Every refund in Shopify carries a small decision: Restock. It is a checkbox on the refund screen, ticked per line item. Ticked, the unit goes back into sellable inventory at the location you choose. Unticked, the money goes back to the customer and the unit goes nowhere.
That second path is the most common way a store ends up with stock it cannot see.
What actually happens when Restock is left unticked
The order is refunded and looks handled. The customer has their money. The item may well be sitting on a shelf in your stockroom. But your inventory count still reflects the sale, so Shopify believes the unit is gone. If you carry one of that SKU and it comes back unrestocked, your store shows zero and you stop selling something you own.
Nothing flags this. There is no warning, no report, and no later prompt. The refund is complete from Shopify's point of view.
Why it gets missed
- The Restock checkbox is unticked by default on some refund paths, particularly partial refunds and refunds issued from the order timeline rather than through a return.
- Whoever processes refunds is usually thinking about the customer, not the shelf.
- The item often arrives back days after the refund was issued, so the person who refunded it never sees the parcel.
- New staff learn the refund screen by doing, and nobody tells them about the checkbox.
How to find the ones you already have
Shopify records, for every refund, whether each line was restocked. That record is readable through the API, so the audit is mechanical: for each refund in a window, list the lines where the restock quantity is zero, and price them at the unit cost or sale price.
Done by hand for a quarter of refunds it is tedious. The pattern to look for on each refund is a refunded quantity with no matching inventory adjustment on the same day. Where those two disagree, you have a candidate.
A worked example
Take a store that issued 40 refunds in 60 days. Suppose 7 of them were processed without Restock ticked, covering 9 units at an average sale price of $75. That is $675 of sellable stock the store believes it does not have. Not a catastrophe, but not nothing, and it repeats every quarter until the process changes.
Putting it right
For each case you find, the fix is one of three things: restock the unit if it is on the shelf, write it off if it is damaged or missing, or mark it resolved if it was handled some other way. Recording the decision matters as much as making it, so the same case does not resurface next time you look.
StockReclaim runs this check continuously and lists each case with its order, item, value and age. The headline figure is free; see how the audit works or the plans.