{"id":1807,"date":"2014-05-14T21:55:39","date_gmt":"2014-05-14T11:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/?p=1807"},"modified":"2017-04-28T11:04:43","modified_gmt":"2017-04-28T01:04:43","slug":"how-to-handle-refunders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/how-to-handle-refunders\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Handle Refunders"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just read a thread talking about a guy who launched a product. He got a sale and within 30 minutes the buyer asked for a refund.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure he made more sales but this topic is about refunds.<\/p>\n<p>One of his threadsters (think I just invented a word!) called the refunders &#8220;scum&#8221;. Calling refunders scum is a bit rich in my book.<\/p>\n<p>Sure it&#8217;s frustrating. You inwardly celebrate a sale and almost while you&#8217;re still punching the air, the refund request lands like a ships&#8217; anchor on your joy.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d guess that most refunds of easily consumed products like PDF&#8217;s happen shortly after the sales process. If people are keen they&#8217;d read it straight away after buying. So a quick refund is expected. If the refund is on a software product or a course series or a more complex, larger product I&#8217;d expect a genuine refund request would not be so quick.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s face it, if I&#8217;m not happy with a meal I don&#8217;t wait til I&#8217;ve finished. I complain just after I&#8217;ve realised it&#8217;s undercooked or cold or as soon as it appears and it&#8217;s not what I ordered.<\/p>\n<p>So timing should not be a surprise.<\/p>\n<p>I know some people who set reminders about refund deadlines so they make sure they check out the product before the period expires. Much like you make sure a physical product is working before your warranty expires. (You do that don&#8217;t you?). A lot of us buy something because we don&#8217;t want to miss out on the deal and park it until we&#8217;re ready to use\/consume it.<\/p>\n<p>So to me, refunding itself is not the issue. It&#8217;s part of any business.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/REFUNDED.png\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-1810\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/REFUNDED-300x57.png?resize=300%2C57\" alt=\"REFUNDED\" width=\"300\" height=\"57\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/REFUNDED.png?resize=300%2C57&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/REFUNDED.png?w=367&amp;ssl=1 367w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The issue is we feel <strong>ripped off<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We believe we put out a good product.<\/li>\n<li>We believe the price was fair.<\/li>\n<li>We believe we wrote sales copy that clearly represented the product.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But one of our customers did not believe those things.<\/p>\n<p>In the tangible world, if you get a refund you give back the physical product.<\/p>\n<p>When someone refunds a digital product we don&#8217;t get the product back . The customer keeps it. We feel we&#8217;ve just been &#8216;<em>had<\/em>&#8216; because now they got it for free.<\/p>\n<p>Well, in rare cases that may be the case.<\/p>\n<p>From my experience and knowledge, people refund for different reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They don&#8217;t feel they got what was being sold<\/li>\n<li>They don&#8217;t feel the product was worth the price<\/li>\n<li>They may have misunderstood what was being offered<\/li>\n<li>Maybe they already have a similar product<\/li>\n<li>Maybe they have purchased the same product before<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What might be &#8216;cheap&#8217; to us may be expensive for someone from a different and poorer country so if the product doesn&#8217;t meet their expectation they can&#8217;t afford to buy something they don&#8217;t feel they&#8217;ll use so will refund.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Selling is not a one-way process<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<h3>So what do you do about refunds?<\/h3>\n<ol>\n<li>Give the refund<\/li>\n<li>Do not stop giving guarantees on the strength of one or two refunds<\/li>\n<li>Keep a record of refunders and blacklist any &#8216;serial&#8217; refunders &#8211; a few do make a practice of this<\/li>\n<li>Learn. Ask refunders to complete a quick survey to find out why they refunded. This is really useful market research &#8211; you identify an improvement that can be made to reduce future refund rates<\/li>\n<li>Check your rate of refunds. If they are higher than average then you may be\u00a0the problem. Check your sales copy, delivery model, product quality and make improvements where you can.<\/li>\n<li>Give people the benefit of the doubt<\/li>\n<li>Accept you will get refund requests and avoid overreacting<\/li>\n<li>Focus on the fact you have lots more satisfied customers than refunders<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Think about it.<br \/>\nIn life, have you ever asked for a refund? How did you get treated?<\/p>\n<p>Be the supplier who rises above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just read a thread talking about a guy who launched a product. He got a sale and within 30 minutes the buyer asked for a refund. I&#8217;m sure he made more sales but this topic is about refunds. One of his threadsters (think I just invented a word!) called the refunders &#8220;scum&#8221;. Calling refunders scum&hellip;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/how-to-handle-refunders\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read More &raquo;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">How To Handle Refunders<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41,4],"tags":[292,291],"class_list":["post-1807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-service","tag-how-to-handle-refunds","tag-refunds"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/REFUNDED.png?fit=367%2C70&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3M6th-t9","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}