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How do member-generated orders and rewards work when a return, cancellation, and/or refund happens?
How do member-generated orders and rewards work when a return, cancellation, and/or refund happens?
Shelby Baldwin avatar
Written by Shelby Baldwin
Updated over a week ago

Note: We use "Program" and "Member" as label-agnostic terms to refer to any marketing you are using Buzzbassador to facilitate, whether you refer to it as an affiliate program, influencer marketing, ambassador program, referral program, creator partnerships, brand reps, partner program, etc.

For refunded, payment pending, partially paid, partially refunded, or otherwise unsuccessful Shopify orders, the order status & amount will update accordingly in Buzzbassador and the reward will be deducted accordingly. For example, if an order is fully refunded, the reward will reduce to $0. If an order is partially refunded (let's say 50%), then 50% of the reward will be removed.

So, as long as the order is being processed through Shopify, the order's total and member's reward will be automatically updated in the event the order is cancelled, refunded, or partially refunded before the reward has been issued and sent to the member.

Keep in mind that in certain cases where you have an order that was cancelled, but not technically refunded, the order will still show up as a fully paid order in Buzzbassador (seeing as the order amount was not changed in Shopify). All you need to do is manually decline the reward to signify that the reward for that order will not be processed.

How can setting a Reward Processing Period help with this?

The purpose of the Reward Processing Period is to protect yourself from losing money on your paid rewards due to fraudulent orders, refunds, etc. While we recommend setting your Payout Processing Period to 30 days (or to the same amount of days as your returns and refund policy allows for) what you set it to is fully up to you!

For instance, if your refund policy is 30 days, you can delay your members' rewards by 30 days, meaning that their payout will not be "Due" until after the last day that the order could be refunded. This will ultimately prevent members from getting rewarded for refunded orders. Once a payout has been issued to your meber specifically via PayPal, there is no way to retrieve it (due to PayPal's policies).


If you need any further help, please don't hesitate to send us a chat at the bottom right corner of your app screen, or email us at [email protected].

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