Cancelled order

In plain words

A cancelled order was placed and then called off, by the customer or by the store, usually before it shipped. On Shopify a cancellation cannot be undone, and it may or may not come with a refund.

It should count as no sale at all. Counting it as a sale with a full refund books every cost of an order that never shipped, and the result is a loss that never happened. Counting it as a sale without a refund invents revenue.

Formula

• A cancelled order contributes 0 revenue, 0 cost and 0 profit; it is counted apart as cancelled

Worked example

If the $40.00 bag's order were cancelled and refunded but counted as a sale, it would show a loss of $22.64: every cost, no revenue. Counted correctly it contributes nothing and appears in the cancelled count.

Computed by the margin engine in Offer Suite's own code, in whole cents, from a $40.00 bag of coffee with a $12.00 unit cost.

A cancellation is not a refund

A refund follows a sale that happened: the goods shipped and some or all of the money came back. A cancellation means the sale didn't happen. Shopify records a cancellation with a refund as a refund of every remaining line, which is why the two are easy to confuse in a report.

Using it

Keep cancelled orders out of every margin and conversion figure, and count them separately. A rising cancellation rate on one offer is a signal of its own: it can mean the offer's price or promise is confusing, or that stock ran out for one option.

In Offer Suite

Offer Suite treats an order that carries a cancellation as no sale in both cost views, and counts it separately as a cancelled order. That fix came from its own end-to-end tests.

Source: Offer Suite's money definitions (decision 41), checked against real Shopify orders.