It won’t let me delete this order. We are still in VERY beginning stages–No PayPal account is set up. How do we delete this freaking thing?? There’s no red “Delete” button in the bottom right, even though the Order is cancelled.
Topic summary
Issue: A cancelled PayPal Express order shows “Payment Pending,” and there’s no Delete button. The store didn’t have a PayPal account set up, and the merchant wants to remove the order.
Explanation/Action: The cancellation/refund didn’t process because the store wasn’t connected to PayPal. Set up PayPal as a payment gateway, then attempt the cancellation/refund again to recover the $3.
Policy: Orders that involve a payment gateway can’t be deleted in Shopify. Shopify retains these records for potential disputes, so the Delete option is removed.
Only deletable orders:
- Orders paid with a manual payment method
- Draft orders that were marked as paid
- Test orders paid via the Bogus Gateway or Shopify Payments in test mode
- Orders imported through the Shopify API
Outcome/Status: The poster accepts the explanation. They can likely recover the funds after connecting PayPal, but the order cannot be deleted and will remain in the admin by design. Discussion effectively resolved.
You would of had to setup PayPal first, before refunding the order, which is why the order ‘cancellation’ didn’t work, as you’re not actually synced up to PayPal yet. If you setup PayPal as a payment gateway, then you should be able to do the refund/cancellation again, to get your $3 back.
But even if you do set up PayPal, and successfully cancel/refund the order, you wouldn’t be able to ‘delete’ the order entirely from the back-end admin. Any time that money gets processed by a payment gateway, the option to ‘delete’ the order goes away, as Shopify needs to keep the order details in the back-end so that if there any disputes, there can be a record of the order/payment to reference.
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/orders/cancel-delete-order#delete-an-order
Only the following types of order can be deleted:
- orders that were paid with a manual payment method
- orders that started as a draft and were then marked as paid
- test orders that were paid with the Bogus Gateway, or with Shopify Payments in test mode
- orders that were imported through the Shopify API
1 Like
You would of had to setup PayPal first
That’s exactly what I was afraid of.
But even if you do set up PayPal, and successfully cancel/refund the order, you wouldn’t be able to ‘delete’ the order entirely from the back-end admin.
Oh no! I’ve already marred our backend with garbage data before we’ve even started. What a tragedy…
Great answer. This is a good first impression to Shopify’s support…