Items being removed from orders when partial refunds issued — need assistance.

[Tern-Eco]

Hi everyone,

We're encountering an issue in our app related to partial refunds and order fulfilment status.

Problem: When a merchant issues a partial refund for specific line items in an order and the order is marked as unfulfilled, we observe that the refunded item gets removed from the order. This behaviour is puzzling to us.

Details: During our API call to Shopify for the refund, we set the restock_type for each line item to "no_restock". Given this setting, our expectation is that the items would remain as part of the order.

Could anyone shed some light on why this might be happening? And more importantly, how can we prevent items from being removed when a partial refund is issued for unfulfilled orders?

Thank you in advance for your insights and help!

[Tern-Eco]

Sounds like a generic AI response...

[anniebaile]

Having the same problem

[Tern-Eco · Accepted solution]

I reached out to Shopify directly for support and they confirmed the following (which is currently undocumented behaviour):
 

• When you refund a specific line item in an unfulfilled order, it is expected behavior for that line item to be removed from the order. This is consistent with the behavior we see in the Shopify admin. 

Example: 

• The restock_type parameter in the API call determines what happens with the inventory. If you select no_restock, it will remove the inventory from the committed state and not re-add it to the inventory.

• If you want to create a refund for specific line items without removing them from the order, please specify a dollar amount and not the line items in the API request. You can then leave a note to mention the line item that was refunded. 

Shopify support also said they had passed on my feedback to their developers, so hopefully they will update the (API) docs soon to cover this.