Refunds are a fact of life. They happen in almost every business to a greater or lesser extent, even when no refund option is given.

How you deal with them affects your customer relationship and therefore affects your business.

The first thing to remember is that it’s almost certainly nothing personal.

You can’t please all of the people all of the time.

For instance, my products vary in style but are usually “how to” products or “watch while I do this” products.

J.K.Rowling changed style sufficiently with her recent book that she used a different pen name for it. And that was probably at least partially to stop Harry Potter fans being disappointed with her latest book.

Some refunds you don’t really get a choice about – Clickbank are famous (or notorious) for their relaxed refund policy and some customers are wise to the fact that they can effectively get products free by asking for a refund.

Some vendors dislike this and products such as DL Guard are sold to help ensure that anyone who’s refunded a product no longer gets access to it.

Always assuming that they haven’t downloaded the product before asking for a refund. Then the option would depend on whether the product you sold “phones home” to check whether the purchase was still valid – software products can do that relatively easily and several programs I’ve used over the years – including most of Microsoft’s products –  log in to a remote server to check whether the purchase is legitimate.

Some customers will simply email asking for a refund.

If you’ve offered a no quibble refund within a certain amount of time, they’re perfectly within their rights to do that and don’t need to give a reason, although in my experience the majority of people will do so.

Some are even quite apologetic – even though it’s not really their fault.

And some refund requests are because they’ve bought the product twice by mistake – something I’ve done myself on occasion as my memory on that kind of thing isn’t always as good as it should be, especially if the headline has been changed.

One off refunds from otherwise regular customers are fine – I normally process them on receipt and suggest that you do the same.

Serial refunders – those people who buy products and then request a refund for most or even all of the products they’ve bought – are irritating at best.

Some of the payment processor systems such as Warrior Plus have the option to blacklist a buyer. It’s not something I’ve done and from what I’ve read it’s not always as successful as it should be because people can and do change things like their email address.

Personally, I’ll remove a serial refunder from my email lists if I think they’ve pushed the boundaries too far.

I’m not going to publicly state what those boundaries are (for hopefully obvious reasons) and they change over time and with my reaction to how the serial refunder has gone about requesting their refunds. Politeness doesn’t hurt and, in my view, helps a lot.

Even if I’ve taken a serial refunder off my lists, that doesn’t mean they won’t get to hear about a new product and potentially buy it.

The affiliate system works that way.

Warrior Plus will have opted them in to their notification list unless they deliberately unticked the appropriate box. So past customers will get notifications that way.

And they could well be on the list of various affiliates who promote my products.

Which means keeping serial refunders out of the loop ranges from difficult to impossible.

Then there are the people who assume that everyone selling digital products is a scammer.

They escalate their claim first, think about it later (or never).

And they’re definitely in my “dislike” group of customers.

It happens quite a bit with Clickbank products, especially those that are bought via credit card. The credit card statement will show a charge by ClickBank or CLKBANK*COM which doesn’t particularly remind people of the product they’ve bought.

Some people will research further.

But some just contact their credit card company and file a chargeback.

That’s irritating as it costs money for Clickbank to deal with. It also potentially affects their relationship with their credit card merchant as too many chargebacks are taken as a sign that all is not well with a business.

But it’s understandable from a customer point of view – a weird, unidentified, charge on a credit card statement from a site they’ve never heard of.

Which is why I prefer Paypal – their system seems to be easier and it’s rare for someone to dispute their Paypal transaction with their credit card company.

Instead, they’ll file a dispute with the built-in Paypal system.

Again, some customers will do that as their first step rather than dig through their emails or Paypal transactions and contact the vendor.

And, again, that’s understandable as Paypal’s receipts aren’t the most helpful at times.

The transaction then gets put on hold within Paypal until the dispute is resolved or, if nothing happens for a certain amount of time, until it times out within Paypal’s system. That’s good when a customer disputes a transaction, you resolve it and the customer then doesn’t tell Paypal that everything’s fine. It just means you have to wait for a while until the funds are released.

The final section of customer refunds I’m going to talk about isn’t really refunds.

It’s those slimy people who share download links for all and sundry.

Record and film companies suffer from this a lot as their products are digital and don’t have the same kind of built-in protection systems that something like a video game has available.

Amazon tightly control their Kindle product so it’s quite well protected although I guess someone could still copy and paste a book if they wanted to (it’s certainly possible to copy and paste from the PC version of Kindle).

But the main problem for digital product creators is when the download page gets shared.

If you’ve used a membership site option such as S2Member then there are various options available but if, like me, you just use an unlisted download page then the first you know that your product and bandwidth are being shared is when a bunch of extra page views show up.

In extreme cases, I’ve changed the name of the download page. That works – it’s a low tech solution but I prefer those if at all possible.

If the page is directly linked from the file sharing site then there is an option to block access using the scary .htaccess file – it’s scary because if you get something wrong in it, your site could potentially break. So keep a backup of your previous version and use a plugin to help write it if you’re not confident.

But most sharing sites use various services as a middleman to anonymise and disguise where the click is coming from.

The main thing I’d suggest with refunds is not to let them bug you.

They’re going to happen.

And there is a school of thought that if you’re not getting refunds, you’re not selling hard enough.

Guarantees – including no quibble refund guarantees – normally push sales higher.

So the net result, even after the refunds, is more income overall.

Which probably means you need to chill out when you get a customer refund request rather than wind yourself up.