What a refund does to profit

When you refund a buyer, two things happen: money goes back to them, and eBay gives you some of its fees back. Baiord tracks both, because only the pair of them tells you what the refund actually cost.

The arithmetic

A refund subtracts the gross — what the buyer received — and adds back the fee credit eBay handed you. The net effect is the cash that actually left you.

Baiord keeps all three numbers rather than only the net: the gross, the credit, and the net. That is how eBay's own report presents it, which means your figures can be checked against eBay's line by line instead of taken on trust.

On the dashboard and the P&L

The row is labelled Buyer refunds (net of fee credits), with a minus sign. It is named for exactly what it is, after an earlier version printed a separate "fee credits" line that read 0.00 and left people thinking eBay had credited nothing.

Two more rows appear when they apply:

• Supplier recoveries, with a plus — money a supplier gave you back. See supplier-refund recovery.
• Returned stock credited back, with a plus — the value of a returned unit you put back on the shelf. See returns and the return shelf.

Cancellations are not refunds

When eBay cancels an order it refunds the buyer, but nothing went wrong and nothing was bought. So a cancellation gets its own line — Cancelled orders (refunded by eBay) — placed between sales and net sales, ahead of any refund figure.

Counting a cancellation as a buyer refund would make a quiet month of cancellations look like a quality problem. It is not one.

Drilling in

The refunds row on the dashboard breakdown is clickable. The sheet behind it lists each refund with the amount the buyer got, less eBay's fee credit, the supplier status, and the word "cancelled order" where that is what it was. The footer totals it net.

Which month it lands in

That is a choice you make once — see which month a refund counts in.