Start with the audit. Then $9, $19 or $49.

Return Owl reconciles Shopify returns and refunds. It finds the money returns leave behind — failed refunds, returns never refunded, refunds never restocked — and turns each finding into a case with an exact amount, an evidence ledger and a statement of what remains unknown. You and your accountant review the evidence; every real-world action stays in Shopify.

No. Return Owl uses read-only Shopify scopes and has no workflow that issues refunds, edits orders or adjusts inventory. When a case needs attention you open the original Shopify order and act there. The app records your local review outcome; Shopify stays the source of truth.

Neither. The product is reconciliation: specific findings, exact money and an accountant-ready record. The Returns tab is supporting proof — return-adjusted sales, dollars at risk, top leaking products and reasons, and a money-at-risk trend — not the headline. Trends never replace a case.

A case is one reviewable finding: the observed facts, the exact amount and currency where relevant, the evidence ledger, an uncertainty statement, a class and, where relevant, the expected workflow. You resolve it with a recorded outcome, dismiss it, or snooze it.

Expected workflows are classified from positive evidence: exchange, store credit, instant refund or refund before receipt, keep-it/damaged, manual gateway, cancellation fee and intentional no-restock. At least two dismissals in ninety days can support a pattern suppression. Expected cases stay visible and exportable; they are simply out of the default Needs attention queue.

The free audit reads roughly the last 60 days of order activity available under approved read-only scopes. From install onward, history accumulates up to that published horizon. Raw operational evidence is retained for up to 180 days, and cases and identity-free daily aggregates for up to 730 days.

Every amount carries its own currency, and money is compared and summed exactly, without floating-point rounding. The shop currency is the accounting currency; nothing is summed across currencies. An alert rule minimum amount is stored in the shop currency and compared only with that currency.

Shop identity, granted scopes and settings; normalized order, refund, return, exchange, transaction, line and product evidence; scan progress, cases, review outcomes, saved views and suppressions; alert recipient emails after confirmation; and delivery bookkeeping. It does not request or store customer names, addresses, phone numbers, customer emails or payment credentials.

No. Webhooks are treated as refresh signals only, and authoritative reads replace normalized evidence. There is no secondary raw-payload data lake.

Disconnect removes Return Owl data and leaves Shopify untouched; the one-time audit entitlement and billing ledgers remain as commercial records. Uninstall marks the store pending deletion and purges Return Owl data after a forty-eight-hour grace period. Shopify’s shop-redaction callback deletes immediately and idempotently.

No advertising trackers, behavioural analytics or tracking pixels. The site stores only your colour-theme preference. The contact form sends the details you type to Return Owl and to the notification address; the privacy policy states exactly what is kept.

Every store’s normalized evidence is strictly isolated by tenant on secure cloud infrastructure, contains zero customer PII, and expires automatically on the published retention schedule. Redacted or deleted records are permanently suppressed so they are never re-ingested.

One free, one-time, read-only audit of your last 60 days, showing total dollars at risk and your top three findings before any paywall. It is not an ongoing free tier: monitoring, alerts, saved views and ongoing case work require Starter, Growth or Scale. A disconnected or reinstalled store does not receive a second audit.

Starter is $9 a month, Growth $19 and Scale $49, each with a fourteen-day trial administered by Shopify. Billing, invoices, taxes and cancellation are Shopify-managed. The app displays plan, trial and usage; it offers no in-app purchase.

Distinct orders. An order is counted once, in the UTC month of its Shopify creation time. Retries, rescans, webhook replays and refreshes never count it again, and older orders in the initial history scan do not touch the current month's allowance.

Only first-time detail analysis for unseen current-month orders pauses. Counting continues, and existing cases, returns evidence, exports, alerts, privacy workflows and settings all remain available. Eligible paused work catches up in bounded passes after an upgrade or month change. Downgrades delete nothing.

Accountant pack CSV is included from Growth; PDF is Scale. Growth also adds the canceled-order check, the full Returns blocks, the money-at-risk trend, period comparison, ROI proof and escalation rules. Every paid plan includes the core money checks, Needs attention queue and queue CSV.

Sync mode and interval, alert rules and recipients, plan usage, saved views, suppressions, the store data export, privacy request downloads and disconnect. Settings state the store domain, timezone, audit window, granted read-only scope and first-connection date. Only one refresh runs at a time.

Yes. Queue CSV covers the whole filtered queue, not just the page on screen. The accountant pack writes one row per finding. Returns analysis CSV follows the same coverage rule. All refuse while coverage is incomplete. The full store-scoped export follows its own completeness rules.

You define rules per case type: instant, a daily digest at 09:00 in the store timezone, a Monday weekly digest stating dollars at risk and the top three cases, or escalation on age or amount. Recipients confirm by email before receiving anything and can unsubscribe independently. The delivery log records intended, dispatched, failed and uncertain attempts.

There is no promised response-time SLA. Messages are reviewed as operating capacity allows, with security, privacy and access concerns prioritised. Including your myshopify.com domain and a case ID makes a review faster. Do not send customer contact details or payment data.