Shopify returns and refunds report: what is coming back, why, and whether it has arrived
A return requested, a return approved and a return received and refunded are three different numbers. Sales figures keep moving until all three are counted in their own column.
Apparel and fashion is the largest single group of Shopify's reviewers on Capterra, at 29% of users there, and apparel is where returns live. An accounting reviewer at a small store wrote in 2023 that "the returns from online sales do not show on the reports until 2 days later; also on the summary report, the returns do not reduce the total payments." The complaint is about timing and stages: a return is a process with steps, and a report that treats it as one event gets the week wrong.
Three stages, three columns
A returns and refunds report for the last four weeks splits every return into exactly one stage:
- return requested: the customer has asked, nothing has shipped back
- return approved: you have said yes, the units are on their way
- received and refunded: the units are back and the money has gone out
Each stage lists product, variant, units returned, refund value, return rate against units sold and the reason the customer gave. A return counts in one stage only, decided by its status and whether its units have been refunded, so nothing is counted twice between the approval and the refund.
Dating the refund
Refund value is dated by the day the refund was issued, not the day of the original sale. That is what makes last week's revenue stop moving: the sale stays in its own week and the refund lands in the week it happened.
The reason column
Return rate per variant, with the reason beside it, is the number you can act on. One variant's sizing problem can run for a season before anyone adds up the reasons by hand; about 40 minutes a week of doing that is what the report replaces.
How Captain Miles does it
Say it in a sentence ("every Monday, returns and refunds per product for the last four weeks, with the reason"). Captain Miles shows the plan before anything runs, then builds the report from the orders, products and variants in your own store, counted the same way each week, with a note on how each number was produced. Your data is used for your store only, never trained on, and deleted within 30 days if you uninstall. The ready-made version is below.