This is a new one on me

This is a difficult one to handle. First off I have a notecard I send out to people who lose items containing all the advice I could gather online about recovering lost items. Often this resolves the problem. While every case is different, I would decline a refund in this case until the lost item is found -- the person has the option of opening a support ticket with LL. Likewise if I send a replacement I want two items returned for a refund -- but in actual fact I've never had this personal policy tested, the intersection of the set of people who experience an inventory loss and who want a refund is so low that statistically it has not occurred for me. I guarantee my work, but I can't guarantee against SL's bugs.

That said, it is up to you. I've discovered that most people are actually quite honest about things and legitimately frustrated at inventory loss. But the fact this particular user never recieved the item, therefore never tried and therefore doesn't have a real basis for requesting a refund does raise eyebrows a bit...

When someone wants money back I can't help but imagine that it might be some scam. For my own peace of mind I just give them the money and don't try to figure out what's going on. If the same person kept doing it (which I haven't experienced) I would probably start to deal with that person differently.

Yup and I voted for it as top priority, but the ongoing conversation suggests that their eyes are elsewhere.

Funny that i have never met a designer or creator that has ever treated me with the shaft.
i've had some times where items were either the label was wrong and gotten the wrong item or not gotten the item at all or even bought something for someone then realizing after that it is no transfer.. each time they were nice enough to trust me and very friendly at that..As much shopping as i have done in sl and as many transactions that have gone wrong i can say it has to be a small number out there messing over customers because i've yet to meet any of them in the past two years..

people get very stressed out when a transaction goes bad and sometimes use caps or IM the creator like they have already been ripped off or something when in truth it was just an sl burp..
IMing the designer or creator in a calm manner and being nice will get a faster response than one stressed out and angry..Plus most prefer a note card or have contact information in the stores.. It's a matter of being patient because if you have had a bad transaction chances are so are others in world and IM's will pile up..

Also some do Photoshop their products or may have the product in different lighting at the time the image is taken or just has a better graphics card than you when they took the picture so the item can look different to everyone..Just as when there were some using windlight and some not using it before it became standard in the viewers..

there are bad apples out there selling things but it's not the majority thats for sure..
just as there are some customers that try to take advantage also not a majority of them..

i think you will find more times than not a designer /creator will do what they can to help the customer in some way..the majority are not in the business of being fly by night companies.
i am just speaking from the experiences i have had..i can't speak for others.

I have seen comments in regards to how much one makes vrs giving a refund

I have very modest sales, lucky to cover tier from month to month, but that will not stop me from taking a customer at face value, and refunding when needed, assisting when needed etc

I do not take into consideration how many sales I made this month, when I decide if a refund is warranted or not (and thankfully very few refunds have taken place since I opened) usually it is just failed delivery and they are just happy to get the item

It costs nothing to resupply the item, but it does cost money to refund if no funds were recieved, consider refunding when a customer says they paid you for a $10k item in the above case, it cost you nothing to fork over $10,000L once amonth right?
The customer obviously wanted the item enough to try purchase it in the first place, so if thats the case then give them another copy just in case, they get the item just as they would have if it all went smoothly, and it costs you nothing and at worst they get 2 and give one away to a friend.
If you look at it likes it cost nothing, then perhaps you should remember the customer may have spent nothing, if the funds were actually transfered or just income from camping.
"The customer is always right" ghreat in principle but if someone sends an alt in to your store every few days and says they paid for something and didn't recieve it, you'll fork out a refund everytime right? It's a better income than camping, wonder if they could make a refundhunting bot?
I imagine in RL if customes came in to your audiovisual store without a reciept and told you the $700 TV they paid cash for yesterday hadn't been delivered, you't refund them and send them a new TV?

Last night I made a 800L purchase as a gift. The servers were starting to bork. The money was deducted but the gifted person received nothing. I figuered it was the borking and figured I'd Im the creator the next day--the creator was a very reliable person.

I logged off and then on after about 15 minutes and as soon as I logged on the creator was Iming me, asking if the transaction had gone through, he didn't think it did. I checked the other person and they still had not recived it, so without me even asking the seller sent me back the 800L. I thanked him for his quick action.

Someone like that is very reliable for a reason. Due diligence

I had a customer once who bought a sari for a party, but the xaction didn't go through... I was out of town so couldn't log in to respond that evening. When I did log in, she said "well, the party's over, so...." I just refunded her the L$ and sent her a new copy of the sari. I figure that good customer service is more important than a dollar.

refund.

sux to possibly give it away for free, but you make enough sales this won't really hurt you, and your reputation is more important. hopefully, it's a no-transfer item.

Imagine, imagine. Imagine sl without paranoid greedy indiviuals? Shopowners, anyone?We can sit here all week and discuss imaginary circumstances and it's not about that.


Then you need to make sure what you sold isn't crap. Then the customer won't mind get a duplicate. It's not always about refunding money. If someone buys something it's because they want it and if as I said you haven't sold garbage then the customer won't mind getting another which is nothing since it's copiable. Unfortunately, at times you do get garbage and not what's being advertised then you have no choice but to refund their money and go learn how to make better items.

If they didn't receive it then you send another, not too hard to do.

Ricardo. It's nothing to do with greed. It's about the SL system in which sellers have no way of knowing whether or not an item was delivered, buyers are able to take advantage of it if they choose to, and sellers do not want to be ripped off because of it.

The customer is *not* always right. The end.

from the sound of it you have been shopping at some pretty bad places and have had some bad experiences..
by bad places i don't mean bad quality but bad businesses..they are out there but they are not the majority that i have seen..
i can see becoming sour over bad transactions or feeling like you have been fooled in some way..that would make me sour..
you can't blame a shop owner for asking for advice from other shop owners and take everything said in the thread as this is what they do all the time..
i believe he did give a refund but wanted to see what others thought of the situation..
the ones ripping people off won't take that time to worry about what a customer thinks..
they give a bad name to everyone just like any bad apple in any barrel..

It's not the case for traders in SL that one policy size will fit all. If we sell a transfer item, and the customer fails to receive it, or claims not to receive it we have an insoluble dilemma. We cannot prove that the item has been delivered unless we are in world and drag it from our inventory to their profile. Then we will see a 'XXX XXXX has accepted your inventory offer' mesage. But if they have gone off line or crashed we won't. And this is not a satisfactory way to conduct a business that may have dozens or hundreds of sales a day! So it may be that the customer will get a 'replacement' for an item they already have. Whilst wishing to believe that people are honest and trustworthy, we cannot be blind to the truth that some are not.

Clearly then we must all, as business people in however small ( and virtual ) a way, have a clearly defined and accessible notice of store policy. Mine is that I make all my products no transfer. If a customer wants to send a gift they can buy the item on SLexchange, or they can send me a notecard with the gift request. If any customer then claims not to have received the item I redeliver as soon as I have checked my transaction history. I only give refunds where there has been an accidental duplication of a purchase.

Until there is a reliable delivery confirmation system in SL, I think that no transfer is the only option.

But that's a really different scenario, right? I mean, if the buyer's transaction history shows money going out, and the seller's transaction history doesn't show money coming in, then the Lindens just have to sort it out--and it should be easy for them because the buyer has a transaction ID for investigation.

But even Ricardo (or me, for that matter) surely wouldn't expect a merchant to just hand out money to everybody who claims to have spent it at your store if there was no receipt of funds transaction. That would be lunacy.

Incidentally, I have never heard of a case where money was spent and that transaction wasn't recorded in the spending account's history (albeit sometimes a few hours late in updating to the web). If that ever starts happening, then the whole show is over.

We have suspected this (requesting refund for undelivered goods scam) has happened to us on more than one occasion. It's only happened in the last 2 or 3 months, whereas we've sold our skyboxes for nearly 2 years. Generally we err on the side of good customer service, but we pay close attention to who's making the request. In our case we had a rash of people requesting refunds for non-delivered items over 2 days- different avatars but the wording of the requests was almost the same each time and they had very similar profiles.

We've also been getting this lately: "my friend bought xxx but it wasn't delivered..." and the friend doesn't show up in transactions history. I have no idea how the friend angle, if it is indeed a scam, is supposed to make their claim more believable?

One more thing to note: Offline IMs AND item delivery are both rather wonky lately. I guess I need to file a jira, but I fear nothing will come of it since it seems to be random, and not immediately reproducible- but I have confirmed that offline IMs are simply not delivered or forwarded to email quite often these days, and that some offline item deliveries are not reaching their destinations. If people were buying your stuff off SLX while they were not in-world (making it an offline delivery), that would lend more credence to the story.

That's what I said too, but then someone reminded me that it's simply not possible, in theory. In RL there is no such thing -- transactions are handled by keeping journals and reconciling them later.

Well, you could get confirmed delivery, but not confirmed lack of delivery. To oversimplify a bit, think of it this way: when a sales occurs, buyer sends money. Seller confirms receipt of money by sending goods. Sending of goods is done using a "reliable" service, which means you are notified if it succeeds -- the delivery is acknowledged.

What does it mean if you don't get the acknowledgement? One of two possibilities: either they didn't get the goods, or the acknowledgement got dropped. No matter how many acknowledgements you try to add on top, there's always the possibility that the last one gets droped (in which case you can't tell whether the previous message the other way got dropped instead). So instead, in RL, the transaction is journalled and the journals are reconciled later (this is usually between banks, who have a vested interest in doing this reliably and cooperating).

In SL, in order to have the same ability, we'd need a foolproof way of seeing part of someone else's transaction history. So, if we want a fix for this, we need to ask for the ability to see the part of someone else's transaction history where we're the other party. Then we could resolve these disputes with a much higher confidence. And I believe it's the best we can hope for.

Even that wouldn't be foolproof, because adding to the transaction history could be dropped, but LL ought to make some attempt at doing something. Even if it's not foolproof, it would cut down the possibilites. E.g. after the item has been deposited into someone's inventory, record a confirmation for the seller. There are fewer operations that can go wrong where the buyer receives but the seller doesn't get the confirmation of receipt.

Yes it is, the money doesn't get sent until the item is delivered. There are ways to program the system to do this.

It's the last few months when non-deliveris have been almost daily, and that makes it sound like people are learning to take advantage of it to steal. I see no reason to refund unless there is a good reason, and non-delivery isn't a good reason, imo - and neither is "I've changed my mind". I refunded the subject of this thread (back on page 2), but I was content with it because she gave me what I consider to be a reasonable reason for changing her mind. If I'd had a bunch of refund request, as you have, I wouldn't be suspicious at all - I'd be darned sure I was being scammed - and I wouldn't do the refunds.

can maybe try this... doesn't work in every case (if they unpack in a no-script zone), but can help weed out some of the 'conners'...

/54/4f/214183/1.html

Here is my take on this...I do a good biz with many many transactions a day. I had a guy recently who bought some curtains from me and didnt realize the texture itself was slightly transparent. Also, he needed them to got to 10m, but with the added curtain rod sticking out on each side, they did not cover his windows. He imd me, i went to his house to try to help. I saw they just would not work, so i refunded 800L for all the curtains he bought. He did not ask for a refund, but i thought it was the right thing to do in this case.

In another situation, i had a woman come in 4 times in one day complaining about diff items and wanting a refund. She had every reason in the book for why she wanted the refund, didnt fit, color was wrong, clicked on and bought the wrong things, etc. Every time she came in she bought another item, and then came back later for the refund, which i had given her each time. In the middle of this she brought several friends in who started doing the same thing. This was clearly to rip me off. I called a halt to it after the 3rd refund of the day. She called me every name in the boot, things got ugly, i banned her, she followed me and had friends follow me for a couple of days, etc.

So, in my opinion, it is best to refund but once it is clear that the person IS in fact trying to get things for free, i have NO issue with refusing to do so.

:\ i hear ya - i developed my little packaging receipt system upon a friend's suggestion after i discovered while quizzing a 'complaint' (misc. evidence suggested that this person had actually received the product) that the customer simply wanted one for her 'sister' - a 'twofer' con. :\ that after a long run of 'i didn't get it' complaints... there was simply a little 'network' of friends who knew they could get away with it. after i installed my receipt system, these complaints -swiftly- decreased... i hope it helps until the lindens can underpin the current transaction system a lil' more.

Qie may be able to answer this one...

I know there's an LSL 'change of owner' function. If it's an event, is it triggered when someone buys something and receives a copy of it into their inventory, or is it triggered when someone rezzes a purchased item for the first time? If either of those are true (especially the first one), then I would think that a script could be placed in each sale item, that IMs the seller on a change of owner, and then deletes itself.

Phil, we've never had that particular scenario, but just last week, a woman IMd me telling me she LOVED my stuff. Since I don't build, I IM her back and tell her thank you, but that my husband is the builder. She then strikes up a conversation during which she tells me she'd love to buy from us, but that all of her transactions are charged TWICE to her account. She further explains that she only gets one of the item even though she is ALWAYS charged for two. She then asks if she goes and buys something, will I refund her when it shows up looking like she bought TWO. I told her that we don't issue "refunds" and offer to have her pay us directly and we'll "drop the item" to her. She refuses and says she'd rather "buy it". Then she gets upset when I say we don't issue "refunds". She asks to "friend" me, at which time I explain that we have a group she can join, but I try to keep my friends list relatively small. She then tells me she won't buy from us. The upshot? I am assuming she planned to purchase TWO items, and then tell us that (as she had prefaced) she only got one and only wanted one, then request a refund.

It takes all kinds....