer_refunded_order]').remove();
if (jQuery('#original_post_status').val()=='wc-refunded') {
jQuery('#s2id_order_status').html('Refunded');
} else {
jQuery('#order_status option[value=wc-refunded]').remove();
}
});
</script>
<?php

}

Then, click on the Update file button and you should be done.

Conclusion:

Enabling and allowing refunds can be great for improving your conversion rates. And with the option of easy refunds, customers are keener on purchasing and trying out your products since there’s little risk involved if the product isn’t for them.

To summarize, we covered different ways to refund an order in WooCommerce using Automatic refunds and Manual refunds in this tutorial. We have also provided the essential details to keep in mind while setting up refunds and refunds policy. Finally, we’ve also added a short guide on how to block your website users from refunds if you don’t want to allow returns for your products.

Similarly, if you want to add more features that can help you increase your profits and conversions, why don’t you check out some of our other articles like:

So, were you able to process your refunds without any hiccups? Need more help with adding your refund policy pages? Let us know in the comments and we’ll do our best to help you out. Additionally, we also love hearing your opinion on how you’d consider the benefits of adding a return service to your products.