Issue Refunds as Store Credits in WooCommerce: A How-To Guide

Issuing store credits instead of refunds in WooCommerce can help overcome any potential revenue loss from refunds in your store. Learn how to set up the same using a WooCommerce gift card plugin.

Automatically issuing refunds using the original payment method often leads to revenue loss for your business. On the other hand, providing store credits can guarantee that customers return to your WooCommerce store to redeem their credits.

But how do you set it up? How can you offer store credits automatically upon issuing refunds rather than manually creating and emailing custom credit vouchers for customers? Let’s look into this in detail.

In order to issue store credits to your customers, you should first set them up in your store. The core WooCommerce functionality doesn’t provide you with this feature. Thus, your best bet is to integrate a plugin supporting WooCommerce store credits.

There are two main ways to provide store credits to your WooCommerce customers: you can either manually email a store credit voucher with a redeemable code or credit the amount to the user’s account balance directly. In both cases, you will need an external tool to generate WooCommerce store credit refunds in your store.

To email store credit as a refund in WooCommerce, you’ll first need to install and activate the premium Smart Coupons for WooCommerce plugin. Beyond setting up store credits, this all-in-one coupon management plugin meets all your WooCommerce coupon needs. It allows you to create advanced discount rules, such as BOGO, sign-up coupons, cart abandonment coupons, next-order discounts, and more.

Here’s how to set up WooCommerce store credit refunds using the WooCommerce coupon plugin

1. Install Now and Activate the WooCommerce Smart Coupons plugin.
2. Go to Smart Coupons > Store Credits > Email store credit. This is where you can set up the details for the refund.
3. Input the email address(s) in the corresponding field. To send store credits to multiple customers, separate email addresses with commas.
4. Enter the amount you would like to provide as store credit refund.
5. Customize the remaining settings and click on Send email. The store credit coupon will be sent instantly to the customer’s email address, which they can redeem for future purchases.

To give store credits instead of refunds, you need to first install and activate the WebToffee’s WooCommerce Gift Cards plugin. This plugin offers several useful features, including user credit management, unlimited gift card creation, and customizable gift card products.

Now, let’s explore how to issue store credit refunds in your WooCommerce store using the Gift cards for WooCommerce plugin.

Steps to Issue WooCommerce Refunds as Store Credits,

1. Go to WooCommerce > Orders and click on the order that you want to refund.
2. Click on the button named Refund.

3. This will add text fields below the quantity and total in the item table. Specify the number of items or the price to be refunded.

4. Once you select the item or the amount to be refunded, click on the button Refund to store credit.

This amount will be automatically added to the customer’s store credit. You can cross-check if the amount is credited by going to Gift Cards > Manage user credits and clicking on View details corresponding to the required user.

Your customers can see the credit acquired by going to their My Account > Store credit.

The customers will also be notified of the WooCommerce refund to store credit in the refund email that WooCommerce sends out to customers.

That’s it, there’s no need for additional configuration to enable refunding as store credits in WooCommerce. This feature will enable for all future refunds.

Offering store credits instead of actual refunds has several benefits, not just for you but also for your customers. Some of the key benefits include good old-fashioned convenience and flexibility for both parties involved.

For store owners, this technique would help with retaining customers and reducing return costs. These costs often include fees from payment gateways for processing transactions.

In the case of customers, store credit refunds guarantee immediate fund transfer and therefore immediate purchase power. Also, such refunds ensure better value for money to the customers.

Let’s consider a scenario to understand this better. Say your customer purchased a shirt for $X for which they paid $X + $Y (here, $Y will be the convenience chargers that the banks or payment gateways charge). But they want to return it and repurchase the shirt in a different size. So, instead of refunding $X (for which you might get charged) to the customer, you can offer $X as store credit.

This would eliminate the need for paying $Y (by customers) again during the repurchase. This is because the customer will be using the store credit and is not employing any payment gateways in the process. This helps to cut down costs for both you and the customer.

Store credit refunds may not be appropriate in all situations. You will have to make rational decisions on when to offer such refunds by taking into consideration the requirements of the users.

For instance, store credits would be a wonderful opportunity to retain new customers in your store. Say, if you have to issue refunds for a user who has never previously purchased from you, you can offer store credits to ensure that they will return to your store.

However, that might not be the case if the customer has previously expressed any dissatisfaction. For example, if the customer complains about the quality of the product or service, issuing a full refund via the payment method might be necessary to pacify them and save your store from negative reviews.

So, you will have to weigh in different factors such as customers’ needs and your business demands to make a decision on missing store credit refunds.

Communicating about the refund process and how customers can then use the store credits accrued so far would go a long way in setting up a great customer relationship.

With the WebToffee WooCommerce Gift Card plugin, such alerts will be automatically sent out to customers once the refund has been processed. Since the credit is refunded to the store credit balance itself, the refund process is almost instantaneous and this allows customers to utilize the credits without any delay.

Directly issuing store credit refunds in WooCommerce is an important feature that has a very high significance. The proper usage of this option can result in better customer satisfaction, improved revenue, and the soaring popularity of your WooCommerce platform.

Though WooCommerce store credit refunds can be volatile at times, the proper utilization of such a feature guarantees better store performance. The WebToffee WooCommerce Gift Cards plugin and the Smart Coupons plugin enable you to offer store credit refunds effortlessly, requiring no additional setup or effort.

Additionally, these plugins help you communicate store credit refunds to customers through WooCommerce refund emails.

That’s it, folks! We encourage you to use our store credit refund techniques to enhance customer service in your WooCommerce store!