When something goes wrong before it ships

This lesson prepares you to: Handle a cancellation, an out of stock item and a bad address, knowing what each costs.

The buyer wants to cancel

Before you ship, a buyer's request is a cancellation and you have 24 hours to respond. Silence auto refunds in full.

If you are going to refund it anyway, do it promptly. The refund happens either way, and doing it yourself is the difference between a buyer who had a fine experience and one who had to wait out a clock.

You cannot fulfil it

You oversold, the item is damaged, the supplier failed. Refund it yourself rather than letting it sit. A refund you issue and a refund the clock issues cost you the same in fees, and only one of them reads as a shop that is paying attention.

A refund does cost you something real. Stripe does not return its processing fee when an order is refunded, so Helm retains a share of the commission to cover it: 20% of the commission, capped at 5 dollars. That is a cost recovery rather than a penalty, and it is the same approach TikTok Shop takes.

The address is wrong

Helm does not validate addresses, so a bad one reaches you intact. There is no correction tool and no way to edit the address on the order.

Contact the buyer. If it cannot be resolved, refunding before you post is far cheaper than posting to an address that will fail.

What a refund does to your standing

Refunded orders feed the refund rate that sets your payout tier. Above 5% across the rolling window and you drop to introductory. Below 10 orders in the window it is not counted at all, so early mistakes do not pin you.

That threshold is deliberate. A seller whose very first order was refunded used to sit at 100% and stay on the longest hold until roughly twenty clean orders diluted it. Their worst day was also their first day, and it was changed for that reason.

What a refund does not do

There is no strike, no warning, no suspension and no shop health score. Helm has no seller standards framework at all today. The refund rate feeding your payout tier is the only automated judgement of your shop that exists, and track 9 covers it in full.