There may be instances where you need to issue a partial or full refund to a customer. This guide provides an overview of refunding and cancelling your subscription orders. All refunds must be processed in Recharge. 

For merchants that migrated to the Shopify Checkout Integration with existing subscribers, subscriptions purchased before your store's migration can be refunded using this guide. To refund your new subscriptions that were purchased after your store's migration (via the Shopify Checkout), refer to Issuing a refund through the Shopify Checkout Integration. See Understanding customer management with the migrated Shopify Checkout Integration to learn more.

This guide does not apply to merchants using the Shopify Checkout Integration. Refer to Issuing a refund through the Shopify Checkout Integration.

Before you start

• A refund status's source of truth lives in Recharge. There may be rare scenarios where a refund status fails to update on your store platform. If you have issued a refund in Recharge that is not reflected in Shopify or BigCommerce, confirm the refund status in Recharge and with your payment processor. 
• For BigCommerce Checkout Integration merchants, refunds must be issued in Recharge.
• Customers can typically expect to receive their refund within 3-5 business days for Shopify or 5-7 business days for BigCommerce. It can take longer depending on the customer's credit card company. If the refund hasn’t been processed within seven business days, check to ensure the refund was submitted in the Recharge app. If the refund was successfully submitted, contact your payment processor for more information.

• Recharge charges transaction fees based on gross processing each month. Refunded amounts are not removed from the transaction fee calculation. The Recharge platform has processed the transaction so the usage fees apply. 

• Check with your payment processor to confirm their fee policy around refunding transactions as additional fees may apply:

  • • Stripe
    • Braintree
    • Authorize.net

Issue a full or partial refund in Recharge

1. Click Customers in the Recharge merchant portal and select Customers from the dropdown.
2. Search for and select the customer you want to refund.
3. Locate the Recent orders panel and click Actions for the order you wish to refund.
4. Select Refund by amount.
5. Enter the amount to be refunded in the Refund by amount field and select Next.
6. Click Refund to confirm.

Refund by item in Recharge

You can refund by item for orders with 2 or more items. 

1. Click Customers in the Recharge merchant portal and select Customers from the dropdown.
2. Search for and select the customer you want to refund.
3. Locate the Recent orders panel and click Actions for the order you wish to refund.
4. Select Refund by item.
5. Enter the quantities of the items you wish to refund and click Next.
6. Click Refund to confirm and process the refund.

Cancel an order 

In some cases, you may need to cancel an order in addition to refunding. By default, Recharge does not cancel an order when refunding so you need to complete this as a separate action. The reverse is true as well, cancelling an order will not refund the order.

1. After refunding an order click the Recharge Order ID to open the Order details panel.
   
2. On the Order details panel, click Cancel.
   

Issue a refund in Shopify 

Shopify requires that all purchases made via third-party apps be refunded directly in the app. If you attempt to refund using the refund button in Shopify, you may receive a "transaction requires a gateway" error or an e-mail indicating that the refund did not process. We suggest issuing refunds directly from Recharge, though there is a solution to refund in Recharge via Shopify's order page. We cannot guarantee refunds issued via the Shopify solution will process. To verify a refund has processed, rely on the refund status in Recharge. 

When the order is in Shopify, click More actions and select Refund Recurring Order from the dropdown list.

On the following page, confirm if you would like to proceed with processing a full refund. You will also have the option of cancelling the order in addition to the refund on this page.

Issue a refund through your payment processor 

You can also issue refunds directly through your payment processor. However, if you refund through the payment processor, this information will not sync back to Recharge, which means that you will not be able to update the order status and the refund information will not be present in your reporting. We only suggest refunding through your payment processor directly in certain situations, such as:

• If the payment already shows as refunded in Recharge but not refunded in the payment processor.
• If you use Authorize.net and you need to issue a partial refund.
• If the order was created on a different subscription platform, issuing a refund cannot be performed through Recharge.