Shopify Store Credit: How It Works and Where It Stops

Store credit is a balance held against a customer account. The customer signs in, and at checkout it appears as a payment method alongside the others.

Shopify lists the obvious uses: goodwill gestures, retention, marketing campaigns, and rewards or referral incentives. The less obvious one is returns, which is where most stores meet it first.

Where it can be spent:

• Your online store
• Point of Sale — see Shopify POS setup if you are running both
• Shop

No other sales channel accepts it. That is worth knowing before you promise a customer their credit works everywhere.

Three conditions have to be true for the customer to actually use it:

• They are signed in through customer accounts or Shop Pay. There is no code to type.
• You have switched on Apply store credit in the Payments section of Shopify Checkout.
• They are not on legacy customer accounts, where store credit is unavailable. If you are still on legacy and planning to move, note that customizations built for legacy accounts have to be rebuilt with apps.

Store credit is on by default, and you can hide it under Settings > Customer accounts.

One wrinkle for B2B: store credit works there and can be added to company locations, but credit added to a customer profile is usable only on the D2C online store, not the B2B store. Those are two different balances.

None of these are bugs. They are all documented, and every one of them has surprised somebody.

It is all or nothing. Only the full store credit amount can be applied as a payment method. A customer with $200 of credit and a $40 basket cannot choose to spend $40 of it. This is the single biggest difference from how most people assume store credit behaves.

There is a ceiling per account. You can only issue store credit amounting to less than $15,000 USD on a single customer account. Fine for most stores, a real constraint for high-value B2B or a large goodwill settlement.

Draft orders and edited orders are out. Store credit cannot be applied to either. If you are placing an order on a customer's behalf, the route is a draft order, then an invoice with a checkout link, and the customer applies the credit themselves at checkout. You cannot apply it for them.

Subscriptions only work once. A customer can put store credit toward the initial purchase of a subscription. They cannot put it toward the recurring bills.

Multi-currency hides balances. Only the balance matching the checkout currency appears at checkout. A customer holding credit in one currency who checks out in another will not see it.

Issuing credit is a handful of clicks, and the permissions are more granular than people expect.

The admin path

Open the customer profile, find the Store credit section and select Edit. Choose Credit, pick a currency if you need to, enter the amount, set an expiry, then Review changes. Tick Notify customer if you want them told, and confirm.

Debiting is the same path with Debit selected instead. Both actions land in the customer's timeline, so there is a record of who gave what.

The permissions

• Store credit — to manage it as a payment method at all
• Edit store credit — to issue or debit
• View store credit transactions — to see the history
• Refund to store credit (an Orders permission) — to send a refund there
• POS staff also need the POS Customers permissions to redeem or manage it in person

Splitting these across a team is the point. The person handling returns usually should not be the person able to issue arbitrary credit.

At volume

For bulk work there are the storeCreditAccountCredit and storeCreditAccountDebit mutations in the Admin GraphQL API. This is the route for migrating an existing credit balance in from another platform, or wiring issuance into a system you already run.

One POS quirk: you can deactivate store credit on POS on its own, but it cannot be active on POS while it is inactive on the online store. Online is the parent switch. Getting that pairing right across a retail team is the kind of thing Shopify store configuration experts do in an afternoon.

Expiry is set per issuance. There is no store-wide default: every time someone issues credit they choose No expiry date or a specific one.

That design has a consequence worth naming. With no default, your expiry policy lives in the head of whoever happens to be issuing. Two staff handling the same kind of return will produce two different outcomes unless somebody has written the rule down.

The mechanics:

• Credit expires at the end of the day in your store's timezone, regardless of where the customer is. A customer in another timezone can lose credit on what is still, for them, the day before.
• When a customer holds several credits, the one expiring first is used first.

Shopify's own guidance is to check your local laws before setting an expiry date, and that is not boilerplate. Expiry on stored value is regulated in many places, sometimes prohibited outright, and the rules often differ from the ones covering gift cards. This is a question for your lawyer, not your developer, and it is worth settling before you issue the first credit rather than after.

These get confused constantly, partly because Shopify's own gift card documentation lists "store credit" as a use for gift cards.

The practical differences:

• Gift cards travel on a code. It is sent by email or SMS, and after creation the admin shows only the last four characters. Store credit has no code — it is attached to the account.
• Store credit needs a signed-in customer. No sign-in, no credit. A gift card code can be handed to somebody who is not the buyer.
• The ceilings differ sharply. A gift card is capped at $2,000 USD, or the local equivalent. Store credit runs to just under $15,000 per account.
• Cross-currency behaves differently. Gift cards issued in the store currency can be redeemed in any currency, and cards in a local currency need a matching checkout currency unless cross-currency redemption is on — a setting that cannot be changed after the card is created. Store credit simply shows only the matching balance.

A reasonable rule of thumb: if the recipient is not the buyer, or might not have an account, issue a gift card. If it is a known customer and the balance is tied to their history with you, store credit is the cleaner record.

Both create a future liability on your books, and both carry an optional expiry that is a legal question rather than a preference.

Refunding to store credit is supported for full refunds, partial refunds, returned items and canceled orders. It needs store owner status or the Refund to store credit Orders permission. For how this fits a wider returns process, see returns on Shopify.

The over-refund trap

After refunding to store credit, it is still possible to over-refund to the original payment method. Doing so does not reverse the store credit refund. You can end up paying the same customer twice: once in credit, once in cash.

Shopify gates this behind its own permission — Refund to original payment method > Over-refund orders previously refunded to store credit — and that permission should sit with very few people.

The fee most merchants miss

Stores created on or after 12 May 2025 are charged third-party transaction fees on the portion of an order paid with store credit. Stores created before that date are not.

So the same refund-to-credit policy has a different cost depending on when your store was opened, and a merchant comparing notes with a peer on an older store will get advice that does not apply to them. If you opened recently and plan to route returns to credit at volume, put that fee in the model before you commit.

Seeing the liability

Two reports live under Analytics > Reports > Finances: Store credit transactions and Outstanding store credit balance. Store credit also shows as a payment provider in payments reports such as Net payments by gateway, and customer segments can group people by balance, upcoming expiration and last credit date.

That outstanding balance is money you owe. If it is material, it belongs in the accounts rather than in the admin alone — a conversation for Shopify accounting and finance experts.

Switching store credit on costs nothing and needs no one. The work worth paying for starts further along:

• Migrating balances in. Moving an existing credit or loyalty balance from another platform or app means the GraphQL mutations and a reconciliation you can defend.
• Wiring it into returns. Routing refunds to credit automatically, rather than a human deciding each time, is where the policy actually becomes consistent.
• Retail and online parity. Permissions across a store team, POS behavior, and staff who know which of them can issue what.
• The accounting. Outstanding balance, expiry recognition and how it all lands in your books.

Real figures from the shopexperts directory, pulled 19 October 2026:

• App and feature setup: 6 fixed-price packages from 4 experts, median $424, middle 50% $324 to $487, range $180 to $500. Configuration and permissions work sits here.
• Custom development and apps: 41 packages from 24 experts, median $1,000, middle 50% $390 to $2,499, range $150 to $8,000. Bulk issuance, API work and returns integration land in this band.

A packaged price is what an expert publishes for a defined scope, not a quote for your store. For wider ranges see Shopify custom development cost.

For program design and the retention side, browse Shopify loyalty and rewards experts. For the API and integration work, Shopify custom development experts. If store credit is part of a wider retail setup, Shopify POS setup experts. Not sure which you need? Read what kind of Shopify expert do I need.