This guide will give you an understanding of general return policy settings, which are applied to all returns and can be found under Settings → General in the Loop admin.

Use the menu on the left to quickly navigate this article.

Customers often purchase with both a credit card and a gift card, complicating return refunds. Previously, Loop refunded the gift card first before any remaining amount to the credit card. To enhance the customer experience, merchants can now choose which payment method to refund first.

The Refund credit cards before gift cards setting allows merchants to prioritize refunds to credit cards, followed by gift cards and store credit.

In the "Exchanges" section of Return preferences, you can adjust the following settings for exchange orders.

When new exchange orders are sent to Shopify by Loop, you can set a prefix to that order, so it ties it back to the original order number.

• When New order prefix is enabled:

  • Original Shopify order number: #1001

  • Shopify exchange order number with prefix: #EXC-1001-1

  • Shopify exchange of an exchange order number with prefix: #EXC-1001-1-1

• We recommend changing the prefix to "EXC-" or "EX-" to clarify that these are exchange orders.

Note: Disabling New order prefix will force new exchange orders to use unique order numbers. It is not recommended to deactivate this setting.

This setting allows customers to create another exchange from Loop exchange orders:

• When enabled: The return window re-opens with every exchange order

• When disabled: Customers will be limited to one exchange and future return requests will have refund or store credit outcome options

The Limit number of sequential exchanges checkbox allows you to set a limit to the number of sequential exchanges a customer can make. In the example below, with a limit of 3 sequential exchanges, a fourth attempt at a return will result in the customer being limited to refund or store credit outcomes.

Note: Setting this to 0 will prevent any exchange from being placed, even if exchanges are enabled in the return policy and it's the customer's first attempt.

This setting shows and hides products from Shop Now, Advanced Exchanges, and Product Recommendations based on their set availability for the "online store" sales channel in Shopify. Toggle this on if you want Loop to respect the same product visibility rules you've set for your storefront.

For details on how the native exchange flow works and when to use it, visit the Native Exchange Flow article.

For details on how pre-discount credit affects exchange order values, visit the Pre-Discount Credit article.

Controls how Loop handles a variant exchange when the new variant is a different price than the item being returned. Four options are available: Same price only, Same price only, recalculate tax, Charge the difference, and Absorb the difference. Same price only and Absorb the difference are available on all plans; the other two require an Advanced plan or higher plus a Loop + Stripe integration or Shopify invoicing.

Advanced Exchanges has its own separate Price differences setting, configured on the Advanced Exchanges page rather than here. See the Advanced Exchanges article for details.

Choose whether store credit is issued as Store credit (Shopify-native store credit — see the Shopify Native Store Credit article) or Gift card (see the Store Credit Automation article).

Choose what information you would like to display in the notes section of a Shopify gift card issued through Loop.

If toggled on, exchange orders will be discounted by the value of the returned items. If toggled off, the full value of the exchange items will be stated on the order. Learn about Loop Discount configuration recommendations in the Loop Discount article.

Merchants who use Shopify for taxes: On exchange orders, the taxes are undone against the original order. If you use Shopify to calculate tax liability, we recommend keeping this setting toggled on to prevent understating taxes.

Merchants who use a third-party for taxes: For merchants who use a third-party, 90% of the time we find that this setting should still be enabled. To make sure, you should check if taxes are preserved on the original order when an item is marked returned. If taxes are preserved, you may need to disable this setting, or leave it enabled and use the Only add upsell taxes to exchange orders checkbox below.

If you're not sure how your third-party handles taxes on returns, please reach out to your MSM or support@loopreturns.com.

If Add taxes to exchange order items is enabled, taxes will be posted on Shopify exchange order items as seen below.

If Add taxes to exchange order items is disabled, taxes will not be included as seen below.

The "Discounts" section controls how discounts are distributed across exchange order line items. For full configuration details, visit the Discounts article.

• Discount codes — Distribute across discount family / Distribute across order / Do not distribute line item discounts

• Automatic discounts — Distribute across discount family / Distribute across order / Do not distribute line item discounts

• Script discounts — Distribute across order / Do not distribute line item discounts

Visit the Gift Returns article to learn more.

When enabled, customers will be guided to return a gift for an exchange or store credit.

• Gift returns toggle: turn on to enable the gift return flow.

• Gift support email: this email address will receive a form with the customer's order details.

• Gift receipt generator URL: the URL used to generate gift receipts for customers.

• To allow customers to skip order lookup, add the following liquid variables to the end of your Gift Receipt URL in your Shopify Confirmation email.

Visit the EU Right of Withdrawal article to learn more about this toggle and how it affects the return window for EU customers.

In order to make it easier for customers to pull up their order, you can select one or more criteria customers can use to validate their order: Zip code, Email, and Phone number. By default, we have zip code configured if you do not set up the others.

Note: Most merchants select Zip code only.

Enabling Require policy acceptance will make it so that customers have to acknowledge the terms of your return policy before submitting their return. This can help you clearly communicate your return policy to ensure that customers have reviewed it, prevent loss and rejected returns, and reduce inquiries to your support team regarding the return policy.

To configure this, enable the setting and enter the message you'd like to communicate to customers in the message box:

Once enabled, this message will then appear on the Review Page and the customer will have to check the box before they are able to submit the return.

Manage inventory and restock settings here. These will be dependent on how you manage inventory.

Set your threshold by entering a minimum quantity. We recommend a minimum inventory of 5.

• If set to a higher value: more products will appear out of stock during the exchange process, increasing the likelihood of a refund request.

• If set to a lower value: the more out of stock email notifications will be sent out when Loop attempts to process an exchange request, requiring merchant intervention.

• Evaluate the velocity at which products sell, on average, in order to calculate the most appropriate number for your store.

Check the Ignore minimum inventory threshold if Shopify product is set to "continue selling when out of stock" box if you'd like Loop to respect that Shopify variant-level setting rather than enforce your minimum inventory threshold.

In situations when a product is showing as out of stock in the Loop portal when there is available inventory in Shopify, your minimum inventory is likely the culprit and can be adjusted at any time.

Note: The minimum inventory setting only applies to inline, advanced, or Shop Now In-App exchanges. If using Shop Now On-Store, the inventory will reflect what is available on your website.

Note: If Shopify does not track inventory for a given product, Loop will always assume it is in stock.

Enable if Shopify is your inventory source of truth.

• When disabled: You will manage restock return inventory outside of Loop.

• When enabled: You will have the option, within Loop, to restock return inventory to Shopify, using one of two restock types:

  • Shopify: Select this option to directly update Shopify inventory. This is useful for merchants who use Shopify to manage product inventory.

  • Webhook: Select this option to fire the restock Webhook and update Loop's system. This is useful for merchants leveraging third-party tools to manage inventory. See the Restock Webhook article for details.

• Online returns default restocking location: choose which Shopify location (original fulfillment location or another location) restocked online returns default to.

• Automatic restocking checkbox: leave this off unless you want items restocked before all return outcomes are resolved.

  • Regardless of return outcome, every product on the order will be restocked at the same time.

  • For returns without refunds, the products will all be restocked as soon as the last outcome is generated for the customer.

  • For returns where a refund is involved, products will be restocked when the refund is issued to the customer.

Note: If it is important to your team to be able to verify the condition of a product before it is added back to inventory, leave Automatic restocking unchecked. You will still be able to restock through Loop, it just will not happen based on Processing Events.

Restock Restrictions Shopify requires all returns for a refund to be restocked at the same time that the customer gets their refund issued. This results in a few limitations to how you can configure your settings. Loop will block you from configuring anything in a way that will break something, but the restrictions are outlined below.

• If you left restocking through Loop off:

  • These restrictions do not affect you in any way.

• If restocking through Loop is on, and Automatic restocking is off:

  • Processing for refunds will have to match when the restocking is happening. Your processing event for refunds will need to be set to "Manual", so both events can happen concurrently. You can set this in your Return Policy settings. You will not be able to manually provide the outcome to the customer and then manually restock the product later. Outcomes for exchanges and store credit will happen based on the processing event in the return policy, but they will remain open for manual processing.

• If restocking through Loop is on, and Automatic restocking is on:

  • Restocking for refunds will happen at the same time that the return is processed, as dictated by your Return Policy settings. Automatic restocking for returns of any other outcome will continue to happen at the Delivered event, regardless of when they are set to process.

Manage restocking returned inventory when returns are completed through Loop Point of Sale. Toggle this on if you'd like Loop to handle restocking for POS-completed returns the same way it does for online returns.

For more detail, see the Automate Out-of-Stock Exchanges section of the Out-of-Stock Exchanges article.

Loop merchants have the ability to manually turn an out-of-stock exchange into a return for store credit or a refund instead at all times — whether this switch is on or off.

When enabled, this setting will issue a refund for the out-of-stock item and process the return automatically.

Note: This does not work if the processing event is manual.

If you would rather reach out to customers when their exchange item goes out of stock, then change the return, we recommend leaving this off.

• Admin return editing (toggle): allows admins to edit a return after it's been submitted. See the Admin Return Editing article.

• Shopper return editing: allows shoppers to edit their own return. See Returns Management > Shopper experience > Return editing, and the Shopper Return Editing article.

The Final Sale and Exchange Only tags let you control which items are eligible to be returned in the Loop app. To learn more, go to the Product Tags article.

To associate Shopify product tags with eligibility in Loop:

1. Navigate to General > Inventory & operations > Product tags.

2. Enter the appropriate tags:

   1. Exchange only tag: products with this tag will have available outcomes limited to exchange, store credit, and Shop Now.

   2. Final sale tag: products with this tag will have all return outcomes disabled — the item is non-returnable.

3. Save changes.

Warning: Only one product tag is supported in each field. Multiple product tags will not work even if separated by commas. If you would like to configure rules for multiple product tags, then we recommend using Workflows.

Note: Any product tags that are in place at the time of the order will be honored, even if the tag is later removed from the product. If you would like for the product tag to be read at the time of return, this can be supported via Workflows.

I don't want customers to be able to exchange for a particular product variant. Is there a way to hide these variants? If you don't want a particular variant of a product to be available for customers to exchange you can hide that variant from Loop. To do this, add the variant SKU as a tag to the product within Shopify and Loop will hide that variant.

Can the Exchange Shipping Method be dynamic or can customers select which method they want? At this time, we can only configure a fixed shipping method.

I know that exchanges of exchanges can be disabled, but is there any way to automatically make exchanges final sale? There isn't a setting that can make exchanges final sale, but there are some workarounds. Workflows give options for fine-grained controls around disabling return outcomes.

Please reach out to support@loopreturns.com with any additional questions.