Refund question for big sales

Discussions
#1

Hi all, I saw a product for sale where the corporate license was $14900. The payment processor is ShareIt (or MyCommerce, after the ShareIt link opens).

My question is this: say the buyer disputes the purchase for any reason. Does ShareIt (or any payment processor) listen to the seller’s side of the story and make the decision to refund? And if they don’t refund, would the buyer then sue the seller to get the money?

As a one-man show, I’d be concerned that if I sold something for that much, I’d be too scared to touch it in case of a refund dispute. Knowing my luck, I’d spend it by getting better equipment and so on, and then once the money is gone, I’d get hit with a refund request - and wouldn’t have the money to pay it back. This worries me greatly, and thus is making me keep my product price lower rather than higher.

So how does a MicroISV deal with this concern? Thanks.

#2

I had such experience in February when a customer requested a $3000 refund and I executed it. My FastSpring account became negative but FastSpring told me that its Ok and the funds will be deducted from my future sales. (February was a bad month for me)

#3

Just to clear something out, there are chargebacks and there are refunds. Chargebacks for credit card payments are initiated through a bank, and there’s very little you can do. In most cases bank takes buyers side. Especially since you go through third party, i.e. payment processor who should deal on your behalf. However, my experience when dealing with B2B is that chargebacks are very rare, and in most cases they happen because customer didn’t recognize company name on charge. You can deal with customer directly in these cases to revert it, although it’s a bureaucratic problem with a bank even when end user cooperates with you.

Refund is a different thing, it’s initiated through you or through payment processor. You have much more saying in that, although I never disputed it and don’t know what happens then. Refunds were for my case always reasonable, e.g. someone ordered wrong product or quantity, etc. Having incorrect $14900 order is a mistake customer will quickly recognize, i.e. it should not happen after few months after you spent money.

In my opinion it’s not that risky situation, i.e. you have much higher risk of no one buying that offer :slight_smile:

If you’re still concerned, you can just remove public buy links for expensive licenses:

1 lic = $199 -> Buy button
10 lic = $1599 -> Buy button
Ent .lic = $14900 -> Contact us for purchase options.

You can still fulfill that order through payment processor, but they’ll contact you first, will be involved in purchase process and there will be very low probability that something goes wrong. Remember, when a company buys something for 15k, multiple people were involved, someone requested that, multiple people approved it, there was probably a trial period… Even if you’re not that happy with your software, there’s very little chance that all of these people will admit they made a bad call. Office politics 101.

Btw. ShareIt was renamed to MyCommerce few years ago, and its parent companies are Element5 and Digital River. All of these names show up in one place or another when dealing with them.

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#4

Thank you both for the excellent answers! Very eye-opening and educational for me. :slight_smile:

#5

I had a similar experience last year with Avangate/2Checkout. Same outcome. - No big deal.

#6

If a purchase was extraordinarily large, that’s exactly what you should do. Set the money aside and wait until any refund and charge-back time frames expired, maybe even longer. Only then spend the money. Simple measure of caution that will minimize risk to almost zero.

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#7

keep in mind that for refunds and chargebacks, you may be liable for the payment processor’s fee. For 15K, this can amount to a lot of money