How To Avoid Refund Requests For Information Products

Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 12:11 am

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How-To-Avoid-Refund-Requests-For-Information-Products

Refund requests are probably the most rampant in the internet marketing industry – which is the selling of information products. I don’t have the statistics to back it up but I got that statement from a very well-known internet marketing guru.

If you are selling information products as an online business, here’s a couple of pointers for you to avoid or lower refund request rates.

1. Undersell, Overdeliver
2. Use Pictures Correctly
3. Not Giving Immediate Access
4. Poorly Produced Product
5. Incongruent Sales Letter

Let’s look into what each of these pointers mean for your business.

1. Undersell, Overdeliver

The main purpose of doing something like this means to provide overwhelming value to your customers. To sell to your customers and let them experience that they made a good choice and got a better deal than what they thought they were going to receive.

One way is to providing unannounced bonuses which are related to the product.

Some people might disagree with this point because sometimes, sales letters require hype. Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with using hype to get attention to your business, but the main issue to prevent refund requests is not focusing on building too much hype that your product fails to live up to the anticipations of the purchaser.

2. Use Pictures Correctly

People like to see pictures of the product that they are getting – and that’s usually in the form of an ebook cover. When you hire a professional to design your graphics, do let him know what design you want. Do you want a hard cover picture, a spiral bound report, a CD or DVD compilation?

If you sell ebooks, the cover should depict the size of the product that they are getting. Yes, people do judge a book by it’s cover. So create your product images to match with the size of your product. If your product is a 20 to 40 page ebook, you might want to use a spiral bound picture. Anything larger than that, you’re safe to go into a thicker looking book design.

3. Not Giving Immediate Access

If your sales letter promises that they will get instant download to the product – you’d better live up to it! And that means to always test out the buying process. When the buyer has made a successful online transaction, does he get immediate access to the product?

If you want to test the buying process for yourself, you can make a test purchase link on your sales letter. You can either setup the sales page to be $0.01 or you can use a coupon code that gives you a complete discount. That way, you can still test out your sales process.

Once you’re sure that the process is running smoothly, replace the test purchase link with the actual one. Make sure all links are correct!

4. Poorly Produced Product

This is something that’s very subjective. However, if your product has a lot of white spaces with only a few sentences in between large graphics, you could be setting yourself up for a refund trap. Also, people like to see a product that has been formatted properly – much like a book.

Because if your product has a picture of an ebook on it’s cover, people tend to associate your product with a book. So try to format the text of your product so that it’s easy to read as well as transmit whatever information you want as clearly as possible.

5. Incongruent Sales Letter

This is the biggest reason for refunds – and it’s mainly because of one word: hype. Using hype can cause your product to be “beefed up” more than it actually is.

It gives the reader a lot of expectation and when they get a product expecting to make hundreds or thousands of dollars only to get a product that’s 20 pages for $47 dollars, which the buyer can really read finish in 5 minutes… don’t be surprised to get a refund request.

Your sales letter should never promise more than what it really is. You can use flowery words to make your product look good but don’t ever promise something that can’t be delivered. Not only that, you could also save yourself from spreading bad news (which can catch on faster than piranha’s on fresh meat!).

Asher says: “What do you think? I pretty much like the picture because it probably represents the minds of product owners when some people want a refund request for all the weird reasons in the world! If you’re interested in creating an information product of your own, you’ll definitely want to check out my friend Kevin ‘Hamster King’ Riley’s guide about how to build a profitable home-based how-to business empire from your hobby.”

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