Free calculator
What do refunds really cost your Shopify store?
Not the refunded amount — every brand accepts that. The two costs nobody puts a number on: the hours your team spends processing refunds, and the refunds granted outside your own written policy. Move the sliders.
Every year, refunds cost you
$33,024
on top of the $172,800 you refund to customers — which is the price of doing business. This is the part that isn't.
- Support time384 hours a year
- $12,288
- Refunds against your own policy12% of refunded value
- $20,736
- Refunds handled240 per month
- 2,880 a year
Appease costs $3,000 a year at the founding rate — about 11.0× what those refunds cost you now.
Connects read-only to Shopify · 60 seconds · no card
The three costs of a refund
1. The money back
Unavoidable and correct. A customer who gets a fair refund buys again more often than one who never had a problem. This is not the number to attack.
2. The time
Every refund is a ticket a person reads, a policy they half-remember, a decision, and a click in Shopify admin. Five to ten minutes each. At a few hundred refunds a month that is a part-time job nobody hired for, spent almost entirely on cases where the answer was never in doubt.
3. The leakage
This is the one that surprises founders. Your policy says store credit for a change of mind, but the agent issued cash. It says refunds over $200 need sign-off, but forty of them went out unreviewed. It says two refunds per customer per quarter, and one customer is on their fifth. Nobody did anything wrong on purpose — a human under queue pressure takes the fastest route to a closed ticket, every time.
Want the real number instead of the model?
Connect Shopify read-only and the audit reads your last 90 days of orders and refunds, then itemizes every refund that broke your policy — order number, amount, and which rule it broke. It takes about a minute, costs nothing, and you can revoke access from your Shopify admin the moment it's done.
Run my free auditCommon questions
What does a refund actually cost a Shopify store?
Three things: the refunded amount itself, the support time to process it — typically 5 to 10 minutes per ticket at a loaded cost of $25 to $40 an hour — and the refunds that get granted outside your own written policy. The first is the cost of doing business. The other two are avoidable, and together they usually run into five or six figures a year for a mid-size brand.
What is refund leakage?
Refund leakage is money paid out that your own policy said should not have been paid: cash refunds where the policy says store credit, refunds above the amount that is supposed to need a manager's sign-off, and repeat refunders past the limit you set. It happens because a support agent under time pressure will almost always choose the fastest path to a closed ticket.
What is a normal refund rate for a DTC brand?
Most direct-to-consumer brands sit between 3% and 10% of orders, depending on category. Apparel runs highest because of sizing; consumables run lowest. If you're above 12%, the problem is usually upstream of refunds — sizing, product photography or shipping damage.
How accurate is this calculator?
It's a model, and it's only as good as the six numbers you give it. The free audit is the accurate version: it connects read-only to Shopify, reads your last 90 days of real orders and refunds, and itemizes every single refund that broke your policy — with the order number and the amount.
Can refunds be automated safely?
Routine ones, yes — a small refund for a damaged item within the return window is a rule, not a judgement call. The risk lives in the exceptions, which is why Appease resolves what fits your written policy and sends everything else to you as a one-tap approval. New accounts run in shadow mode first, reporting what they would have done without touching an order.