Refund is not a cost; handling is
The sale price you refund is the buyer’s money going back, so the page shows it as context rather than adding it to your cost. You collected it once and you return it once; the loss is elsewhere.
The four cost lines are all money that leaves and does not come back: outbound postage already paid, the return leg, the fixed cents the processor keeps, and the time and materials spent checking and repacking. On the defaults that is $19.30 against a $60 sale.
The hero also prints the total as a percentage of the sale price. That ratio is the fastest way to see how much of a small order a return can consume - and why a low-value item is often better refunded without asking for it back.
Postage is spent twice on a return
The outbound label was already paid to get the order to the buyer, and it is gone whatever happens next. The return leg is a second freight bill: either you buy a prepaid label or the buyer ships it collect and you absorb the charge on receipt.
Both lines belong in the total. Counting only the return leg hides the sunk outbound cost and makes a return look cheaper than it is, which is the same mistake as treating the refund as the whole loss.
Free-shipping orders hurt most here. The outbound leg was a cost you chose to absorb to win the sale, and a return does not refund it - it only adds a second leg on top of it.
Processors split their fee differently on refunds
Many payment processors return the percentage of a card fee but keep the fixed cents, commonly around $0.30 per transaction. Others refund the whole fee. The field exists because the answer depends on your processor and your agreement, not on a published rule the page could hard-code.
This line is a statement fact rather than a rate: read it off your processing statement and enter what was actually kept, or zero if everything came back. Enter it wrong and the total shifts by exactly that amount.
At volume the cents stop being trivial. Three hundred returns at $0.30 is $90 a month, which is real money for a store whose average basket is modest.
Handling is a real cost, and unsellable stock is a fifth line
Receiving, checking and repackaging takes time, and sometimes tape, boxes and a new poly bag. Enter what you would charge a restocking fee for, or the net figure if you do charge the buyer one - a fee that covers the handling should not be counted twice.
If the returned item cannot be resold, its landed cost is a fifth, real line that this page deliberately leaves to you. Guessing your margin for you would be worse than leaving the line out, and if the item does sell again, that cost is recovered in the next sale rather than lost here.
There is no official return-cost schedule to anchor, so the page prints its four-line model and its assumptions where a fee page would print a source. The numbers are yours: your shipping accounts, your processor’s refund policy and your own labor rate.
The lines this model leaves out
Four lines are on the page because they are money you can name from an invoice. Four more decide whether a return policy is affordable, and none of them have a natural input box: the resale value of what comes back, the labor of a second listing, fraud and empty-box returns, and the chargeback fee if the buyer disputes instead of returning.
Resale value is the biggest of the four. A returned item that sells again as open-box recovers most of its margin; the same item in a damaged box is a write-down, and a worn one is a total loss. That spread is why two sellers with identical fee tables can have very different return costs - the model prices handling, and the merchandise risk stays with whoever owns the inventory.
Fraud is small in count and large in cost. A package that arrives with a brick inside costs the refund, the outbound label, the return label and the item, and the fee is rarely recovered; card disputes add a fixed charge that is usually larger than the payment fee this page asks about. Neither is a rate you can look up, which is why they stay outside the four lines.
The point of naming them is not to add them all up. It is to know which direction a policy pushes: free returns with no restocking fee buy conversion and pay for it in handling and in the small number of abusive returns. A seller who has priced the four visible lines can at least see which of the invisible ones the policy is buying.
Danfio