Here’s my problem and what I’m trying to do:
Problem: There is confusion on who owns what. When you do a contact search and limit it by which products they have, contacts who have refunded that product still show up in the search. I guess because that purchase is part of their record. However, I need a way to filter out people who’ve refund their purchases. And I need to be able to use this information in several ways. Adding a tag to a contact who’s refunded seems like the most versatile way to do that, but I can’t find a way to automatically tag someone who refunds a product.
What I Want to Do: When one of our employees issues a refund, a person is automatically tagged as having refunded. That tag can then be used in a host of ways. For instance, we use PlusThis to create custom audiences in facebook for our ads. When someone buys one of our products, they get automatically added to one of our Facebook Custom audience.
But they stay in that audience even if they refund the product. If, however, they received a “refund” tag, I can send them through another PlusThis HTTP Post send to remove them from that audience.
This is just one way I want to automate refunds. But I can’t find a way to do this.
Why not manually tag? Because that is time consuming and prone to human error. It is not ideal.
Any ideas? Thank you.
So a few problems there. The system might be able to indicate when someone has been refunded but it would differentiate between being refunded and being refunded for a specific product. So purchase product a and b and refund product a. While the system knows that it was product a that was refunded, it doesn’t know that you don’t want to see refunded but then, what about when someone also has a not refunded product AND a refunded one. Tags can be raised by conditions but often a http post (api solution) can be the answer for that.
As I see it, automation based on refunds will never really occur for a variety of reasons, but starting with the fact that refunding is a manual process, so therefore, any resulting actions will also be a manual process. We have clients who use note templates to process refund-based automation, which can run those actions and provide a timeline of who, when, and why it was processed.
The other reason that I feel it wouldn’t/shouldn’t be automated is because there are valid reasons why an order could be refunded, yet still be a valid purchase. We have client customers who contact us all of the time because they purchased on the wrong card and need to refund/rebill or they purchased on a payment plan/full pay and meant to select the other option. If automation were enabled for refunds, these people would also be noted as refunded.
The All Sales report can be run by product to see any refunds and export them. We used to be able to filter it by refunds also, but this is no longer available. Some of the 3rd party reporting apps may be able to get to this info, so there may be some automation available there.
Lastly, you can filter the One-time Orders report by refund/write-off status, which could be helpful for you also. Despite the name, this report does bring up subscription-based orders, as well as one-time orders.
This is just my $0.02.
Camille
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