This is a cautionary tale about upgrading gear with currency, as is prevelant in Shadowlands, as well as some suggestions for improving how this system works.
I want to emphasize that I do not care if you think I’m dumb because of what happened here, so please, save the keystrokes if that’s what you intend to contribute to this thread.
tl;dr: You can refund items you spend currency to upgrade during the two-hour refund window, but you forfeit the currency used on the upgrades and get back only the cost for the original item. Nothing in the UI tells you this, and there is no warning prompt to stop you from doing it by accident.
Ok, so what happened?
I bought a piece of gear with honor. That item was refundable for 2 hours.
I had a hefty quantity of honor, and I knew I wanted a higher item level version of that item. Nowhere in the game’s UI does it show the cost to do so beyond the current tier (i.e., it shows the cost from rank 1 to rank 2 if the item is at rank 1, but it does not tell you the cost from rank 2 to rank 3 while the item is at rank 1).
I was debating buying the same item slot with conquest instead, which is why I was curious about upgrades.
So, not wanting to try and find a wowhead article about this, I upgraded the item once. I saw that it could still be returned to the vendor for a “full refund.” Neat.
So I dumped all my honor into it to see how high I could afford to level the item.
Great idea! What could possibly go wrong?
I decided, given where it landed, that I’d be better off buying the conquest version of that particular item, so I too it back to the vendor. With a single click, I returned the item, and was refunded my honor–but not all of it, only the honor for buying the original rank 1 item. I lost all the honor I spent upgrading the item. 
So, first off, don’t do this by accident. The UI is trash and does not clearly explain how this works.
Blizz, you got some 'splainin to do!
I opened a ticket and received this response from a GM:
Hey there! Game Master Kieulas here!
I’ve read your ticket about a refund for a PvP item!
PvP items can be refunded within 2 hours, but there’s a number of things to keep in mind.
Firstly, the refund timer will disappear if you equip it, enchant it, or delete and restore it. Taking any of those actions will bind the item to you and void your ability to refund that item.
Next, any upgrades you buy for a PvP item will not be included in the refund value the vendor offers you. The “full refund” it refers to is only supposed to apply for buying the item - upgrades are considered non-refundable, which is why that part of the cost is not returned. I know that might seem harsh, but upgrading an item is considered extra confirmation that you’ve made the right choice - so while you can refund the base item, the extra upgrade costs won’t come with it.
Third, refunding an item by mistake cannot be reversed. This is intended. If you buy an item, upgrade it, then refund it by mistake, you won’t be able to restore it through Item Restoration. Instead, you’ll have to farm up and repurchase the item and its’ upgrades on your own.
Last, and most importantly, Game Masters won’t step in and provide refunds or swaps. If something happens, and you aren’t able to refund your item, you’ll need to consider it a learning opportunity, use your item as best you can (or vendor, disenchant, or destroy it if you can’t), and farm up the materials for your next purchase. This includes cases of simple mistakes, such as being unable to equip two of the same rings or trinkets, or buying the wrong kind of weapon.As harsh as it is, it’s important to double- and triple-check your purchases before you make them, to be sure they’re the right choice.
This even applies to Conquest, which you can only earn so much of per week. That’s an intended choice by our Dev crew - that’s how they want the in-game refund system, and Conquest, to work.
Personally, I play a Paladin, so with three specs to juggle, I typically read aloud the entire tooltip of any item I’m buying - that helps me realize the words I’m saying aren’t correct, and helps me stop any odd purchases. (That’s especially true now that Holy Paladins can heal with a two-hander!)
Hopefully, though, this info helps clear things up. If you’d like PvP vendors, refunds, upgrades, or anything else to change, you can reach out to our Dev crew through the Suggestion button here in-game, or through a forum topic, and make that request.
Well, Shucks… Now What?
Condescending tone aside, I’m accepting this GM’s suggestion, and starting a forum post about it. Here are my suggestions for a fix to make this less awful.
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Fix the inaccurate tooltips. The GM says that the dev team does not want you to get what a normal person would consider to be a “full refund.” A person of average intelligence reading that blue tooltip would reasonably assume it included the upgrade honor too. If it doesn’t, something should say so. I shouldn’t have to google every action I want to take in this game to see if my computer is going to catch fire for doing it.
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Upgrading an item should make it soulbound. A prompt should appear alerting players that this will happen before the upgrade. I would bet that literally zero players want to cash in an upgraded item and forfeit the currency used to purchase the upgrades. If they told you in-game that this is how it worked, we would all be better off.
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The in-game UI should show the cost to upgrade an item at both the currently available step and each subsequent step. I shouldn’t “have to” go to wowhead to find an article explaining this mechanic–the game should just show me how the upgrades work. If it did, I wouldn’t have upgraded the item to see how far it could go with the honor I had in the first place.
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There should be a confirmation prompt before refunding an item to a vendor. This was one click–an easy enough thing to do entirely accidentally. There is no valid reason for this to be the default behavior–if it’s a conscious dev decision, it’s a mighty stupid one. A confirmation dialogue is a reasonable intermediary there. I have to type “delete” to delete even many trivial items, yet I can, with a single click, throw away a week (or more) of progress on key loot upgrades. That’s just poor game design.
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Allow repurchasing of upgraded items within a two-hour window. This would be an alternative to some of the above suggestions. It would solve the misclick problem, and it would make the system less punishing to someone who doesn’t know how this works (and why the heck would we know how it works–the tooltips are misleading to say the least).
These are my suggestions for resolving this problem. If you have suggestions to add, put them down below.
Thanks.