Partial Refund for discount code and taxes—Shopify, please you’re killing us

[pearlgrant]

So a customer just bought $85 worth of merchandise but didn’t get the 10% off code into their checkout screen properly. They subsequently emailed requesting a correction. Of course I would like to honor it. (Take note, please, that when a paying customer asks for a logical thing within the grasp of another customer, the merchant’s appropriate instinct and action should be to make it happen, hint, hint. We call this customer service, and it really does pay in the long term)

original ticket:   5 items subtotaling $85 + 8% tax = $91.80

desired result: 5 items subtotaling $76.50 + 8% tax= $82.62 (merchandise credit due is $8.50 with a tax credit of $0.68)

Currently I would have to refund a flat $9.18 to the customer and then write a note to the bookkeeper explaining that at the end of the month she’ll have to search through the payout on date X, and write in a correction to the sales tax from order Y (and pray to a higher power that it’s the only adjustment in that period so that it’s easy to break down properly and not have her tied up for hours literally chasing pennies we already gave back to customers —and getting paid by the hour to do it) documenting an ill-recorded refund because Shopify can’t offer the merchant the ability to edit orders properly. 

Now in my brick & mortar POS, this is a piece of cake, but Shopify makes it impossible to do properly.  

There are a couple of ways this could be easily rectified from the user perspective, I’ll leave you to decide what the most direct coding option is.

1) You let us edit the line item prices on an order prior to fulfillment, and when the new total calculates let us refund that amount with appropriate taxes reporting on our sales tax report.

2) You let us return the item at full price while adding the same item at a reduced price  ( Not sure why this would be preferred, but in my register system this is how we trick it into allowing us to blindly refund a credit card as the software will allow a credit to the encrypted card #, without its presence, but wouldn’t allow an employee to charge extra items without running the card through the reader machine). This would also be a nice way to let us document substituting an item in an order...But that is not my goal today and think that the necessary steps involving communication with a customer would cloud the issue...

3) You let us check a box after manually entering a refund amount that the refund is taxable, we would only issue a refund for the merchandise amount, and then check to request the commensurate taxes be adjusted—now my guess is that because the taxes are attached to the product, this wouldn’t work. Which brings us back to suggestion number 1!

I’ve seen this request numerous times in the discussion boards dating back years (we’ve only been on Shopify a few months and are continuing to be shocked by the basic holes in the Shopify system that are completely transparently easy in any halfway decent POS software), don’t you think it’s time to fix it?

[Ogonajo]

It is now December and this issue has still not been resolved.

A customer spent $45 with a 40% discount. One item was misordered and therefore refunded. The discount amount should've changed according to the new total but instead I lost money. Please fix this issue stat!

[Vonda_Youngkin]

Basic holes?  I think you mean huge massive holes in what should be basic common sense IFTTT. A 16 year old app developer could do a better job in a weekend.

[Sam-123]

Please @Shopify fix this massive TAX issue! 

In Ecommerce, it's very common for customers to forget their coupon code and reach out to the merchant to apply that coupon code to their previous purchase.

The easy fix would allow merchants to apply the coupon code to the previous order which would automatically give a partial refund, giving the correct refund in gross sale AND sales tax. This would also expire the coupon code for customers email address if it was a 1 time only code.

But we are not asking for anything fancy - just  give us merchants the ability to edit the tax. It's so unbelievable that we can't.

Partial refunds without the ability to include the sales tax completely skew data by understating gross revenue and overstating sales tax collected.

Basically any merchant issuing partial refunds has wrong financial information on Shopify. The fact merchants have to spend time writing this request is a joke. 

I just did a test where I made a test order for $5,000 + 12% tax is $600 in tax. Total amount $5,600. I gave a partial refund of $5,599 and guess what it shows under taxes reports. It still shows $600 in tax!!!! How is that even possible!!! I just refunded 99.99% of the order and the tax is unchanged?! And now my net sales under reports is -$600......?

This illustrates how horrible the reports feature gets skewed with issuing partial refunds!!

I'm so frustrated that basic ecommerce functionality like partial refunds and allowing you to reduce the sales tax can't be done. Empowering ecommerce merchants? More like making them overpay and remit on sales tax that was never collected. I bet so many merchants are overpaying  on sales tax if they use the tax reports on Shopify as a way to keep track. As you can clearly see if any merchant based their tax payouts by this amount they would be throwing away money.....

Know what's worse than having data? Bad data, and this is faulty skewed data that should not even be displayed as it's skewing Gross revenue and sales tax....