How we track refunds in Segment and Google Analytics
Littledata tracks refunds from your Shopify store and sends them to GA4 and Segment. This page explains what we track (and don't track) for refunds and returns, and where to find refund data.
Refunds are one of several post-purchase events Littledata tracks, along with post-purchase upsells, recurring orders (subscriptions) and cancellations.
What is a refund event?
When you refund an order in Shopify admin, Littledata sends a refund event to your connected destinations. The event includes the details of the original order, so you can match the refund to the purchase.
Littledata finds the original order's tracking IDs (such as the GA4 client ID) from the data it saved when the order was placed. If it can't find them, the refund is still sent, just without those IDs.
Returns vs refunds
Some return apps let customers swap products or get store credit instead of money back. Examples include:
Returnly
AfterShip
Refund Logic
Shopify treats an exchange as an order edit (product A is swapped for product B), not a refund. So no refund event is sent to any destination. A return only creates a refund event when all or part of the order value is refunded to the customer.
Supported refund types
Littledata supports all refund types in Shopify:
Full refund: you refund the whole order. The refund event includes every product in the order, plus details such as shipping.
Partial refund: you refund some items from the order (for example, 3 out of 5). The refund event includes only the refunded products.
Custom refund: you refund a specific amount. The refund event includes no products, only the amount refunded.
Google Analytics 4
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Segment
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Meta Conversions API
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Meta does not have a standard event for refunds, so Littledata does not send refunds to Meta.
Refunds in GA4
Littledata sends a refund event to GA4. To see your refunds, create an exploration in GA4 with the Transaction ID dimension and the Refund amount metric.
Refunds in Segment
Littledata sends an Order Refunded event to Segment. To see it, open the debugger for your Littledata source in Segment and click an Order Refunded event.
Attribution for refunds
In GA4, the source and medium of a refund can be different from the original purchase. The refund uses the customer's most recent session, and it is dated on the day the refund is sent.
For example, customer A buys on day 1 from google / cpc. On day 2, they come back from google / organic. If you then refund the first order, GA4 attributes the refund to google / organic, on the day of the refund.
Why net revenue can differ between GA4 and Shopify
Littledata sends the refund when it happens, so GA4 records it on the refund date, not the original order date. When you compare net revenue for a date range, a refund may land in a different period than its order. This can cause expected differences between GA4 and Shopify reports.
Refunds with multi-currency
If your store sells in more than one currency, the GA4 refund event uses the currency the customer paid in (the presentment currency). The Segment event includes both the store currency amount and the presentment amount and currency.
Turn off refund events
You can stop sending refunds to a destination in the Littledata app.
Disable the event
Click the three-dot menu on the event row, select Disable, then click Save.
For more detail, see Enable or disable events.
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