What this help center covers

These pages are for the people who run returns for a shop — setting up the rules, and dealing with the requests that come in.

Throughout, you means you and your team. Your customer means the person sending something back.

The three things you set up

Almost every “why did it do that?” question comes down to one of three layers:

Your policies decide whether someone is allowed to return something at all — how long they have, what’s covered by a warranty, which products and people are blocked.
Your options decide what they can ask for — money back, store credit, a swap, spending the credit with you, or keeping the item.
Your workflows change both of those for specific situations, and handle what happens after a request arrives.

Policies set the boundaries. Options fill them in. Workflows are where you write the exceptions.

New to this? Read How a return works. It follows one request from start to finish and is the quickest way to make sense of everything else.
A customer is stuck? Why an item can’t be returned lists the six checks in the order they run. Work down it and you’ll find the cause.
Someone’s querying an amount? How refunds are worked out shows where every number comes from.
Drowning in requests that need no thought? Workflows is how you stop looking at them.

Each page stands on its own, but this order builds up: