How Does Shopify Get Away With Charging Fees On A Cancelled Transation?

Shopify Discussion
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The original thread on this topic is not allowing replies so I’ve started a new one.

I am so disappointed with Shopify. When I first joined they were a reliable partner and I felt that they really had the merchant’s best interest in mind.

Now, Shopify makes considerably more money from my business than I do.

One reason for this is the fact that when I cancel or refund an order, good old Shopify keeps the credit card fees.

in the previous thread, the reason given was that “this is the industry norm”. Complete cop-out reason. Just because it’s industry norm doesn’t mean you have to do it! That’s basically saying “we’ll everybody else is gouging their merchants unfairly so we are too” and trying to sell it as a valid justification.

Shopify, don’t you make enough money from your merchants? This is predatory.

I just lost over $74 because a customer placed an order by mistake. Infuriating that I throw away my money this way. I am very resentful of Shopify.

Merchants, we need to form a union / association. This cannot stand and has to stop and clearly Shopify doesn’t care about our profitability and success the way they used to.

Classic corporate greed.

The halo is gone, Shopify. In my eyes at least.

And spare me the “we value out merchants’ feedback” line. The only words I want to hear are “due to the feedback of our valued merchants, who are responsible for the majority of our company’s revenue, we have decided to reverse our policy of charging merchants the credit card fees in the refund scenario effective immediately and we are retroactively giving our merchants all fees they were charged when canceling / refunding orders”.

Otherwise I don’t care to hear your response.

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I was just “charged” over $500 for a customer changing their mind and cancelling. These guys are vultures!

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Unfortunately, its likely due to the fact that Shopify is not a merchant processor in an of itself, since they use a 3rd party gateway, that gateway charges them on EVERY transaction. Even if your customer order is cancelled, the authorization was still processed by the gateway and hence a transaction fee was charged to shopify and they pass that through to us. It is annoying, but its not predatory behavior, its just how transaction gateways work. If Shopify was its own transaction gateway there would be an option on their end to forego the transaction fees, but given that they utilize Stripe on the backend, unless Stripe agrees to not charge Shopify for the transaction fee, they will most likely ALWAYS pass that through. Just some info from somone who has been building ecommerce platforms since early 2001. Nothing much has changed in how transactions are processed and/or billed back to the user of the gateways.