When eBay refunds a buyer, you are out the sale and the cost of the item. Usually your supplier owes you that cost back. Money quietly never chased is the most common leak in a supplier-ships-direct business, so Baiord asks you about every single refund.
The question
On each refund: "Did you receive a supplier refund?" Four answers.
| Answer | What it records |
|---|---|
| Yes, received £X | Status Received. The amount defaults to the order's cost of goods. Profit updates immediately. |
| Expecting it | Status Expecting. Nothing is credited to profit — it is tracked as outstanding and chased. |
| Partial… | Status Partial. Opens an amount box, pre-filled with the order's cost. The amount is required. |
| No | Status Not refunded. "Recorded — the loss stands." |
Answering recomputes that order's profit on the spot and clears the question from your notifications. No answer is final: any row can be reopened with Arrived? or Change and answered again, and the profit follows.
The four figures
| Figure | Exactly what it counts |
|---|---|
| Recovered to date | Everything your suppliers have actually paid back — the received and partial amounts added up. |
| Still recoverable | For each order with an unanswered or expecting refund, the buying cost less anything already recovered on it — counted once per order. |
| Overdue from suppliers | How many expecting refunds are now late. |
| Written off | The buying cost on orders where you said nothing is coming. Your own verdict, and the honest name for that money is "written off", not "outstanding". |
Why "still recoverable" is counted per order, not per refund. One order can carry several refund rows — a partial refund, then another, or a refund and a return case. If each row claimed the full buying cost, Baiord would tell you you are owed double. So it is capped at what the order actually cost you.
When something becomes overdue
- If you gave an expected date, it is overdue the day after it passes.
- Otherwise, 14 days after eBay refunded the buyer.
Only Expecting refunds can be overdue — an unanswered one has not been promised by anyone. An overdue row shows the word overdue in red beside its status, and Baiord raises a notification: "Supplier refund overdue — £X still outstanding on order …".
Cancelled orders are excluded from all of it
A cancelled order never had a buying price, so there is nothing to recover, nothing to chase and nothing to write off. Baiord refuses to record a supplier refund on one. Its refund lives on the Cancelled tab and stays out of every recovery figure.
On your dashboard
A card leads with the headline — "£412.30 recoverable from suppliers", or "Supplier refunds are all settled" when there is nothing — with what you have recovered to date, how many orders there are to chase, and how many are overdue.
One thing to avoid double-counting. If you both record a supplier refund as received and clear the order's buying price, the same money is counted twice — once as a recovery and once as cost removed. The cost history panel warns you when it spots this. Pick one.
This used to be its own page
It was called Profit Protection, with its own chase queue. It was folded into Refunds & Returns because two doors for one job confused people — the answer belongs next to the refund it is about. The old address redirects here.