When should you give customers refunds?

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#21

Yes we use Ioncube. Primarily to prevent supporting modified installations which it does a good job of doing. It’s not very effective if you’re really concerned about IP or code since it’s easily bypassed. I’d prefer an obfuscator like other langs have but PHP doesn’t have any good ones.

I don’t think it really has much impact on the trial end though. There’s keygens for HepSpot so it’s easy enough to just make an license for yourself. I never bother with changing it, real customers never even think to do things like that. They can’t get support since we know who really purchased so that’s the only thing that would bother me.

So really you could just create a license file that’s base64 encoded or something like that with a time in it and you’d be fine.

#22

Ask me for a refund, and you’ll get it…within reasonable limits. Our official policy is 30 days no-questions asked. But ask after three months, I’ll probably do it. Because it just isn’t worth my time or energy getting into conflict with the tiny percentage of users who ask for a refund. And issuing the refund is easy with our payment processor.

Yep, occasionally someone takes advantage of this. I estimate between one and five customers per thousand. I’ll save my energy for dealing with the 995+/1000 that are not taking advantage of our liberal refund policy.

We did once have someone ask for a refund twice…and with a really strange rationale for why we should refund the single purchase twice…That was odd.

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#23

it’s a quite complicated issue. For example you should keep in mind that in many countries there is a law that states that the customer can ask for a refund within 14-30 days after the purchase without the explanations. This applies to digital vendors too and digital vendors need to comply for one simple reason: In case you refuse to issue a refund, the customer can reverse the charge through his bank and this is much worse than a refund as additional penalties apply to you, you still lose the money and moreover you get a record with your payment provider which cannot be reversed.

To prevent such situations there is a number of steps you need to take (refund policy, product descriptions/images etc). It is too long to describe, so I will just share my white paper on the topic of chargebacks (they are strictly related to refunds). I hope it helps:

https://www.payproglobal.com/white_papers/Chargeback_Management_landing_page.aspx

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