I’ll try to make this quick, not sure how to respond:
Person asked for refund/return. I gave him information to return a product he no longer needed. He E-mails me and says its on its way to us for the refund. Within 6 hours, I get a chargeback claim, stating he never got his refund money.
I responded to this chargeback claim with all the info we had - we agreed to the return, but had no information from him showing the return was ever delivered to us. About 5 days later, after I submitted the response (and maybe 7 days after he made the chargeback), its finally showed back up to us. How do I proceed with this? I’m willing to give him a refund based on our stores’ policy (price less 25% for S&H&P), but the chargeback is for full order amount, plus the $15 chargeback fee, has already been deducted from my account. I am not sure what to do at this point? I still have 2 weeks to respond. Not sure how to handle this piece of work.
In this situation I would recommend contacting the customer to let them know that you have received the returned product and are happy to refund them once the chargeback has been cancelled.
I DO NOT recommend refunding an order that has an open chargeback on it as the customer could end up winning the chargeback and receiving both your refund and the chargeback amount. Once the customer cancels the chargeback with their bank, they can provide documentation to you proving this and then you can pass that documentation onto your payment gateway (Our live support if using Shopify Payments) to cancel the chargeback on the account and reverse the funds being withdrawn.
This will put the order back into a standard order state and you can move forward with processing the refund as normal. Please also make sure in the interim that you maintain copies of ALL your communications and that you also add them as evidence to the chargeback claim.
Thank you very much. I’ve sent the customer an E-mail advising them to remove the chargeback, and we can then provide the refund, otherwise the dispute will take weeks.
You didn’t mentioned it, but a good idea is to always ask the customer to return the item with a tracking number as well.
In your chargeback claim, also include your refund policy so that the banks can understand that this might be a case of the customer not knowing how to request a refund.