How return and refund status works?

[Elena@izilla]

Hello,

I am currently in the process of testing an e-commerce site that is using AbleCommerce software. Specifically I am testing Process of the Returned goods and the credit card refund.

My high level test case contains following actions:
1. Customer submits an order and pays with credit card.
2. Customer is not happy with goods and returns them asking for refund
3. Store receives returned goods and issues a refund to the credit card
4. Store owner uses Order Search page to find all the refunded/returned orders.

I am probably missing some setting somewhere, but this what I noticed that doesn't look good for client or issues that site admins might face:

1. When customer returns all items from the order, The order is still shown in their history (which is correct), but Items section is empty it would be nice if user can see the items he returns for historical reference. Also the Status of the order says completed and I can't find a status change trigger that will activate on return action.

2. When the refund is issued for the order, the Payment column in the Order manager still says "Paid" so there is no way to search for orders that have been fully or partially refunded. Also the Customer facing page has order status as completed and I can't find a trigger to set it to something like "Fully Refunded".

Please help me figure this out. Thanks in advance.

[AbleMods]

Pfft that's (almost) a daily occurence for me.

There are two scenarios, both must be accomodated for to have an effective system:

Return for Refund
Create a custom order status. I called my "RMA Request". When the initial request is made, the order is immediately placed into this status. Once details of the RMA are arranged with both the distributor and customer, the order is moved into another status "RMA Pending". That's your list for checking your bank statement each day to see when the distributor credit hits the card.
Once the credit hits your card, your clear to refund the customer. If I cannot post the refund through AC7 i.e. card information is gone or the gateway doesn't allow it, I manually issue through the gateway website and post a manual refund to the order. Order stays put - I want the history in case there are questions.
Once the entire refund process is complete, I move the order to "RMA Completed" order status. Payment status is irrelevant for orders in this status and is ignored.

Return for Exchange
This one is tricker. Sometimes the customer wants the same item, sometimes they want a different item.
If the customer wants a different item, I add that item to their order line items and add additional shipping. The order now has a balance again and the customer is instructed to return to their order, click the "Pay Order" button and pay the new balance. Replacement item is not ordered from distributor until this step is done. Then it goes to "RMA Pending" and "RMA Completed" when shipment is made. Once shipment is made, I add a negative quantity of the returned item to the order, effectively cancelling the original purchase out.
If it's a direct exchange, I just use order status to go from Request, Pending and then Completed using history/notes to track any oddities.

You're only going to be able to issue refunds out of AC7 for a certain period of time if your site is configured to retain CC info. No site (in my opinion) should store someones full credit card details indefinitely. Since that data is required for a refund, it's safer to issue them directly from the gateway processors website interface.
All depends on the RMA volume - some places might want to keep CC info 60 days but that creates a pretty wide window of risk.

Everything I do with orders is managed through a list of 14 different order statuses. This allows me to effectively categorize orders into logical groups for dealing with them.

I deal solely with distributors and carry no stock whatsoever. These procedures probably won't apply if you maintain your own inventory levels.