How to disable the WooCommerce Refund Email from Sending to Admins/Store Owners

Hi there!

WooCommerce does not send an email to the site admin when an order is refunded, it only sends to the customer.

I installed WP Mail Logging to confirm and refunded an order and only the customer email is sent;

Link to image: https://d.pr/i/sO6Pft

Could you please share a copy of your site’s System Status? You can find it via WooCommerce > Status.
Select “Get system report” and then “Copy for support”.? Once you’ve done that, paste it here in your response.

After further investigation, I’m finding that when you refund or reverse a charge that was made via PayPal checkout, an email is sent to the site administrator saying that an order was refunded/reversed. This email is automatically sent if you have PayPal IPN enabled, which is necessary for the plugin to function 100% properly. There is code in the plugin that triggers this email to the admin, but there is no way to turn off the email in the plugin settings.

Ah! I was able to replicate that as well.

I had a look at the code that does this and it is not something you can just disable – https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce-gateway-paypal-express-checkout/blob/c7476dd895713a022e5083596a01f024e3d6cc1e/includes/class-wc-gateway-ppec-ipn-handler.php#L247-L264

We highly recommend contacting one of the services on our Customizations page to see if they can modify the PayPal Checkout plugin for you

Looks like WooCommerce needs to modify this for everyone. I tried to bring this up to WooCommerce support and they just said “post it to WooIdeas or post on the WP stack exchange” instead of suggesting to actually fix.

Looks like others have posted this to the wooideas on this: https://ideas.woocommerce.com/forums/133476-woocommerce/suggestions/39549343-allow-users-to-turn-off-refund-emails-sent-to-the

Hey @ijas0n

I found the chat you had with us and where it was suggested to post in StackExchange and will bring that up with them.

Since this is not actually sent by WooCommerce but rather PayPal Checkout, you could post in the forums there, but I am afraid you will get the same response, reach out to a developer to customize it for you or post to the Ideas Board.

For more WooCommerce specific developer help, there is also the Advanced WooCommerce Facebook Group, along with our WooCommerce Slack Community.

Thanks Etienne, since this isn’t specific to just my install, it affects everyone using PayPal with WooCommerce, I thought this would be something that would get more attention to be fixed in an upcoming version of the plugin, but I keep getting bounced around.

WooCommerce Support says to post to stack exchange and woo ideas.

WooIdeas already has it on their board and probably won’t get any attention.

Stack Exchange refused to let me post cause it’s a 3rd party plugin.

www.ads-software.com (here) suggests to go to PayPal Forums, Facebook, or Slack.

I’m just getting a bit dizzy. Since this is a WooCommerce plugin made by WooCommerce, I would expect WooCommerce support to have a response like “thank you, we’ve verified this issue, and have this in our queue for our developers to fix.”.

But instead I keep getting bounced around the internet to post everywhere. I know I can hire a developer to fix this, I have lots on my team, but where our client is just dealing with the emails for now, and it seems like this should be a probably for the devs of the plugin to fix, we didn’t feel it was our problem to need to fix.

Anyway, we can close this thread. I appreciate your time to respond. Here’s hope that the plugin will get some updates to resolve this in the future.

Thanks for your feedback, this is not a bug or a problem, but a feature request and the Ideas Board is the best place for that.

As I have mentioned, if you would like to get this changed for that one client, one of your developers should be able to help.

I would probably disagree and call it a bug and a problem. It’s sending refund emails to admins with no way to turn it off, where WooCommerce doesn’t normally do this. But if the client complains more, I’m sure we’ll either fix it ourselves or hire a dev to do this. Thanks.