Return & Withdrawal Policy Button for WooCommerce

This guide explains how to set up and use the plugin, written for store owners and staff with no technical or development background. If a step mentions clicking somewhere in your WordPress admin, we tell you exactly where to click.

EU law, and specifically Greek Law 5317/2026, requires online shops to give customers an easy, always available way to cancel or return an order within 14 days, without needing to explain why.

This plugin adds that "withdrawal button" to your WooCommerce store. A customer can request a cancellation or return in two clicks, they must confirm a second time before anything is actually submitted (so nobody submits a request by accident), and once confirmed they receive an email with the exact details of what they declared, for their own records.

Behind the scenes, you decide what happens next: the order can be cancelled and refunded automatically, cancelled automatically but held for you to issue the refund yourself, or held entirely for your review before anything happens.

1. In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins and activate Return & Withdrawal Policy Button for WooCommerce.
2. The plugin automatically creates a page called Withdrawal Request for you. You do not need to build or design anything.
3. Go to WooCommerce > Withdrawal Settings, open the License tab, paste in the license key you received, and click Activate.

Important: the withdrawal button will not appear anywhere on your store until the license is activated. This is intentional, it stops the button from ever half-working. If you see a yellow notice at the top of your admin saying the license needs to be activated, that is why.

You will find everything under WooCommerce > Withdrawal Settings.

General & Legal

About the three cancellation modes:

• Auto-cancel + auto-refund: the order is cancelled and the customer is refunded automatically, no action needed from you.
• Auto-cancel, manual refund (the default): the order is cancelled automatically so stock is freed up right away, but you decide when to actually issue the refund from the requests queue.
• Fully manual: nothing happens automatically. Every request waits for you to approve or reject it first.

Exclusions

Some products legally cannot be withdrawn, for example personalised items, made-to-order goods, or digital downloads once they have been accessed. This tab lets you exclude them.

• Excluded categories: tick any product categories that should never be eligible for withdrawal (for example, a "Custom Orders" category). There is also a tick box to automatically exclude subcategories too.
• Excluded products: search for and pick individual products to exclude, useful for one-off items rather than a whole category.
• Personalisation detection: if you use a product customisation plugin (for adding names, custom text, etc. to products), this list tells the withdrawal button which of that plugin's internal fields mean "this item was personalised". The common ones are already filled in for you.
• Refunds: choose whether stock should be put back into inventory when a refund happens, and whether the plugin should try to refund the customer's original payment method automatically (when your payment provider supports it) or just record the refund for you to process manually.

You can also exclude a single product directly from that product's own edit screen: open the product, go to the Advanced tab, and tick Exclude from withdrawal.

Anti-fraud

These settings protect the guest withdrawal form (the one used by customers without an account) from abuse.

• CAPTCHA provider: turn on Google reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare Turnstile to block automated bots from submitting fake requests. You will need to get free site/secret keys from whichever provider you choose.
• Max attempts per window / Window length: how many withdrawal attempts are allowed from the same visitor before they are temporarily blocked, and over what time period.
• Max "resend email" per order per day: limits how many times the confirmation email can be re-sent for the same order, so it cannot be used to spam someone's inbox.
• Abnormal-volume alert threshold: if unusually many requests come from the same visitor in a short time, you will see a warning at the top of your Withdrawal Requests list.

License

Where you activate, check, or deactivate your license key. See section 2 above.

Advanced

Read-only technical information: which page is your withdrawal page, your account page's web address, how many requests are stored, and a button to refresh your site's page links if something ever looks broken.

1. After an order is confirmed, or on the order's own detail page, an eligible customer sees a "Cancel or return this order" button, along with a short note about their right to withdraw.
2. Clicking it takes them to a form where they choose which items to cancel or return, give their name and a way to contact them, and can optionally explain why (this is never required).
3. Before anything is submitted, they see exactly what they are about to declare and must click Confirm a second time. Nothing is pre-ticked and nothing happens automatically at this stage, this protects both you and the customer from accidental submissions.
4. Once confirmed, they receive an email with the exact wording of their declaration, plus the date and time, for their own records.
5. Logged-in customers can also see all their requests any time under My Account > My Withdrawal Requests, and can resend the confirmation email or withdraw a request themselves from there.
6. Customers who checked out as a guest receive their link by email and do not need to create an account.

The Withdrawal Requests queue

Go to WooCommerce > Withdrawal Requests. You will see every request with its order, type (cancellation or return), who submitted it, its current status, when it was submitted, and the deadline.

Click View on any row to see the full details: the customer's exact declaration, which items are involved, and a complete history of everything that happened to this request (useful if you ever need to show proof of what occurred and when).

From the detail screen you can:

• Approve: accept the request. Depending on your automation setting, this may also cancel the order and issue the refund automatically.
• Reject: decline the request. The customer is notified by email.
• Issue Refund: send the refund once you are ready to.

On the order itself

Open any order in WooCommerce > Orders. If it has a withdrawal request, you will see a small box on the right-hand side of the order screen with the same status and the same Approve / Reject / Issue Refund buttons, so you never have to leave the order screen to act on it.

You will also see a Withdrawal column in your main Orders list, showing the status at a glance for every order.

All of these use your store's own email branding and design, the same way your regular order emails do, and you can preview or edit their wording under WooCommerce > Settings > Emails.

Can I make the 14-day window shorter? No. This is the legal minimum required by EU and Greek law, and the plugin will never let it be set lower, even by accident.

A customer deleted their account, will I lose the record of their request? No. Every withdrawal request keeps its own copy of the customer's declaration, so it stays complete and readable even if the account it came from is later deleted.

If a customer asks me to delete their personal data, do I have to delete their withdrawal requests too? No, and you should not. Withdrawal request records are a legal compliance record, protected under GDPR's own "legal obligation" exemption (Article 17(3)(b)). WordPress's built-in "Erase Personal Data" tool will correctly tell the customer that these specific records are retained for that reason.

A product I sell cannot legally be returned once opened, what do I do? Add it (or its whole category) under the Exclusions tab. The customer will still see the withdrawal button for their order, but that specific item will be shown as not eligible, with the reason explained.

Do guests need an account to request a withdrawal? No, as long as "Allow guest requests" is switched on in General & Legal. They use a secure link sent to the email address from their order.

For license, billing, or update questions, open a ticket at https://01generator.com/ticket-system/