Can store credit be issued instead of refunds under new eCommerce rules?

[persifund]

Is it possible to issue a store credit instead of a refund according to the new rules of Shopify? 

Our client asks us to provide them a store credit service so instead of refunding money to their customers they want to give their customers store credit to use for shopping for another product.

According to Shopify rules, refunds should use the same payment method that was used to pay for the order. We can't issue a refund to a different card or bank account.

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/markets/pricing/refunds

Does It mean we can not use Store Credit instead refund?

[Marcus_Frasier]

Can't you cancel the order but not refund, then issue them a gift card in the same amount?

[persifund]

Thanks for your solution, I tested it but it's not working.
When we cancel a fulfilled order we have two options: Refund or Refund later. 
which means we can not cancel without refunding.

[Marcus_Frasier]

Refund Later is the option you want. It means don't refund now. You're refunding "later" via gift card.

[Maz]

Hey @persifund!

Thanks for reaching out and this is a great question!

Shopify does not yet support store credit. What I would suggest to your client here is to issue a free gift cards on the amount of the refund. We have a help tutorial here on issuing gift cards to customers.

If that is not a suitable option, then they could use some third party apps listed below;

• Rewardify
  
  

• Rise.ai: Gift Cards & Loyalty
  
  

• FreshCredit ‑ Store Credit

With that being said, I can understand why this could be beneficial for your client. I would be more than happy to feed this back up to our developers for future consideration. While it’s not possible at the moment, maybe we will see this option in the future, so I appreciate your feedback on this. 

Also, have you tried out the Shopify Partner Academy yet? You can enroll in interactive courses here to develop your Shopify expertise. Our self-study courses help you shorten your path to success in business and as a Shopify Partner. Develop your technical and business expertise while understanding growth opportunities and how to build exceptional commerce experiences. Check them out if you have time!

[MikeGray88]

Hi Maz, 

If we issued a gift card to cover the store credit provided, how do we remove the balance owed to the customer on the order? By selecting "refund later" it doesn't refund the money but it shows we still owe them money, even after a gift card has been issued. 

[Talktohenryj]

Hey Mike, would you be open to a call? We're working on building this into our app and seeing what you're experiencing would be a big help in making the feature as robust as possible.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Henry

[Talktohenryj]

Yes, this is possible. I see many of my customers use gift cards as a way to give a refund. In Shopify, gift cards and store credit are very similar. With a third party app you can give gift cards and add value to them the way you would with store credit. This is something we are soon adding to my app iziGift. That said, at the moment you can still use the app to issue gift cards as a return.

Hope that helps.

[Talktohenryj]

For anyone reading this and wondering, this feature is now live inside of iziGift. Press two buttons and refund orders via a gift card. You can check it out here:

https://apps.shopify.com/easy-gift-cards?show_store_picker=1

P.S. If you download from this link and message me, I'll be sure to give you a special deal.

Henry

[Mark-G-Travers]

This lack of simple commerce function remains unresolved by Shopify. 

The simple ability to return and exchange products requires a bunch of silly workarounds, which is crazy. 

😞 

[Shay]

Hey @Mark-G-Travers 

Thank you for joining the conversation. I would love to better understand the issues you may be facing when processing returns or exchanges. Shopify has drastically expanded our capabilities in those areas since this thread was initially created. For full transparency, we still recommend using gift cards in place of a "store credit" function at this time. Are there other areas that you feel are not as efficient as you'd like?

[piersw]

Hi @Shay, 

Thanks for replying to this thread. I'll jump in with my take on the situation and missing feature, since I think it's close to the problem that @persifund reported. 

I've just started looking into the "Self-serve returns" feature and for the most part, it looks great. But when it comes to the final steps for the merchant, it only gives you a single refund method option, that is to refund the payment to the payment method used in the order. I think it's very common for merchants to, in some cases, only offer store credit (of gift cards) in some scenarios. 

For me, items that have been heavily discounted are only accepted for return (apart from faulty products) as a credit. But the Shopify returns process doesn't let me do that, instead, it only allows for full cash refund. 

I think if Shopify were to expand the returns process to accomodate this scenario it would be a well liked feature by many merchants. Myself included. As it stands, this missing feature is essentially blocking me from using the serf service returns system. 

[Sudhir]

Hi @Shay ,
With the introduction of new customers account and store credit, can we built an app similar to the third party apps suggested by @Maz ? Will this violate the "Apps that provide refunds - Your app must not offer methods for processing refunds outside of the original payment processor." 

Current scenario with different third party apps use gift card or discount code to issue refund for the order that was paid with other payment methods. Can we not build the app in a similar way that those app offer with store credit?