Doing shopping cart refunds

There are two ways to do shopping cart refunds:

  • through the Woo shopping cart system
  • through Stripe

In the Woo system, the way to do a refund is to open up the order and then click on the “refund” button.  This has the advantage that it is very easy to do.  It will generate a refund back to the customer’s credit card.  It will also generate an email back to the customer, letting them know that a refund is being sent back to them.

This has the potential disadvantage that the refund is “all or nothing”.  It refunds the full amount of the order, or it does not refund anything.

If for some reason you feel that what you need to do is refund a partial payment, then this cannot be done through the Woo system.  This can only be done through Stripe.  There are several ways to do the refund through Stripe.

The easiest way to do the refund through Stripe is to click on a “deep link” in the Woo order.  You can open the order in the Woo system and at the top left you will see something like this:

click to enlarge

You can click on the deep link and you then get to log in at Stripe.  This will drill down directly to a detail page on the Stripe web site that allows you to see extremely detailed information about this credit card transaction.  On this page you can click “Refund” and then you can say how much of the money you want to refund.  You could refund the entire amount, but if you are getting ready to do this, ask yourself why you did not simply do it in the Woo system which would have been so much easier and would have left a clearer trail for your co-workers to follow.  In general if you are using this “Refund” button it is because you are refunding less than the full amount.  

Whenever you are doing a refund, leave detailed notes in the system for the benefit of co-workers.

See other procedures for the OPLF shopping cart.