POS - Multiple Exchanges

[Silvia_2104]

Hi,

At present, Shopify POS has a limitation on the amount of exchanges allowable. It only allows one exchange on a transaction.

Example:

If a customer purchases a pair of shoes, comes and swaps them for another size, and then decides that they want another shoe altogether. This isn't an odd purchase pattern, and occurs for one particular client at least twice a week.

The first exchange occurs as per normal, generating a new receipt etc. If you try to exchange the second order, it will not give the option of exchange and will only allow a refund on the Shopify admin. As the first exchange runs on 'exchange credit' however, if you do a refund it will not match up with the actual refund type (cash / credit / etc.). To me this seems like the exchange method is flawed and inflexible for real life retailer scenarios.

Shopify Support recommended using draft orders. This doesn't really fix my issue on POS, nor does it make sense to do - we can't anticipate which clients will want to do multiple exchanges. My only conclusion is that my client should refund every exchange and resell as a new product (which from memory is basically what they expected a merchant to do prior to the exchange function existing?). Has anyone else encountered this, and found a good workaround - this is going to be a dealbreaker for my client, who is already unimpressed with Shopify as a POS solution.

[lyates]

I agree. My old system could do that no problem. But I can live without that feature....the exchanging issue is huge. As a store manager, I should be able to decide if a item is exchanged or not.......

[JJ-miras]

It would be nice if Shopify would at least chime in on this.
Maybe we should ask on Twitter...

[lyates]

Sorry I am not into twitter but I have commented on their Facebook ad. 

I am constantly sharing it with Shopify support people....as late as yesterday. She finally confirmed what I was thinking. They were originally set up to do online only. Since they have added brick and mortar stores, they are encountering these problems......I think all of their team should have to "work" in retail for a period of time and see the problems we are encountering.......

[Ellen5]

Here is what I do for multiple exchanges:

Scenario : customer buys skirt, customer comes back to exchange the size, then comes back again to return the skirt completely.

The first exchange I process as normal, using exchange credit from the original skirt purchase to buy the skirt in the new size.

When the customer comes in again to return the skirt completely (or exchange it again - it would be the same work flow) I have my sales associates call me when they see the POS message that Shopify can only process this from the back end. I go into the exchange order (the new skirt size) on the admin and I refund the skirt to exchange credit. Then I create a new order on POS and I buy a gift card for the customer with “store credit” for the exact amount of exchange credit I refunded.

I know that this doesn’t give the customer their money back on their card, but I tell them that they they technically didn’t buy the skirt the second time with their card anyway, they bought it with the store credit from the original order. Sometimes this obviously creates confusion but most customers understand…. 

I don’t know if buying a gift card with “store credit” for the amount refunded to “exchange credit” works out okay on the books …. But I have not figured out any other way…. I honestly don’t know where the “exchange credit” goes when it is refunded…  I read the comment from someone on here that after you refund to exchange credit you can go back to the very original order and put money back on the customers card …. But I typically prefer to put it on a gift card anyway and it doesn’t give you an option to put the original order refund on a gift card.

Let me know if anyone has feedback on this!! Thank you 🙂

[Will_Cervarich]

Hi Ellen5!

If it were our bookkeeping, we’d want to see the refund of exchange credit being reapplied as the payment method for the purchase of the gift card, so using Store Credit for that wouldn’t be the best for us. It would make it look like we pulled a store credit out of thin air, when we didn’t.

A slight tweak that might make your bookkeeper/you happier would be to create a manual payment method on POS of Exchange Credit (not to be confused with the natively supported payment method that happens when you created that first exchange). This way, when you refund to Exchange Credit on the web admin, you can then “spend” that with the same payment method on POS. It may not always appear on the same lines in Shopify reports, but should be fairly easy to reconcile.

hope that’s helpful! (But what would be the most helpful is Shopify modifying their POS to support this without these types of workarounds. 🙄)

-Will

[lyates]

My problem with this is that I am not 100% available to do this every hour I am away from the store. I don't want customers hindered by Shopify limitations......

[lyates]

Exactly this...

I have worked in retail for over 25 years and have never had limitations on the amount of times items can be exchanged.....Crazy.....

[Ellen5]

Thank you so much for your reply!! I understand what you mean and that was very helpful. I am confused about where the return to "exchange credit" even goes to... or how I access that? I kind of thought about exchange credit like a cloud ... and store credit like a cloud as well... because I don't use store credit for anything else other than to help me with these work arounds. I use gift cards fully separately from store credit. And every time I use store credit I make sure that it exactly matches what I refunded to "exchange credit".

This is definitely not ideal... I agree with you (and everyone else) that it would be helpful if shopify supported multiple exchanges. Thanks again!!

[Will_Cervarich]

Hi @Ellen5!

For our bookkeeping, we like to see those payment methods completely zero'ing each other out. It sounds like that's the case for you, too. I think your cloud analogy is a good one. These are both really just virtual payment methods with a name. The names could be elephants and rhinos and they'd still function the same way 🙂  (or we could call them A and B as I do below)

Sounds like your store is OK with merging the two clouds and as long as all the debits and credits across both clouds add up to zero, you're happy (A - A + B - A + A - B + A - B = 0). For our store, we want the individual clouds to add up to zero independently of each other (A - A + A - A + A - A = 0 and B - B + B - B = 0) I think both approaches are totally fine. I just like the cleanliness of the papertrail with the secondary Exchange Credit manual payment method. Of course, it relies on staff to process things correctly, so that's a consideration, too. Is it easier to just have one virtual payment method (Store Credit) or two and different rules about when to use each...

Take care!
-W

[Walter_Manning]

This problem really needs to be fixed. This issue comes up quite a bit and the workarounds are ridiculous and make no sense. 

It really makes my sales associates looks like idiots which is probably the worst part. 

Multiple exchanges and returns need to be implemented on this POS - and I'm paying for the PRO version of it...

[ajcardenas5]

Agreed! So frustrating. Where does the exchange credit even go? Thankfully my customer is patient and understanding as I've figured this out but geez there should be a way to exchange multiple times. Come on shopify help us! 

[AndrewGZA]

Please can @Shopify fix this. 

[lyates]

Every time I have to contact customer service, I tell them about the problem and ask to refer it to their developers......I am hoping the squeaky wheel gets greased......

[lyates]

I have had this issue happen twice this week......I spent an hour each time on with Shopify support. What a waste of time.........I keep sending in feedback about how bad the problem is for us.

[LBB67]

I have given up in regards to this flaw I just tell my staff to manually do the exchange, write it down then give it to me and I fix it in admin,

just so the don't look like idiots when they tell the customer the POS only allows 1 exchange. How hard is it to increase the limit on

exchanges just a bit of coding I suspect yet we pay premium price for a pro POS system that has limitations.

I'd get out if I could but all my staff have used this system for years and retraining for another POS is a huge time factor and an expensive exercise.

[Walter_Manning]

Why has this known issue from 2019 still not been resolved? Anyone using Shopify at POS should be complaining like crazy about this. Are not enough stores using the platform for this to be an issue or do they all have really bad return policies that don't offer refunds in the first place?

We recently opened a new store and we have Shopify POS and the Shopify Tap Card Reader. In our other location we have an external card reader so we can always figure out a dumb workaround for a multiple refund and make it work. It's messy and time consuming but the customer at least gets their money back in the end. 

With the Shopify Tap Card Reader you cannot offer multiple refunds on a single transaction. There's nothing you can do to get them their money back if they've been issued a refund for some of the items on the initial transaction already. You can pay them out cash if you have that lying around, but you won't be able to make a record of it in the system.

One workaround is that any time you have a customer trying to issue a refund for a few items from a transaction that has multiple items is to refund the entire transaction the first time. Resell what they've kept to them so they have a new transaction that they can use for refunds down the road if need be. Sloppy. The rub is that refunds through the tap reader take 2-4 business days to appear back on a customers card so they'll be out some money for a few days and bound to let you know about it one way or the other. 

I'm just amazed that I'm paying for a pro account and this hasn't been rectified. It seems so retail 101 to me. Is this a big ask? I can't stress enough just how dumb it makes us look. Time for this one to be a priority. 

[brockpw]

> With the Shopify Tap Card Reader you cannot offer multiple refunds on a single transaction. There's nothing you can do to get them their money back if they've been issued a refund for some of the items on the initial transaction already.

I follow this thread pretty closely just due to the fact that I, like you, am frustrated with the amount of hoops you need to jump through to make a refund happen. Before I elaborate any further, I want to know more about your specific use case. Can you give an example of why you would need to offer multiple refunds on a single transaction? I have always been able to offer the full amount of the purchase back to the customer, but only after returning the funds (+items) to "exchange credit", then making my way back to the original "mothership" order number. (The original order number). 

Regarding why this hasn't been solved. I can only imagine that they are years down the path of stacking code on code on code, and to fix this issue might require and entire rework of their code base. I have no clue if that is true, but an often seen occurrence.

[Walter_Manning]

Why I would need multiple refunds:

Customer buys 10 items. Customer returns 3 items the next day. The day after that they return 3 more items. It doesn't happen all the time but it happens. Some people can't make up their mind. 

The workaround you reference doesn't work with the Shopify tap reader which was the entire point of my post. 

Don't fool yourself: Shopify has the resources to make this happen. It's just not a "priority" despite this being pretty fundamental to a POS system.