4-5 Refunds out of Every 10 Sales - Continue Promoting or Drop Product?

The problem I notice already: you don't seem to know if the product is any good or not. If the only pros you can list of the product are it's low price point and that the eastern hemisphere seems to like it, that's a problem. Further, when you don't know if the quality of the product is a factor, that's a serious red flag. Are you blindly promoting products? That's how refund rates like that happen.

Another thing I'm thinking of is that your market is well aware of Clickbank's refund policy, and take advantage of it liberally. Only you know that though, I have no idea who you target.

Yeah if that was me I'd be a little worried!

You've kind of answered your own question

"The product itself is low quality, and even though I'm able to retain 50-60% of the sales and most of my traffic is from free sources, it seems like too much effort and stress for peanuts."

Is there no way you could like upgrade/improve it?

How much exactly are you charging?

Abandon it, unless it's a high ticket product.

For my own products, I have a return ratio of 1:10.

And even that I'm a little uncomfortable with!

Offer value, if you can't offer value, something's wrong.

Just my $.02

I would drop it.

Too many customers obviously not getting what they
expected.

Willie

Well, you could figure out what the 40% is refunding. Maybe they are really a poor match for the products.

So then you will be laser in on your target audience, and in the process discover how you could make even more money.

As a vendor, if one of my affiliates was generating 40% to 50% refund rates, I would fire the affiliate.

As an affiliate, I would terminate the relationship with any vendor whose products create 40% to 50% refund rates.

As a vendor, I would be scared to death of losing access to payment processing services due to a high refund rate.

Additionally, whichever side of the equation you are on, you are creating problems with your present and future customers by recommending a **** product.

My highest refund rate on any single product was 8%. My average product has less than 1% refund rates. And overall, across my vendor and affiliate sales, my refund rate is much less than 1%.

By continuing to promote a product with 40% to 50% refund rates, you are playing with fire, and as a result, you might get burned.

Bingo. Why'd you take it on in the first place? I'd dump it.

Good to get a perspective on this. Sometimes we fall in love with a failing product and not see the forest for the trees.

Margaret,

I am in complete agreement with the "dump it" recommendation. You are only hurting your reputation with your clients.

Let me make a suggestion to you that may well keep the sales coming in for you. Since you know its a popular product, team up with a programmer and create a software that is better and more flexible than the one your promoting.

When the affiliates that are promoting the on you are now may well have the same high rate of refund as you. Once they discover you have a better product a much lower refund rate, hopefully they will switch over to promote your product. Your affiliate sign up page will give you the opportunity to do a comparison and stress the reduction in refunds.

Make sure you figure out what the reason is for the refunds from the U.S. and Europe, so your programmer can absolutely improve on that particular area.

Think about it. You have a market, you have said its a long term product, and you have a specific step you can take to capture that market.

Ken
The Old Geezer

Promote it to the Asia and Australia market where it sells well w/out the refunds.

I would drop the product for now and then try to reconstruct it possibly to bring the needed quality to the product. Did you do a test run of the product before you launched it? It is always good to see how well a product converts before you send it live. $300 a month - there should be some scalability there with your product that is not there. This product needs to go back to the drawing board, reconstruct it, and do some test runs for conversion stats.

Let's shift focus and empower Margaret here.

First, she's got some "mad skills" here and the dialogue is sort of putting all the emphasis on the product.

Margaret, you're making $300 AFTER refunds on a product that's less than $10. I don't know what the % commission is, but even if it's 100%, you are making a whole heck of a lot of referrals and CONVERSIONS in a single month!

95% of affiliates never get even close to what you have accomplished!

Obviously, you KNOW SOMETHING how to send traffic to a merchant and get people to buy.

Try your mad skills on a different product.

Look for an alternative product that serves the same market, but better, hopefully. Test it. Try out something different.

Keep up the good work!

People are trusting your review and buying. It's not the $300 a month that is of value it's your ability to tap into buyers in a lucrative niche. Find a better product for them one that they know they will be happy with.

Alternatively, if you're making $300 per month buy the product and figure out what's wrong with it. As an affiliate I was able to REDUCE my refund rate by pointing out the flaws and letting people buy knowing up front what was wrong.

They buy product x thinking "Yeah, it's gonna do what I want but it there are these negatives".

Just continue it if you think it's worth of your time and work to do a refund thing
and I suggest you drop it and start sell another product
or another way to make money online, there's lot actually
especially, if you have a start funds (from that software)

I'm mostly in agreement with the crowd that is telling you to dump the product...However, I will say this:

As an affiliate, of course you are trying to make sales...however, it is also your responsibility to know the product, including any shortcomings that it may have. You need to do your own homework, because you can't rely on the vendor to do all of the research for you.

That being said, you should be able to find specific glitches/known issues with the product, and address those within your review/recommendation. If you manage expectations up front (even if it means giving the product a B+ rating as opposed to an A+ so to speak), then you could reduce your refund rates drastically.

There is absolutely no question here.

If a product you are selling or promoting is getting a 40% refund rate, you stop promoting it right away.

Simple as that.

A 40% refund rate means it must be an absolute rubbish product... especially since it has a low price point.

Products often do not get the refund rate they deserve. Most products should have higher refund rates as many simply purchase a product, do not go through the product and subsequently forget about it.

The fact that 40% have actually bothered to refund a product under $10 means it must be rubbish.

Here's an idea, purchase the product yourself (as you are making about $300 a month on it) and see for yourself whether it's good or not.

Drop it. I think that getting 40-50% refund means your product sucks or they dont find useful information.
So change that and you will be fine.

I think the question here is do you have the time and energy to make this product better by yourself? Or, maybe looking for something else ( another product) , while you continue promoting this one, so you do not loose this income? You already know the way of getting the customers, you just have to improve the result of the product you are promoting, so you have an even higher income.

Hi Margaret. These are some options you can study:

OPTION ONE: Drop the product and focus on promoting higher quality products that a lot of people need (test out the products first, of course, so you'll know if it actually provides buyers with the value they need - more value = better, for their time and money).
PROJECTED RESULTS: Better utility of your time because of higher affiliate commissions per month.

OPTION TWO: Study relevant details about the buyers who don't ask for refunds (50 to 60%, you said), i.e. Where they're based, where they've been to before arriving on your site and other channels where your affiliate link is found and so on. Reduce the resources you use to promote the product (say by 40 to 50% since you won't be targeting buyers who ask for refunds), such as time and advertising overheads (you mentioned most of your traffic comes from free sources, so some of your traffic I assume may be from paid sources). Hire someone whom you can pay say $150 per month to implement the things you've done to promote the product (say 2 to 3 hours of work per day, 5 days per week, 4 weeks per month). Use your time to promote other higher quality products that a lot of people need.
PROJECTED RESULTS: $150 or higher commissions per month for you. Your time is spent promoting higher quality products that can potentially earn you more than $300 per month per product. If you branded your site that promotes the low quality product with your name, announce that it's under new management.

OPTION THREE: Save the $150++ per month you earn from doing option two and some of your earnings from promoting higher quality products. Say in a few months, you'll have the money to hire a software programmer who can develop a better product that can offer better benefits from its wider set of integrated features than the low quality product.
PROJECTED RESULTS: You still earn $150++ per month by doing option two, without associating your name with the product. And, you have someone who works on it for you each day. Plus, you earn higher commissions from the higher quality products you're promoting. And, when your custom software has been developed, tested and finalized, hire others to run your other marketing campaigns for those other higher quality products, and spend time promoting your own custom software...

Now, you decide. It's up to you. We're just here to offer opinions, though experts are paid for their opinions and not for the facts they know, so study the opinions provided to you in this thread, and decide which are:

• Expert opinions based on extensive relevant knowledge and expertise gained from years and years of relevant experience; or
• Opinions based on extensive relevant knowledge without relevant experience; or
• Assumptions based on nothing except a workable understanding of the fundamental structure of logical frameworks and fundamental methodologies of logical analysis.. lso:

I'm sure you know many developing countries are in Asia and that many reports that can be substantiated with evidence show some of these countries are hot beds for piracy and IP theft. Perhaps some of those buyers who ask for refunds just want the full version of the product, so they can reverse engineer it to develop patches or cracks and post it in various sites with malicious code inserted (yes, there are companies that pay criminal organizations to develop malicious software that can steal info from an infected computer for their marketing objectives and other illegal purposes, and these criminal organizations pay "affiliates" fixed rates per computer infected with the malware, and they pay higher rates when infected computers have IPs based in North America and the EU), or they just want to see the full features of the product before they download pirated versions of the product, or even before they buy it from their local pirated software dealer...

i think you must ask them why they are asking for refunds and do you best to improve on that area.

ClickMonkey, Wendy Maki, Bill Platt, Ken Leatherman... Thank you all for your pragmatic, encouraging and plainspeak ideas.

I understand that the product is a lemon but the market itself has good potential. It is also a very curious market as the product itself is in the English language but most of my good buyers (the ones who don't refund or chargeback) are from non-English speaking countries.

To those who suggested developing my own software, yes, I did seriously consider that on several occasions but the ROI doesn't justify the time, effort or investment. It's the kind of niche where the product has to be priced low, which is why I stuck with it for 2 years trying to make it work as an affiliate instead of reinventing the wheel as a vendor.

Everything considered, I agree that my efforts are better funneled elsewhere (for the moment) till I find a way to better monetize this niche.

Overall, I respect all the ideas I've received here and I thank you all for your time.

Margaret its great you came back in here and posted again.

It will be interesting to see where you concentrate your new projects. Please keep us posted. Because as others have said you know how to promote a product and get results and your tactics may be the very thing others can do to make an income off the web.

Ken

no-brainer. drop it and focus your attention on a higher converting product.
You are not actually "earning" $300/month from this product, you are in fact losing because of opportunity cost.
So let's say that you focused your attention on a more successful and better converting product and make $500/month, this would mean that the opportunity cost of the time that you spend promoting the current product as opposed to the new one is $200/month.

I believe that blind promoting is your problem here..

You could be telling the customer one thing and then when they get the product they dont get what they expected..

Fergal

What are you doing to presell the product? Sales pages from the vendor are always going to be hypey. I always try and presell it by giving realistic expections (always in a positive light), and reinforce the value of it from a price standpoint.