Issuing a refund in Recharge

There may be instances where you need to issue a partial or full refund to a customer. This guide provides an overview of refunding and canceling your subscription orders. All refunds must be processed in Recharge. 

Before you start

• This article applies to merchants using the Recharge Checkout on Shopify or BigCommerce. If you are using the Shopify Checkout Integration, refer to Issuing a refund through the Shopify Checkout Integration.
• For merchants that migrated to the Shopify Checkout Integration with existing subscribers, subscriptions that were purchased prior to your store's migration can be refunded using this guide. To refund your new subscriptions that were purchased after your store's migration (via the Shopify Checkout), refer to Issuing a refund through the Shopify Checkout Integration. See Understanding customer management with the migrated Shopify Checkout Integration to learn more.
• Customers can typically expect to receive their refund within 3-5 business days for Shopify or 5-7 business days for BigCommerce. It can take longer depending on the customer's credit card company. If the refund hasn’t been processed within seven business days, check to make sure the refund was submitted in the Recharge app. If the refund was successfully submitted, contact your payment processor for more information.

• Recharge excludes refunds from your monthly Recharge invoices (this includes both the percentage and cents per order fees). However, check with your payment processor to confirm their fee policy around refunding transactions as additional fees may apply:

  • • Stripe
    • Braintree
    • Authorize.net

Issue a full or partial refund in Recharge

You can refund an entire order or part of an order for your customers.

1. Click Customers in your merchant portal and search and select the customer you want to refund.
2. On the customer's Subscription orders page, select See Details to view a list of the customer's charges.
3. Locate the charge that needs to be refunded and select the drop-down arrow to expand the Charge details.
4. Enter the amount to be refunded in the Refund by amount field.
5. Click Refund and select Process refund when prompted.

You can confirm the order has been refunded by looking at the status of the charge and the total amount refunded. 

Refund by item in Recharge

You can refund by item for orders with 2 or more items. Follow the instructions to issue a full or partial refund and then proceed with the following. 

1. Click Refund Items in the charge details.
2. In the Refund payments window, enter the quantities of the items you wish to refund. If you want to refund the total shipping cost select Refund Shipping.
3. Click Refund when you are ready to refund.

Cancel an order 

In some cases, you may need to cancel an order in addition to refunding. By default, Recharge does not cancel an order when refunding so you need to complete this as a separate action. The reverse is true as well, canceling an order will not refund the order.

Once an order is refunded, click Cancel Order. 

Issue a refund in Shopify 

Shopify requires that all purchases made via third-party apps be refunded directly in the app. If you attempt to refund using the refund button in Shopify, you may receive a "transaction requires a gateway" error or an e-mail indicating that the refund did not process. You will need to refund the payment directly through Recharge, though there is a solution to refund in Recharge via Shopify's order page.

When the order is in Shopify, click More actions and select Refund Recurring Order from the drop-down list.

On the following page, confirm if you would like to proceed with processing a full refund. You will also have the option of canceling the order in addition to the refund on this page.

Issue a refund through your payment processor 

You can also issue refunds directly through your payment processor. However, if you refund through the payment processor, this information will not sync back to Recharge, which means that you will not be able to update the order status and the refund information will not be present in your reporting. We only suggest refunding through your payment processor directly in certain situations, such as:

• If the payment already shows as refunded in Recharge but not refunded in the payment processor.
• If you use Authorize.net and you need to issue a partial refund.
• If the order was created on a different subscription platform, issuing a refund cannot be performed through Recharge.