Should Clickbank TIGHTEN their 'Refund policy'? {too many refunds..}

I agree. I know there are a lot of "serial refunders" in clickbank but on the other hand, there are also a lot of BS products that they carry. Some measures should be implemented to weed out the bad from the good but it's gonna be a lot of work.

The key phrase here is "Non IM" - I'm willing to bet that serial refunders are mostly composed of IM-related product purchasers. They are already savvy to the fact that they can (a) get the product at a reduced price by using their own affiliate links and (b) have up to 60 days to get a full refund.

I think at the very least there should be a minimum time requirement, refunds that come in 2 minutes after purchase are likely (but not always) fraudulent. And while I'm tempted to propose that CB changes their policy to have no refunds on specific product categories (i.e. IM-related) it probably is not a great idea, as has been noted there is a lot of junk out there.

I also take issue with a 60-day refund on a recurring billing product (or more specifically services). Buyers can purchase, use your service for 60 days and then get all their money back. If your phone or cable TV company allowed that they would be out of business! I really think that needs to be addressed.

Bill

I agree, it's really sad to see ones CB stats these days. I've been doing a lot of affiliate sales in both the IM and the Forex niche and in both niches the refunds have increased a lot since clickbank made it easier to request a refund.

Of course they should. Well... they should at least for IM related products. We've already heard of numerous examples on this forum where people demanded refunds simply because they needed the money back when it had nothing to do with the products themselves. Clickbank really doesn't want to have to deal with the disputes though, so a change is unlikely.

PayPal believes that 45 days is acceptable for a refund period.

The credit card companies allow chargebacks up to 180 days after the original purchase.

Rumor is that American Express allows much longer windows for potential chargebacks, and Amex doesn't care what we think about those chargebacks, since we are not their customers.



Secondly, not all Clickbank products are ebooks. I know of Clickbank offers with more than 10 hours of video on them. How long should customers be allowed to consume those products, before their refund window runs out?

I believe that if the quality of the products sold was of a higher caliper ,than this question would not even be asked in this forum .

If you want better sales results without the refunds," Than put as much effort into quality products as you do in copy and lame @ss empty promises".

The problem is not Click Bank ,the problem is vendors trying to BS people to make a sale.

You can go to the "Review Of Products Section" of this forum and see how people really feel and whether the product delivers or not .

Time and time again it is the same old song and dance overly hyped ad copy and after the payment is processed ,"A WHOLE BUNCH OF NOTHING".

I actually hear far more complaints from affiliates than vendors about refund rates. They choose the wrong product or the wrong market to sell to or both, but it's easier to blame the vendor or Clickbank. They don't want to admit that they picked a product based on how much money they could get or that it was "hot" at the time.

I use to work for AMEX and all disputes are run through a dispute system. You have 60 days (65 to include the original mailing (or email notification folks who are paperless get their email notification within 24 to 48 hours of the statement closing) of the statement) to dispute a charge as per FAIR. Over that, you're generally out of luck, but there are a *few* exceptions.

I don't recall ever doing one for Clickbank past the 60 days, but Clickbank was set up as one that allowed immediate chargebacks. That meant that when we ran it through 99.99% of the time we didn't have to go through the dispute process. The cardmember would be credited immediately on their account & we would pull the amount from Clickbank's merchant account to cover that refund.

With an immediate chargeback, the merchant says don't bother us about a dispute just credit them and pull it from our merchant account.

With a regular dispute, if the merchant didn't respond to our inquiry, then we would credit the cardmember and then do a chargeback to the merchant's account. The merchant would receive notice of the chargeback and they had 2 months to respond to that notification. If they responded, the chargeback was reversed and the cardmember would have to redispute (in those cases we can go past the 60 days since they previously disputed the charge). If the merchant did not respond then the chargeback remained.

Anything past 60 days *could* be opened up but it had to meet the mysterious requirements to do so. There was never a rhyme or reason. You can have a call for one of those discount clubs that someone doesn't remember signing up for, that might let you dispute the past 6 months of. Then the next call might be for a piece of furniture someone pre-ordered that they still haven't received that was denied for it being too old to investigate. We could attempt to override it but if the disputes department still said it was too old to investigate there wasn't anything we could do. Generally this didn't fit into the override reasons but we could always attempt it. I always felt bad for these folks because they would lose often thousands of dollars in those situations.

But all that ramble to say that in as sense the fact that AMEX doesn't care about chargebacks is true because it's how the merchant sets up their account when they agree to take AMEX. Some have it for regardless of the amount do a chargeback (I've had a chargeback on something that was over $2,000 before) and some have certain criteria (i.e. if it's under a certain dollar amount).

So if you deal with Clickbank, Payspree or whoever and when they sign up with AMEX if they say don't bother us on a dispute just charge it back, it's no skin off AMEX's nose. With fees, interest, etc. it all gets made up in the back end.

So whether it's a straight request through Clickbank or a chargeback through the CC, at this point Clickbank isn't losing enough to warrant them changing their policies. But even if they do change, the cardmember just goes back to their CC and get the refund that way. And for serial refunders, unless Clickbank figures a way to ban them or their CC makes it hard to do disputes, it'll be hard to stop them. But of course, they'll still find a way if they really want something for "free".

I remember one account when I first started that was a serial refunder. There was a warning on her account not to dispute anything Paypal due to her constant disputes. PayPal with rare exceptions was always a full dispute. Sometimes if it was something like $5 or so we might eat it and just credit them and not dispute it.

Don't give up, just deal with it.
The gurus got used to it yearssss ago, it's all part of IM.
I promote non-IM niche and I hardly see any refunds on most genuine products.
Only rare cases, and they come from overly-hyped self help / self improvement ebooks.