When a customer's own change leaves them owed money, and you have not turned on automatic refunds, Tacey holds the refund for you. Open the order in Tacey and click Approve refund. Tacey checks the amount with Shopify once more and sends it.
When a refund waits for you
Refunds wait for your approval when Refund customers automatically is off, which is the default. That covers:
a customer who applied a discount after checkout with Apply a discount, and chose to get the difference back to their card;
a customer who swapped to a cheaper product with Replace product.
Refunds from a cancellation, from removing an item, and store credit are not held. They go out when the customer confirms.
How to approve it
Open Orders and choose Needs your action, or click Show these orders on the Home card.
Open the order. At the top you will see A refund is waiting for your approval, with the note: "The customer's own change left them owed money on this order. Nothing has been refunded yet."
Click Approve refund.
That is it. There is no amount to type.
What happens when you click
Tacey does not trust a figure saved earlier. It asks Shopify what the customer is owed right now, then refunds exactly that, once, to their original payment method.
If the customer made more than one change that each left money owed, the page tells you: "This one refund covers more than one change the customer made on this order." You approve once and they get one refund for the total.
The result messages
Message | What it means |
"Refund sent. The ledger records it." | Done. The money is on its way back to the customer. |
"Shopify no longer shows this customer as owed money, so no refund was sent. The ledger records why." | Someone already refunded them, for example by hand in Shopify, or the balance changed. Nothing was sent twice. |
"Shopify did not accept the refund. Nothing was sent; the ledger records Shopify's reason so you can refund by hand." | Refund them yourself in Shopify. The reason is on the order's ledger. |
"Shopify could not be reached. Nothing was recorded as sent; try again in a minute." | A temporary problem. Click Approve refund again shortly. |
"There is no refund waiting on this order any more." | It was already handled. |
Clicking twice is safe
Approving uses the same reference each time, so if you click twice, or two people approve at once, Shopify sends one refund, not two.
What this does NOT do
It never refunds more than the customer paid.
It does not let you change the amount. To refund a different amount, refund by hand in Shopify. If you then click Approve refund, Tacey sees nothing is owed any more and sends nothing.
It does not refund to store credit. An approved refund always goes to the original payment method.
The refund never expires. It waits for you as long as it takes, which is also why it is worth checking Action needed regularly: your customer is waiting too.
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