Refunds - How to highlight customers that have been refunded
Many customers buy online with an explicit plan to immediately return some or all of their purchased items. Customer returns can often attack your profit margins, cut your conversion rates and ultimately threaten your business.
We can't do anything to identify serial returners that are new to your store, but we can highlight customers that request a refund by applying a Customer tag to their record.
Article Quick Links
- How to tag a customer that has been refunded
- Tag the customer if any part of the order is refunded
- Tag the customer if their order has been fully refunded
- Only tag the customer if their order has been partially refunded
- Will this work with Backdating?
- How do I identify new orders from these customers?
- Need any help?
How to tag a customer that has been refunded
To identify customers that have been refunded, you will need to select our when a refund is issued trigger when creating your workflow. This trigger will then listen out for the refunds/create a webhook from Shopify:
When you authorize ANY type of refund on an order in your Shopify store, whether it be a line item refund, a shipping cost refund, or even an ad hoc refund, this trigger will be fired and your workflow will be executed.
Let's explore the available options you have for configuring the rest of your refund workflow.
Tag the customer if any part of the order is refunded
To tag a customer when ANY type of refund has been made on an order, whether full or partial, scroll down to the Fixed Tags section of the workflow builder and type in the name of the tag that you'd like to be applied:
That's all you need to do to set this up, except of course to give the workflow a name and hit Save.
Tag the customer if their order has been fully refunded
If you'd like to apply a tag to customers who request a full refund on their order, then you will need to configure some additional criteria within your workflow.
The Financial Status of the order criteria can be found within the Transaction category in the Select criteria pop-up window:
From the available options in the Financial Status criteria, select the (refunded) option:
Scroll down to the Fixed Tags section of the workflow builder and type in the name of the tag that you'd like to be applied to these Customers:
That's all you need to do to set this up, except of course to give the workflow a name and hit Save.
Only tag the customer if their order has been partially refunded
If you'd like to apply a tag to customers who request a partial refund, where only certain items have been refunded, then you will need to configure some additional criteria within your workflow.
Again, the Financial Status of the order criteria can be found within the Transaction category in the Select criteria pop-up window:
From the available options in the Financial Status of the order criteria, select the (partially_refunded) option:
Scroll down to the Fixed Tags section of the workflow builder and type in the name of the tag that you'd like to be applied to these Customers:
That's all you need to do to set this up, except of course to give the workflow a name and hit Save.
Will this work with Backdating?
If you'd like to tag previous customers that meet your selected criteria for this refund workflow, then why not run a backdating job?
Workflows created using this trigger will also work when backdated, however, it will only work if financial_status of the order is set to either partially_refunded or refunded.
How much does backdating cost?
How do I identify new orders from these customers?
Now that you know which of your Customers have previously received refunds, how can that help you with new orders that come into your store?
With our Order Tagger - we have a criteria that can Tag orders that have been placed by a Customer who's customer record in Shopify contains a specific Customer Tag.
In Order Tagger, we would create a workflow to tag any order that was created if the Customer has a tag of, let's say, Partially Refunded:
Choose a tag to apply to the order, e.g. Previously Refunded, so that you and your team are aware that the Customer who placed this order is likely to return some if not all of the items purchased:
You may then wish to handle this order in a slightly different way than normal.