egafd.com

This question mainly to webmasters but anyone feel free to pipe up with their views.

Should a refund policy on a paying access websites allow refunds for users even if there is clearly nothing wrong with their account/access?

Specifically what I mean is, say a user pays for the service but within a short period (say and hour or so) they email you to cancel the account and ask for a refund. Should you allow a refund in such a scenario? They could still have downloaded a lot of images from the restricted area within a short time period, so clearly there is justification for not allowing a refund?

Obviously if it is a recurring monthly payment then of course they should be able to cancel from the next monthly period, but what I am alluding to is an immediate cancellation and refund of service?

Note, this hasn't happened to me, I am just posing the hypothetical scenario because I hope to launch a site of my own and would like to know the best policy on this.

Cheers

You have to give a refund in most cases, certainly if your using a third party billing processor liek CCBill they will refund the surfer without even consulting you...

Alas it goes on a lot... we have had tonns over the 7 years I run paysites... the worst are those who join on a 6 month sign up, and chargeback a couple of days before the 6 months is up...

We used to use a system as well which would show when the surfer logged in and even how much bandwidth they used... we would check when someone chargedback to see if they had been a active member... and always they were...

These people are cheats and nothing short of thiefs... but the system is set up to allow it, it's to do with the regulations the credit card people put on the billing companies... not sure how it works with your own merchant account... but I would still think the surfer could put a chargeback on their credit card...

Unfortunately the billing companies have to refund the money. If a customer complains and threatens a charge back then the billing company will give the money back without question sadly.

I customer can join your site and after 20 days just complain to the billing company they have had no access and they will be refunded.

This is why all billing companies take a % each month for charge backs. You get this back eventually if you dont get any refunds during that month.

What we do is get that persons card details barred from the billing companies system so they cannot join any other sites using that card.

What i suggest is use a piece of software called "pennywise" you can install download limits and it stops password sharing in its tracks. You have to pay for it but its well worth it.

Hope that helps

Darren

Thanks to both, helpful on here as ever

I've already got Omni-Secure to protect my restricted directories/galleries and it has features such as detecting and blocking concurrent user logins, so hopefully that will do a similar job to Pennywise.

Shame about how the refunds work as it puts me off my initial idea for my subs policy. I was going to initially implement a single '1 low price for 6 months access'. Reasons for this are that it is a new site built mostly using free open source software so bound to be teething problems, and I probably only have enough content to last about a year, and as this is purely a sideline project I have limited time free to do new photo shoots. Hence if the site ended up becoming impossible to manage at least I wouldn't have felt like I was ripping off customers too much.

So perhaps I will just go for a low cost monthly subs option, limiting how much I might get ripped off by the unscrupulous users.

Oh, and I meant to say, I propose to use CCBill.

I wouldnt let that worry you, we offer 6 months subs and we do get the odd charge back but its really such a small amount. I would say we get less than 1% per site

Also most billing companies take whats called a"hold back" as well as there cut, then after 6 months the give it back minus any charge backs.

Its their way of minimising the damage.

Generally I would not personally give refunds as once the user is in the members area they have the goods, and by refunding the money they get to keep the goods for free. It's like someone going into a shop with a pair of jeans stating that they don't like them, getting their money back but also keeping the jeans.
I use Pennywize and I can identify how much each user has downloaded. I've not heard of Omni-Secure , I may check that out. Pennywize has also proved to be a great tool for combatting password sharers!

I use CCBill and Verotel for payment proccessors and unfortunately I have had chargebacks with both. Unfortunately there are the wankers out there who will purchase a subscription, download the whole site and then scream fraud at the card company. There is nothing that we can do about it unfortunately. The only thing that I would say about that is Verotel seem a lot more leanient when it comes to refunds. CCBill seem to scrub harder on the signup proccess and chargebacks have been much lower than with Verotel.

It's one of those things you have to accept I guess.