Refund Policies on Digital Ebooks

Having a refund policy will help you sell more books. If the material is any good, most will not ask for a refund just to get the book for free. I would always offer a refund policy.

For ebooks, I would just offer a refund, no questions asked. It's not as big of a problem as some people would have you believe. My refund rate is well under 1% and it's just easier to give the refund.

The standard argument is that you will get more sales if you offer a solid refund policy. I believe that to be true. On the other hand, you will attract some freebie seekers (more in some niches than others), but don't let that bother you.

There is one other thing to consider: if you DON'T offer refunds, then you run a much higher risk of getting chargebacks, and those can put a real dent in your business.

So, my advice is to offer a 100% money back, no questions asked guarantee. Then create high-quality products that are more than worth what people spent on them.

All the best,
Michael

If you dont want to offer refunds, dont.

Dont feel as though you need to because someone told you to.

If it means selling less, so be it. Id rather deal with decent customers that want to do business, not knuckleheads that are only concerned about getting their $7 back.

well, I am not in the IM niche which has one of the higher refund rates, but I have operated in the adult niche some which offers some of the highest refund and charge back problems of any niche.

My philosophy was that I could always make more sales than I could save by expending the same amount of time and mental energy on driving sales rather than fighting refunders.

Did I leave some money on the table a few times...I am certain I have over the years. But I have usually found it difficult to build a business by spending my time fighting people who are for the most part cheats and scammers for a few coins.

They only exception to this in my book is that you can't get a reputation for being an easy mark. If you ever find a spike in refunds for a decent period of time. I have found that is the time to get tough for a little while and put the brakes on that reputation before it has a chance to get started good.

If people want their money back bad enough, chances are they will get it back. I've seen threads where people go to crazy lengths over $10 and you don't really want that.

After selling my fair share of stuff online, I'd have to say you're better off just having an open refund policy... the people that use the WSO and Clickbank marketplaces like libraries could care less what refund policy you have in place.

This is a much different approach then I had in all my previous years online.

Bottom line just go with a policy you're comfortable with...

OR

Go with the 'VA' strategy...

There are some sellers that have one VA (that actually doesn't exist, they made them up) that gets blamed for EVERYTHING.

But you can take it a step further...

You need to make up three VA's that their specific task is to handle order processing and customer service. (Give them all women's names since generally, people get less pissed at women.)

Then you assign them excuses...

Mary - she never seems to be in the office.
Cathy - her job is to tell customers she can't find their transaction id.
Elizabeth - her responsibility is to pass on the request to either Cathy or Mary.

The end result looks something like this...

Customer Email #1 - I would like a refund my transaction id is: 38948954895.
Elizabeth Responds - "Sorry you weren't happy with the product, I will pass along your information to Cathy".

Customer Email #2 - I put in a request for a refund and never heard anything back.
Cathy Responds - "Elizabeth sent me your request, I couldn't find your transaction id in our system, I'll have to talk to Mary and get back to you."

Customer Email #3 - Still haven't heard anything..
Elizabeth Responds - "I'm not really sure what's going on, Cathy said that she couldn't find you in our system and Mary is out of the office"

Etc... you can keep this going until people finally give up.

It also helps if you have a forth VA Judy who's in training and accidentally deletes support tickets.

(The bottom part of this post is not meant to be serious.)

First --> Lets face it , refund is requirement by your merchant (most likely paypal), so by their terms it is better to leave it out there as they will on most occasions side with the buyer and with digital products this is an grey area.

There will be few customers requesting refund even if your product is the best in the world, it is better to focus on the remainng 95% of your customers and focus on their Life Time Value, that will be best long term strategy.

Finally with refunds being the norm, it also shouts out lous confidence in your product.

One lesson i learnt from Jason fladlein is he has tested it and having a refund increase sales conversions and even if there are a few refund requests (if at all) you will end up making more by having the policy out there.

I always use Clickbank to promote my information products and they require you to have a refund policy. But most of the time this is not used. Just remember to have good quality material.

As long as you are genuine and just want to help people you will be fine. If you are out to trick people, then you are not going to get too far. Once you build your name as a trusted person within your niche, you won't have problems.

I like to give the money back guarantee because it helps my customers trust me. But once they see the quality of my products, they never ask for refund.

I hope this helps.

Just offer a 100% refund policy. It's better to just refund those people and get it over with than have them hound you day in and day out over chump change.

A refund policy is definitely more attractive for buyers and also very attractive to freeloaders. It is good business ethics to offer refund policies; but, not offering refunds is also the right of the seller for some products.

The trick is just to have your products at best quality as possible because you will always have dissatisfied customers anyway. So just have a modest refund policy (usually not 100% refund) for those who are really earnest in justifying why they were dissatisfied.

A refund policy may be in the form of a discount on the next purchase or other future purchases. Its up to you actually, different companies have different discount policies. Its not always about having money return to dissatisfied customers. Just make sure that whatever policy you have, the customer is fully aware of it before purchasing the products covered by the policy.

A solid refund strategy is a great risk reversal technique that helps customers feel more secure in making a purchase. We've found that most visitors are instantly suspicious of making online purchases, as they have been ripped off so much over the years.

We offer a 100% money back guarantee with no questions asked. In fact, there is no limitation period - call me a year later and I'll refund. But it's never happened. When a refund is requested, we process it instantly, then notify the purchaser of the refund and when they can expect it to show up in the account.

I can count on one hand the number of refunds issued in the last five years. Partly because our publication is a B2B product, not IM. Partly because our site goes overboard to show what the customer is receiving, complete with an evaluation download with actual pages.

We've tested both with and without a guarantee. Sell more with.

Just my $.02 from 12 years of selling our flagship product.

gary

I offer refunds immediately, however when they do a chargeback without contacting me for a refund first claiming no authorization of the sale I blacklist their email, I blacklist their IP and I also provide the IP information via screenshot to PayPal that they in fact purchased and downloaded from the same IP address. PayPal should be able to verify the users IP address they access their PayPal account with during this time period. If I win the dispute I unblacklist their IP so they can have continued access to the product.

I'm sick and tired of these types of dishonest people who don't think of it as theft. Now if this user had emailed me saying they were unhappy with the purchase I would definitely honor that request.

Personally what I recommend and do myself is say NO REFUNDS! If they ask for one however, I always give it... chargebacks should be avoided at all costs.

Yes you can usually win many of them! But those that fight every single one are the ones you will see posting on here and other forums online with posts like "Banned From Paypal, lost $3000 a month income... what to do now?" Trust me, you do not want to be in that situation, especially over a few bucks here and there.

I once heard John Carlton say, "If you're not getting at least a 5% refund rate, you're not trying hard enough."

Just for the record, I've found that offering a refund rate that extends far into the future cuts down refunds: "if ever, at any point in time, in this universe or any other, you or anybody who looks like you don't agree that this product isn't worth much more than you paid for it I'll refund your money immediately- no questions asked."

And, I do. I refund fast.

That way, the customer isn't counting the hours til the refund period runs out... dramatically cuts down refunds.

If we notice that the same person has bought and refunded multiple times, we just work a little magic so they can't buy from us again.

And - when you start selling in high volume, you might as well relax about refunds, theft, etc. If my stuff doesn't show up on the torrents right after I launch it, I'm disappointed. It's a fact of life and there are plenty of honest customers to make up for the dweebs that steal stuff.

One of my mentors told me when I was first starting out- "Don't worry about people stealing your stuff. Worry about making something good enough to steal."

HI

Put yourself in the shoes of your customers...Would you buy a 25$ 30$ 50$ article without a money back waranty. Personnaly, over 10$, without a money back waranty, I usually don't buy. Of course some people will buy it, use it and will return the product but I don't think it is the majority of the customers as long as your product has a certain value...

Best Regards

The Frog Marketer

Great info everyone, thanks!