Cannot Refund, customer paid via Paypal Express Checkout

Technical Q&A
1

I’m facing an issue with refunding a customer. I need to refund the customer ASAP.

Here’s the situation:

I first tried to process the refund through Return Prime app and then I tried multiple times through Shopify. The customer made their payment through PayPal Express Checkout.

The first attempt to refund was through the Return Prime app, I noticed Paypal Express Checkout was not activated in the Checkout settings. So I activated it via my Business Paypal. This part was easy. All I did to activate was login with my Business credentials and it integrated with Shopify. Upon successful integration it did bring me back to my Shopify store/dashboard.

I continue to try to refund and I keep getting the same message, “You do not have permission to refund this transaction.” I’m the store owner so I know I have permission.

Also, when I click on Refund in Shopify, it shows I have the refund amount available.

Questions:

  1. How do I complete the refund now?

  2. In addition, the customer payment came to my personal paypal account which I have no idea how that happened. Now that my Business Payal is integrated, this occurrence will not happen again, correct?

Please advise for both questions.

2

Hi, @WRDesigner .

Thanks for reaching out. I hope you’re doing well regardless of this frustrating issue.

While I’m not familiar with the workings of the Return Prime app, this issue can happen with PayPal if you change your PayPal account from the period in which the order was processed, and you attempt your return.

This essentially means that the permissions were not deactivated for the previous account, and activated for the new account. The easiest way to correct this is to deactivate and then reactivate your PayPal account within Shopify. This should prompt you to enter your PayPal email address and password, which will allow the permission to be placed in PayPal. Then, simply try the refund again.

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Payments
  2. In the Supported payment methods section, find PayPal
  3. Click Manage.
  4. Click Deactivate.
  5. Click Deactivate again to confirm.
  6. Click Activate.

If the above doesn’t work, I recommend you reach out to the app developers for Return Prime and see if they have experienced this before. You can see a link to their support by opening your Apps in Shopify, where to the right you will see ‘Support.’

In the meantime, I’d love to learn more about your business and how long you’ve been with Shopify to see what additional support we can provide!

3

It’s worth noting, for anyone else who finds this forum, that doing this will require you to re-authenticate with PayPal and you’ll need your credentials handy. Also, if you haven’t updated your PayPal connector in a while, the PayPal-side settings may have changed, requiring some additional configuration.

TL;DR, be thoroughly prepared ahead of deactivation and only do the above during a low traffic time.