Introduction
When customers return all or part of their order they get their money back. Similarly you, as a store owner, should get your points returned to you as well.
✅ Partial Refunds are not currently available for BigCommerce Merchants.
✅ Order settings are not currently editable for WIX merchants.
Overview
Your points cancellation settings can be found in the Order Settings section of your Smile Admin.
How points are deducted based on order settings
Points are automatically deducted based on which one or more financial status values you choose to configure to return rewards.
This means that when an order’s financial status changes to any of the selected values for cancelling rewards, all the customer's points for that order will be deducted from their balance.
To choose which financial status values trigger a cancellation select your desired status in the dropdown under Cancel rewards when.... While the default (and recommended) setting is to cancel rewards on Refunded orders, you can choose to change or add more values to this list.
Partial points refunds
If an order's status is Partially Refunded in Shopify:
For all orders that have a financial status of Partially Refunded, the amount of points awarded for the amount refunded will automatically be removed from the customer's account and VIP tier placement will be adjusted accordingly. The mapping of Partially Refunded to Cancel or Reward under Order Statuses will be ignored. This means you do NOT need to add Partially Refunded to the Cancel rewards when... dropdown mentioned above.
Example scenarios
If your customer made a purchase today of 1 product at $50 and used a $10 off coupon then they would earn points on the $40 spent on the order. If they return that product, they would get their $40 back and the points earned on that $40 would be removed from their points balance.
If your customer made a purchase of 2 products, $40 and $20, and used a $10 off coupon then they would earn points on the $50 spent on the order. If they return the $20 product, they would get $16.67 ($20 minus 1/3 of the $10 discount) back and the points earned on that $16.67 would be removed from their balance -- they would keep the points earned on the remaining balance of the order. The underlying platform (e.g. Shopify, Big Commerce, etc.) assumes that the discount on an order is applied proportionately across the eligible items on the order -- in our example 2/3rds and 1/3rd respectively.
In both scenarios above the discount coupon used is not returned automatically -- in the second it wouldn't make sense to do that as the customer is still getting a discount on the remaining purchase on the order. In the first scenario you could choose to manually refund those points on a case by case basis.
📋 Notes:
For WIX Merchants, the Refunded and Partially Refunded status may take up to 24 hours to sync over to Smile. So if you've just refunded an order - please allow at least 24 hours for the points to get cancelled from the customer's account in Smile.
This behaviour applies to orders with the Partially Refunded status. Any stores handling returns through store credit will see no change to customer points balances or VIP tier placement, unless they mark the order as Partially Refunded. No notifications will go out to a customer for a partial removal of points for a refunded or returned purchase.
Points cancellation is determined based on the Place an order earning rule in the points program. This means that points will only be cancelled if the original Place an order earning rule by which the customer earned points for their order still exists/is enabled in program. If the original earning rule no longer exists or is disabled at the time of the refund/cancellation, the customer's points will not be cancelled.
Refunded orders and VIP placement
Cancelling rewards for a specific order status also means that these orders will not be counted towards a customer’s VIP tier placement, for both Points and Revenue-based VIP programs. If your customer entered a VIP tier with an order and that order was refunded and the points removed then your customer would no longer be in that VIP tier.
If a customer has redeemed a reward on a purchase, and then later returns the purchase, the redeemed reward will not automatically return to the customers account. In this case you can optionally adjust the customers points balance to reinstate the points spent on the reward that was used.
What's next?
Understanding program settings
Learn more