ISSUING CUSTOMER REFUND REQUESTS:

When you receive an email from a customer, that requests a refund, process it immediately!

Do not wait, thinking that you'll do it later, because if you do wait, you may forget about it altogether. It will then go from a simple refund, to a complicated chargeback, and you really don't want that to happen.

Depending on which type of payment processing system you are using, it should be really easy to process a refund. You should NOT need to request that the customer provide you with his/her credit card number, unless the purchase was a very long time ago, as in nine, or ten months!

When you process a refund, it is a very good idea to keep a copy of the transaction receipt, in a .doc file, which is of course saved to a floppy disk, and/or burned onto a CDROM for future use. Since the refund confirm won't contain their credit card number, it's safe to store them on your system.

You never know when you may need to provide proof of a refund, so keep a copy of it, for as long as you can. There are many other things that you'll need to hang on to, and those are covered in depth, in another section.

You may want to name the .doc file: (Insert Month) Refunds.doc or something that easily indicates which month is associated with the file. It's a good idea to use a separate one, for each month. It saves having to dig through one long file, to find proof of a refund, months later.

Also, if you process a manual charge for a telephone order, keep a copy of that too. If you don't and you need to process a refund for that person, you will need their transaction ID, and that may be the only place you can find it!

Depending on which type of payment processing system you use, it may be quite easy to process a refund. Verisign/Signio allows us to search transactions by day, and process a quick credit.

All we have to do is find the original purchase order, (which we copy, and paste into the .doc file) then going by the Transaction ID, we do an "auto credit".

Once the credit has been done, we take the confirmation message, and paste that into the .doc file, right underneath the original transaction information.

If you are not be able to issue an "auto credit", you might be able to do the refund, using the TRANSACTION ID number alone. If that isn't an option with your payment processing system, you wil then have to enter the customers credit card number, expiry date, name, address, phone number, etc.

If that is the case, it will take considerably longer to process the refund, because you'll have to locate, or request all that information first.

Once the refund has been processed, you MUST immediately email the customer. Here is an example of what to say, to inform them their refund has been processed:

Right after the refund has been processed, the results recorded, and you have emailed the customer with confirmation, the next thing you want to do is DISABLE the password they were given. Doing so will ensure they are no longer able to access the product, or the product download site, since they've been refunded, which is very fair. If someone requests a refund, because they are truly unhappy with their purchase, they won't be using it any longer, and won't need a working password.

There will always be a handful of people that are happy with the purchase, and will be using the product, but do request a refund. Simply process those requests, as you would any other. There is nothing you can do. However, if you have someone that buys a product, and immediately requests a refund, then buys another product from you, and does the same thing, you may have to deal with them in a different manner.

This subject of what to do regarding many consecutive refund requests is covered in another section, in detail.

In most cases, you can have someone set up an "admin" section for you, where you can issue passwords, change passwords, and disable passwords. You pretty much can't get by without it if your customer have to login to a web site to receive their product from you, so check with your webmaster, or programmer and see if they can create a login admin area for you to use.