First sale...followed by first refund. WTF?

Hey Joseph, congrats on your first sale. Refunds are a fact of life when it comes to Clickbank products. There is no way you can prevent buyers from returning your Clickbank product.

I would suggest you not focus on that one refund, look at the positives and continue your marketing efforts. You will have many more sales than refund.

Best of luck!

In the old days we used to have software that locks em out after they refund, I'm not sure why no one uses it now... Might be time to revive the practice.

Actually you should stay focused on selling then watch the refund rate after a few sales to get your %, if it seems high call or contact the refunders, and see what's up, lots of folks will give you straight answers that can help figure it out. It might have nothing to do with you or the product at all. Right now 100% refund rate sounds high, but it's too small a sample to count.

I had a similar experience when I started but my sales outweigh the refunds by a huge margin. Having your first sale turn around like that is a bummer, but you're still ahead of 99% of the yahoos who only talk about getting a product out there. Good for you.

Dave Saunders (davesaunders) on Twitter

Thanks gang - I know refunds are a fact of life, but seeing that first sale suffer from a refund was like a kick in the head. Okay - nothing to be done, focus on the sales.

Here's what I'd do...

Send him an email.

Ask why he refunded.

Tell him his feedback is appreciated...and mean it.

Tell him you'll send him a complimentary copy of your next product in return for his opinion.

He'll be a friend for life...and...he's more likely to become a customer again than if you were to just 'ban' him.

Well, that's my 'stupid' opinion, anyhow.

Steve

there is nothing you can do about it, its just how it is with these kinds of digital distributions

Actually I'd be interested to hear if there are any online solutions that allows to access ebooks via some sort of protected access that could be locked/unlocked.

I do see potential in such service.

Gleb

Do you have an affiliate program. I've got a related site, so maybe I can help you get a few non-refunded sales.

EDIT - Nevermind, I found the link.

For what it's worth, you might also find that the source of your refund requests has a great deal to do with the percentage of refunds/sales.

Advertising here will result in a much lower refund request rate than certain other forums that seem to possess a large number of scammers, for example.

Something that sets my alarm bells ringing is the question: Do you offer a refund if I'm unhappy with the software? I can almost guarantee that the person's not a genuine buyer, as I offer a free trial and confirmation that I offer refunds.

When confronted by these questions, I usually ask if they'd like a free copy and refer them to my free copy offer on the site. If they buy, good for me, if not, no loss.

Well, for pure PDF DRM protection, there's always something like LockLizard, although that's pretty expensive, unless your sales are in the $6K+ per month range, in which case the $6K+ you spend on the software is justified. ;-)

Which is why I tend to stay away from info products. Far easier to code a solution into the software. :-)

Refunds are what we have to accept with clickbank. But generally I find it's only about 5%. So don't worry. Just allocate an amount in your mind like say 20% for refunds so you won't feel disappointed.

However, for non-US customers, it can be pretty high.

Want to protect it?

Simple.

Give them immediate access to the first chapter!

Then send the rest to them via CD, have this CD Copyright protected so they can't copy the contents.

I believe Clickbank have a policy for returning of physical products - could be mistaken. But i do remember asking them about this and they vaguely said they honor that type of physical return of the product first before they refund the buyer. You might want to check that out?

Only other suggestion is - i hate to say it, but use paypal, seller is protected, and buyer isn't on digital goods. And more so if the product is not bought via ebay. Any product bought outside of ebay is NOT protected - and this is from the horses mouth (Head Supervising Manager of Paypal).

I don't like this at all!
Person could buy a book, get money back, repeat with every ebook product. get EVERYTHING for free! I'm sorry, but this just sucks!

I agree that it is early in his case, but I don't think it can ever be premature to talk about protecting downloads.

This guy was probably just a jack@$$, but unfortunately there are many of them!

Thanks for all the suggestions, gang.

I did write and ask him if he had some difficulties with the product, so we'll see if he answers. If it was an honest complaint about quality or some such, he'll reply.

I'm concerned because I intend to release a new ebook each month and wanted to be sure I got a handle on the problem before I get too far down the road.

I do have a membership site, and in fact, two of the three levels of membership get every ebook as part of their monthly fee, but I am also selling them as stand alone products which keeps me from locking them away totally behind the membership wall.

I'll give it some time, see how the refund vrs sales things goes and then make some decisions.

AskLoz - you mentioned using Paypal and I had originally set up the ebooks as being handled through Paypal and Ejunkie instead of Clickbank. (Deciding to put everything up as part of an affiliate program made me switch it all to Clickbank since Ejunkie couldn't handle recurring affiliate payments)