No matter how good your product is, at some point you'll have to refund an order. In just about any e-commerce system, you can manually log in to your payment gateway such as PayPal or Stripe and reverse the charges. That works, but it's tedious and, if you have anyone helping you, you'll have to give them access to your payment gateway, which not every store owner will feel comfortable with.
WooCommerce can do refunds directly from the order screen. This is a huge time saver because you don't have to go into the payment gateway. It also reduces errors because you're clicking on the Refund button from within the order itself instead of refunding a charge in the payment gateway, which you would have to cross-reference.
Most payment gateways support refunds directly on the order page. Both PayPal and Simplify Commerce support these refunds. So do Stripe and many other popular gateways.
You'll need an order in your store—preferably one created using a gateway that supports refunds on the order page. I'll be refunding a payment made through Stripe.
An order can be refunded from the order page in WooCommerce by performing the following steps:
- From the WordPress admin, go to WooCommerce | Orders.
- Click on one of your orders that was processed by a gateway that supports refunds.
- If you scroll down the Order Items panel, you'll see a list of items, at the bottom of which is a Refund button.
- Once you click on the Refund button, a new panel will slide open.
- You can enter the full amount or a partial amount in the Refund amount field.
- You can optionally fill in the Reason for refund field. This is logged along with the refund for your own information and won't be shared with the customer.
- Click on the button that does not say Refund manually. My button says Refund $40.00 via Stripe.
- A pop-up window will confirm the refund. Click on Ok.
A loading icon will appear for a moment while all of the data is refreshed on the page. Then you're done.