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When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]
491–500 of 583 posts
Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
Credit card companies (i.e., Visa, Mastercard) absolutely do refund fees on payments when the retailer processes a refund. This is why retailers generally require you to use the same method of payment to get your refund. It's uniquely online processors that do not refund fees.
That isn't true. They enable the return of the interchange (from the issuing bank), they do not refund the scheme fees. In fact, you will pay more on the scheme fees to process a refund, as you need to send another message into the scheme's network - often charged per message or per byte etc. Interchange is not payment scheme revenue - it is just passed through to the issuing bank.
Scheme fees generally don't apply to US credit card transactions...
That is primarily an issue for cross-border credit or debit card transactions.
Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]
#493Tweet is unavailable (deleted). Backup http://archive.is/wqWYK New twitter link: https://twitter.com/twolivesleft/status/1288625617873694721?...
This wasn’t true:
https://twitter.com/twolivesleft/status/1288625617873694721?...
Recanted there. People need to think more critically.
Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would still mean that Apple would need to have a remote way of scanning every device currently connected to your account (even it's offline..?) to see if you have the app installed anywhere. It's trivial if the app can only exist on a single device and that is the only device that can request the refund. But that's not the reality.
I mean they already track which device things are install and not installed on, a simple popup "please delete this app from all your devices in order to request a refund" would be all it takes . Or if that's too much of a disruption for users, just requiring the current device to delete it would cover most cases and be better then the current situation.
That... wouldn't work.
Users can set each device to automatically download and install newly-purchased apps.
Imagine the case where there is a device you have misplaced (or given to a relative, or had stolen, or ___). You must find every device with auto-download and purge the app from each one before requesting a refund.
So you create a situation where it is possible that the user quite literally can't comply with the terms of the refund.
Perhaps a compromise would be to
1. Delete from the current device; and 2. To verify the status of each app during OTA updates (which, by definition, have connectivity to Apple's servers). Any refunded apps would be greyed-out or something.
Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm glad that Apple can't remotely delete apps from my device. It would be somewhat dystopic if they had that capability.
But they could make the refund wait until you do! It wouldn't be foolproof in case of backups but it would be a lot better than an honor system.
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Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ditto. Helping some non-profits, we were really hurt by people typo-ing a $10,000 donation when they meant to only donate $100. We quickly learned from that mistake. We also learned about how credit card thieves test credit cards. We saw hundreds of donation attempts. Stripe had us refund those that went threw, which costed us money in fees. Fortunately we were able to put some quick measures in place to stop them te…
I am curious what measures did you put in place?
The credit card tests had unique network patterns we could block.
We lowered our online donation limit. Above a certain amount it really is more ideal for a check or some other type of transaction. Though we've had a few people offer to just pay the 3% transaction fee on top of the multiple thousand dollar donation. For those we do a bit more manual process.
For a cost, Stripe also lets you put some additional rules on what type of payments you'll allow & how much info the person has to verify for the payment to be accepted.
Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 30% cut is not a payment process cut or else this would fall under: usury, profiteering, rip-off.
For reference for folks who aren't familiar - in the US,even 3% would be an above market rate for credit card processing. The big companies like square and stripe are usually 2.9% for $0/year accounts, and rates go down from there. Smaller processors can do lower rates, and if you do over a few $100k/year, you can do lower with the bigger players as well.
For online processing, 3% is by no means above market.
For example, the default price on Stripe (and many others) is 2.9% plus $0.30. For a business with an average order value of $30, that $0.30 adds a full percent, bringing your fees to nearly 4%.
If you do high enough volume, yes, you can negotiate lower prices.
Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm glad that Apple can't remotely delete apps from my device. It would be somewhat dystopic if they had that capability.
They absolutely have the ability to do that though, they clearly have the ability to shut a device down entirely too based on the iOS activation system. I probably wouldn't go as far as 'dystopic' either.
By that definition, if you want to be realistic about it, every OS vendor with regular software updates has the ability to do anything they like on any device they like.
Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying that companies who have to compete charge less whereas companies with a dominant market position can extract monopoly rents because they lack competition? But people keep telling me that isn't the case for Apple. Shouldn't they be doing the same thing to try to get store market share from Google?
> So you're saying that companies who have to compete charge less whereas companies with a dominant market position can extract monopoly rents because they lack competition? Not GP, but I didn’t read it that way. I read it as Microsoft loss leadering their store to get growth.
"Loss leader" means losing money one one product in order to get people to show up who buy more of something else. How do you imagine Microsoft's costs for paying a ~3% credit card fee and hosting a ~50MB app are going to exceed 5%? Also, what's the other product they intend to make money on supposed to be?
You can't attract people to the store with low fees and then raise them later or they'd just leave as soon as you do. Unless you would require them to use Microsoft's store and no other, but then you could just do that from the outset, except that it'd leave you with the same sort of antitrust scrutiny that Apple should be under for doing the same thing.
Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]
#500Payment processors generally don't refund fees on payments when the payments are refunded, this isn't new. It's remarkable mainly because (a) it's 30%, not 3% and (b) the App store doesn't position itself as a payments processor the way Stripe does, so it sounds really weird that they would act like one. If the app store took a 3% chunk and never refunded it regardless of the ongoing status of the transaction, that w…
Credit card companies (i.e., Visa, Mastercard) absolutely do refund fees on payments when the retailer processes a refund. This is why retailers generally require you to use the same method of payment to get your refund. It's uniquely online processors that do not refund fees.
> This is why retailers generally require you to use the same method of payment to get your refund.
This is for AML, not because of fee refunds.