When a shopper withdraws, their request lands in your returns inbox inside the app, with the 14-day legal deadline already running. From the detail view you mark it as processing, mark the goods as received and process the refund in Shopify; every step is recorded. Here's how the whole flow works.
Where the requests land
In your Shopify admin, open returnEasier and go to the Returns tab. You'll see the inbox with the most recent requests first, paginated 25 at a time. The table has six columns: Date, Customer (name and email), Order, Type, Status and Actions (with the «View detail» link).
The filters and the statuses
Above the table there's a row of filters that combine; click Apply filters to narrow down and Clear to go back to the full view:
- Status: filter by any of a request's 11 statuses.
- Type: returnEasier distinguishes four types —withdrawal, return, exchange and warranty—. By law, withdrawals are the ones with a non-waivable deadline.
- Search: type an email, an order number or the request identifier and the list narrows.
- Date range: set From/To using your store's time zone.
The 11 statuses are, in the legal record of a withdrawal: Pending, Being processed, Not processable, Received, Refunded and Closed (in the commercial flow, «Being processed» and «Not processable» are called Approved and Rejected). On top of those come Exchanged and Credit issued, plus the three for shop-for-exchange: Payment pending, Paid (awaiting receipt) and Exchange expired. Each status carries its own colour so you can spot it at a glance.
A request's detail view
Click View detail to open the request. It gathers everything you need to resolve and to prove you complied, in cards:
- Customer and order: the shopper's and the order's details, with the delivery date: the one the carrier confirms or, if there isn't one, the shipping date («Not confirmed» if there is neither yet).
- Selected products: the items they're returning, with the partial selection already applied if they only withdraw from some.
- Customer photos (Pro+ plans): if they attached images.
- Reason: the text the shopper left (it's optional; they don't have to justify themselves).
- Timeline: the chronology of events from the audit log.
- Integrity: the chained hash that seals the request.
- Metadata: the public ID, the creation and resolution dates, and the Shopify identifiers of the refund or the credit.
- Return label (Scale+): its status and the download; the labels article explains it.
The Legal Flow actions
From the Actions card you resolve the withdrawal (the Legal Flow, clean: it ends in a refund):
- Mark as being processed. You accept the withdrawal for processing; the shopper gets an automatic email with the return shipping instructions. On Scale+ with Sendcloud set up (Return labels), «Mark as being processed + label» also appears, which generates the return label; the button without a label is still available.
- Mark received. When the goods come back to you, you record it.
- Process refund. You click the button and returnEasier instructs Shopify to issue the refund to the original payment method. The button already shows the amount («Process refund (amount)»): the one Shopify suggests for the request's items, the full amount if they withdrew from everything or the part if they withdrew from some. When you click it, a modal shows it to you again and you confirm it with «Refund [amount]». If Shopify rejects the refund, you'll see the error Shopify returns and the request doesn't change status.
- We cannot process… Only in the legal cases that allow it (excluded product, past deadline, order not found…). You give the reason, which is sent verbatim to the shopper by email.
- Resend confirmation. If the shopper says the acknowledgement never arrived, you resend it with its PDF from the Withdrawal confirmation card, without creating a new request. If the acknowledgement was never sent, the card says so («The confirmation email is not on record yet…»), the button is called «Send confirmation» and the timeline shows «Acknowledgement not sent (resend it from this screen)».
When the action sends the email straight away, the app's notice tells you if it could not be sent («Email not sent: …»). The label with its email and sending or resending the confirmation run in the background and do not go through that notice: if the acknowledgement is not recorded as sent, the Withdrawal confirmation card says so.
Important: in a withdrawal the store doesn't «approve» or «reject» —it's a discretionary consumer right—; that's why the language is about processing. A full refund to the original payment method is non-waivable: offering a voucher or an exchange is fine as a freely chosen alternative, never as the only way out. That offer lives in the Commercial Flow, separate from the legal button.
The 14-day deadline, counted by you
The clock to refund starts when you receive the withdrawal notice (when the request is created), not when the parcel arrives: from then you have 14 days. In sales of goods, the law lets you hold the refund until you receive the products or proof that the shopper has returned them, whichever happens first, unless you offered to collect them yourself. The detail view shows the date the request was created («Metadata» card) and the order's delivery date, but it does not calculate the deadline.
Everything is recorded
Every action you take generates an event in the append-only audit log: the app offers no way to edit or delete it, it carries a UTC timestamp and a hash chained to the previous one, which you can check against the hashes in your earlier exports; the confirmation PDF also carries the hash of the request. If a consumer authority asks you for proof, you export the auditable history and hand it over. That traceability is the difference between complying and being able to prove it.