5 Top Ways to Survive a Refunds Nightmare

As an online merchant, one of the things you should be wary of is celebrating after making a sale. You do not know it yet but one of your customers may be contemplating getting a chargeback or demanding a refund. When you do get a customer who is demanding for a refund, do not give in instantly. You might be surprised but more than half of all the refunds demanded were not because of credit card fraud or faulty products. Most of these refunds are demanded by unscrupulous customers who bought your products or e-books with the full intention to make copies of these and refund their original purchases. Although it is more difficult to settle refund issues on online products like e-books and other downloadables, below is a guide on surviving refunds and minimizing them:

1. Use the money back guarantee to your advantage.
Almost all customers who have inquired about money-back guarantee policies have the full intention to use them, often immediately after downloading the product and making copies of it. So if anyone contacts you or your staff through your website, email address, or phone about the existence a money-back guarantee and how it is effected, you and your staff should answer all inquiries politely, but offer no additional information. Most importantly, get this “potential customer’s” name and address and BAN him or her. Prevention is always better than empowering a refunder waiting to happen.

2. Collect pertinent information and verify authenticity.
Before effecting a potential customer’s purchase, take the time to collect important information like names, valid email addresses, phone numbers, and postal address. Make it part of your purchasing procedure to have customers verify their given information before effecting the sale. This reduces chances of refunds claiming identity or credit card theft. For added protection on your part, ensure that you use a secure and efficient payment and information system.

3. Provide accurate product details, pictures, and relevant information.
Most refund claimants say that product dissatisfaction was their motive for demanding a refund or that the product they received or downloaded was different from the one they paid for. Avoid this mess by giving accurate descriptions of your e-books and other product downloads. Offer excerpts, chapter summaries, audio clips, or software demonstration. This may seem like a huge effort but it can provide you with protection should the customer decides to demand a refund based on the given reasons above.

4. Require customers to read your terms and conditions before making their purchases final.
Ensure that your terms and conditions provide you with thorough protection against unscrupulous refunds. Make your terms and conditions visible in your website, your product, and in the delivery email. Have a delivery tracking software to track whether the downloaded product or e-book was actually delivered. Set a strict time frame for refunds and enforce it.

5. Join a credible and secure internet marketing and affiliate network that allows you to control refunds.
Internet marketing and affiliate networks do more than increasing your traffic and generating more sales. Most top players in this industry like Click2Sell.EU affiliate network ( http://www.click2sell.eu ) offers ways by which you can manage orders efficiently and promptly. By signing up for a merchant account and using the Orders Management section, you can view the details of the purchase like the product sold, customer’s name and address, payment option used, amount paid, place delivered, and purchase status. Aside from this, selling your product through an affiliate limits the validity of the download link to ensure that the customer cannot share your products with other people. An internet marketing and affiliate network provides you with an extra layer of protection against unscrupulous refunds. Moreover, such affiliate networks allows you to fully control refunds. You can refund the money to your customer whenever you want or feel it is necessary. This way you could save yourself from a real refund nightmare after a successful product launch.

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Relevant Website Content is the Key to Getting More Traffic to Your Site

Obtaining high quality targeted traffic to your website has never been as challenging as it is today. There are several different ways to advertise your website all with varying results. This article will discuss a brief history of advertising online, current advertising techniques and why website content is so important. To understand the best way to advertise online and increase your website’s traffic today first you should learn about the history of advertising on the internet. In the 1990’s when the internet was still young the most effective way to advertise online was through banner ads. By 1996 companies were advertising through Juno’s new ad supported e mail service and Webconnect started to offer accurate measurement tools to advertisers such as URL tracking. (http://www.worldata.com/wdnet7/articles/the_history_of_Internet Advertising.htm) It has been said that in 1998 Amazon was the first to launch a successful affiliate program. They invited webmasters and retailers to link to their website in exchange for a commission. This was the beginning of the still popular advertising method of link exchanging. That same year Larry Page and Sergy Brin introduced Google to the World Wide Web. This new search engine technology was designed to analyze these back links which were considered votes for a website. The “votes” determined how the page was ranked in the Google index. (http://www.searchenginehistory.com/#google) Today there are over 66 million websites on the World Wide Web and a lot more ways to advertise your site than there was just a decade ago. Companies use everything from pop up ads, banner advertising and even ads that interrupt online games and other interactions. Advertisers are always looking for easier, faster and less expensive ways to promote their products and services. The cost of regular postal mail has increased over the years making electronic mail the better choice. Email advertising can result in a better targeted audience. Customers who receive the email message are interested in what the advertiser has to say; therefore they click on the link. There are also several downsides to this form of advertising. In order for email advertising to be effective you have to have a well designed lead capture page. Along with this you must use a reputable auto responder service that obeys all the spam laws. This can get complicated because you also have to advertise your lead capture page. Banner advertising is very simple and can be effective if your banners are placed on relevant websites. But this method is also very expensive. Banner advertising can cost you as much as $20-$50 per thousand impressions which could run you anywhere from $2,000-$5,000 per month. A lot of companies today use pop up ads as a way to get traffic. But with the increasing popularity of pop up blockers pop up ads do not attract as much traffic as they used to. The most effective way to get highly targeted traffic to your website is by getting indexed by the search engines. Relevant back links will help you with your search engine rankings but if you do not have good content the links will not matter. For example, when someone types something in the search engine such as “Dodge Trucks” that searcher will more likely click on a website with information on that particular brand, not just “Trucks.” If you are selling Dodge trucks it would benefit you to have an article about that particular brand of trucks. This will help the search engines to index your website and you will get more return visitors. There are two different ways you can get good website content. The first way is by writing your own articles pertaining to your online niche. You can then add them to your website or blog to increase your traffic. Or you can submit them to free article sites like this one with a link to your website. Either method will give you more targeted traffic. Advertising online has come a long way since simple banner ads in the 1990’s. Webmasters, companies and affiliate marketers have a wide variety of different ways to get their message across online from email marketing to pop up ads. But they can get complicated and expensive. To avoid these issues the best way to get traffic to your website is by having accurate content. Relevant website content will help the search engines index your site and visitors will like what they see and return for more information. Writing your own articles and subscribing to articles previously written are two great ways to get content for your website. For more information on this topic visit: http://www.privatelabelarticles.12w.net
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