If you want to refund a customer part of the purchase price due to a minor defect, without a return or exchange, it's important to record this correctly for accounting purposes. The following article walks you through the recommended process, which ensures that VAT is displayed correctly and your stock level is not incorrectly adjusted.
The regular refund process as part of returns is described in a separate article.
Step-by-step guide for partial refunds
To ensure that VAT is displayed correctly on the credit note even in the case of partial refunds, proceed as follows:
1. Open the order
Open the relevant order in your Shopify Admin and click Edit.
2. Set the amount to be refunded
Move your cursor to the price of the desired product and click the icon that appears there.
Here you can now select either a fixed or a percentage discount amount and specify a reason. Then click Done.
You now see the new, discounted price. Then click Update order on the right. If the order has already been paid, you'll see on the left the amount you need to refund to the customer.
With some payment methods, refunds are processed with a delay and are initially in the Pending status. If the refund amount differs from the amount suggested by Shopify, temporary discrepancies between the totals in Shopify and Pickware may occur. These automatically align once the refund has been completed.
3. Create the credit note
Now switch to your Pickware Admin. You can now create the credit note for this order as usual. The discount will be displayed correctly on the document.
To ensure your credit note meets all legal requirements, make sure the document has been configured accordingly beforehand. Please follow the steps described here. You can find out how to create a credit note in this article.
4. Process the refund in Shopify
If the order has already been paid, a refund must finally be processed in Shopify.
Restriction with certain discount types
With certain discount types — e.g. automatic discounts with a fixed amount — Shopify does not allow subsequent editing of the order line items. In this case, the message Du kannst diesen Artikel aufgrund des angewendeten Rabatts nicht bearbeiten appears when editing the order. The step-by-step guide described above cannot then be applied.
Partial refund via return and exchange product
If editing the order is blocked by a discount, you can implement the partial refund via the return process:
Return the affected product in the Shopify Admin.
Add an exchange product (the same product).
Discount the exchange product by the amount you want to refund to the customer.
Process the return: refund the amount and restock the returned product. At the same time, release the exchange product.
Fulfill the exchange product.
Create the credit note in the Pickware Admin.
The credit note will then contain both the original discount and the refund discount.
For more details on the exchange process, see How does exchanging products work in connection with Pickware?