Refund policy for a digital product (3)

Hi everyone. I'm selling a ebook and have a question about how to treat refunds the best way. At first I had a pretty vague refund policy like "If you don't like our book for any reason, just shoot us an email and we will give you a refund" and I gave refunds to almost everyone who asked for it but over time I've started to see more and more people taking advantage of it saying something like "I want a refund no questions asked". Then I created a pretty strict refund policy which, suprisingly, didn't hurt my ROI at all but helped it and now almost no-one is eligible for a refund and everyone loses cases in paypal, lol . What I'm worried about is longevity, so this question is probably for more experienced marketers who sell digital products. Does a strict refund policy hurt your bottom line in any way over time? When I look at the competition, no one has a strict or well defined refund policy on their pages when selling digital products so that made me think I went a little overboard with the refund policy.

Originally Posted by phemistery

Hi everyone. I'm selling a ebook and have a question about how to treat refunds the best way. At first I had a pretty vague refund policy like "If you don't like our book for any reason, just shoot us an email and we will give you a refund" and I gave refunds to almost everyone who asked for it but over time I've started to see more and more people taking advantage of it saying something like "I want a refund no questions asked". Then I created a pretty strict refund policy which, suprisingly, didn't hurt my ROI at all but helped it and now almost no-one is eligible for a refund and everyone loses cases in paypal, lol . What I'm worried about is longevity, so this question is probably for more experienced marketers who sell digital products. Does a strict refund policy hurt your bottom line in any way over time? When I look at the competition, no one has a strict or well defined refund policy on their pages when selling digital products so that made me think I went a little overboard with the refund policy.

Yup, as cmdeal mentioned, a strict refund policy will likely result in a high amount of disputes... with paypal it's not such a big problem, I believe, but some billing solutions will simply stop doing business with you based on this. Once your dispute rates go above 1% it can mean your account with them is at risk.

The question here would be, how many actually requested the refund? In cases like this, it's not worth it to chase every single $$$ and simply be proactive with the refunds. Keep in mind that the customers are riding the horse here, banks and billers will honor their requests in majority of the cases and a business that causes too much trouble by raising a lot of disputes and chargebacks, is simply not worth for them to do business with.