Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Do Not Negotiate with Terrorists

ignitiondeck.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 56 posts

Re: We Do Not Negotiate with Terrorists

#31

Post by BryanB55 »

patio11 wrote: post #22

As a counterpoint: I have the opposite policy for refunds, and have for the last 8ish years. The official version, to satisfy my accountant [+], is a full refund with no questions asked for 30 to 60 days. The unofficial version is that I will give anyone a refund in (basically) perpetuity. I think my current record is 70 months after the transaction. My refund rate for BCC is 2.7%. That's the easiest one for me to ca…

Agreed. We do the same and sell digital products. Not happy? No questions, no hassles, 100% refund. Hardly anyone asks for a refund. In fact, I'd say its less than 2% but I don't have an easy way to calculate it unfortunately. In most cases we try to work with people to fix any issues and after an email or two everything is fine. But we occasionally do get the "pathological customers" that patio11 likes to talk about. In those cases having the ability to give a refund is really nice because it is an easy way to part ways and "fire" customers you don't want to work with.

I think a lot of people are initially afraid to offer refunds, most notably for digital products. The ones I've talked to always say "but then they can just ask for a refund and get it for free!" Sure... they could, but, hardly anyone ever does from my experience. My advice would be to at least give it a try and see how it works, you might find out that it is actually an effective marketing tool and a way to gain trust while lowering the perceived risk for new customers.

Re: We Do Not Negotiate with Terrorists

#32

Post by makomk »

001sky wrote: post #5
maaku wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to nitpick, please be accurate. Terrorism is the strategy of taking actions to incite terror within a population to achieve some goal. It goes back much, much further than the current concept of a nation-state.

Its better surmised as just anti-civilian warfare.

No, gnu8's definition is the correct one. For instance, recently in the UK a cell of Islamic terrorists launched a terrorist attack in which they murdered a serving British soldier. They intentionally targeted him because he was in the military and were apparently quite apologetic to the civilians who saw it. Was universally described as a terrorist attack by the media.

Re: We Do Not Negotiate with Terrorists

#34

Post by 6d0debc071 »

spellboots wrote: post #18

How ridiculous. This post sounds like a pair of children fighting. And whilst your client seems very annoying, calling them terrorists for opting to exercise their perfectly valid rights to (a) engage you in legal proceedings and (b) write about their experience and publicise this writing make you look a lot less professional that they do.

To be fair threatening to have your 'SEO staffers aggressively hit the forums and ratings hubs' seems a bit beyond standard writing about someone. It seems more like they're threatening to flood with lots of reports of bad service, where only one would really be an honest reflection of an experience that successfully picks out the company involved.

Which seems more akin to fraud than honest reviewing.

Re: We Do Not Negotiate with Terrorists

#35

Post by PeterWhittaker »

macspoofing wrote: post #21
PeterWhittaker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes reading the comments helps me decide whether or not to read the article. I wasn't going to read this one, but your comment made me think I should - I fully expected to "+1" your comment, because on the whole, I agree with your statement. Then I read the article, upvoted the OP, and decided to write this. A better headline would have been "We don't negotiate with blackmailing, SOB bullies who string us along…

>We don't negotiate with blackmailing, SOB bullies who string us along with songs of high praise only to demand - DEMAND - their money back for no reason after days/weeks of a fully supported free trial, and who threaten us with all the fury of god's own social network There was no free trial. As I understood it, ignitiondeck does not do trials because they "want to discourage the process of ‘shopping,’ that is, some…

Re the free trial - yes, you are correct, I misunderstood the pre-sales Q&A bit the first time I read through it.

Makes me reconsider my conclusion, that does.

Re: We Do Not Negotiate with Terrorists

#36

Post by patio11 »

tieTYT wrote: post #26
patio11 wrote: post #22

As a counterpoint: I have the opposite policy for refunds, and have for the last 8ish years. The official version, to satisfy my accountant [+], is a full refund with no questions asked for 30 to 60 days. The unofficial version is that I will give anyone a refund in (basically) perpetuity. I think my current record is 70 months after the transaction. My refund rate for BCC is 2.7%. That's the easiest one for me to ca…

Do you offer money back guarantees for the consulting you provide, too? Or does this advice only apply to products?

I was occasionally asked for that. My response was typically along the lines of "The model for consulting is typically that I'm guaranteed my rate and you're guaranteed all of the upside. If you want me to take on the downside risk for this project, I would want to share equitably in the upside. My sense of equitable is that if I double your sales I end up owning half of the company."

That typically achieved the laugh I was going for. But seriously, if my contracts included a no-fault do-not-pay-Patrick option, my rates would be positively Rumpelstiltskinian to compensate.

There's many ways to de-risk potential offerings. Back when I was consulting, a money-back guarantee was not one which I needed to fill my engagement calendar. Customer references, a bit of a brand name, case studies, and a history of doing pretty much exactly what I get paid to do in a pretty public fashion mostly sufficed.

I can also very easily think of situations where that would have been personally catastrophic to me without any fault of my own (e.g. six months down the line client X exits line of business I consulted on, triggers guarantee on our $50k contract after I've already used that money to pay for my wedding). That strikes me as not a great idea, at all.

Re: We Do Not Negotiate with Terrorists

#37

Post by eliteraspberrie »

moocowduckquack wrote: post #25

"The reason we do not offer refunds is because our products are digital in nature, and digital products can easily be copied and reproduced. Once a digital product has been downloaded, it cannot be recalled. Additionally, refunds can be costly, as fees convert positive transactions into negative ones. In other words, we lose money every time we refund a product. Lastly, we want to discourage the process of ‘shopping,…

Canada has similar consumer protection laws. Here "no refund" means "stay away."

Re: We Do Not Negotiate with Terrorists

#38

Post by DanBC »

Hilarious that they write a wall of text about how no one ever gets their money back and how unreasonable this terrorist customer is, and then the last bit of small print is

> …The best I can offer now is we downgrade your account to the IgnitionDeck + Membership level and return the difference of $150. It is not a full refund, nor is it a refund of ($299 – $100), but it is a compromise that allows both parties to meet in the middle.

Which is pretty much what the customer was asking for anyway.

Re: We Do Not Negotiate with Terrorists

#39

Post by adrr »

MartinCron wrote: post #28
dougmccune wrote: post #9

I can't possibly imagine the time and energy wasted on this blog post and back and forth with the customer is worth $300. Not to mention the PR implications... you're calling your customers terrorists! Good god. You have an unhappy customer, give him his money back and move on.

Both parties have become completely entrenched "on principle" and are now acting in a way that economists wouldn't consider rational. Maybe this is a cautionary tale? Personally, I think that both strict no-refunds policies and SEO blackmail threats are antisocial behavior. Come on kids, you can do better than this.

Bad customers are a fact of life. A business should be able minimize damages from these types of customers.

Re: We Do Not Negotiate with Terrorists

#40

Post by spinlock »

patio11 wrote: post #22

As a counterpoint: I have the opposite policy for refunds, and have for the last 8ish years. The official version, to satisfy my accountant [+], is a full refund with no questions asked for 30 to 60 days. The unofficial version is that I will give anyone a refund in (basically) perpetuity. I think my current record is 70 months after the transaction. My refund rate for BCC is 2.7%. That's the easiest one for me to ca…

I have the same refund policy specifically for chargebacks. Here's a fun side note: despite the fact that I always issue a full refund, I had one customer chargeback a purchase. I decided to contest the chargeback and, amazingly, I won. I still don't know how that ended up in my favor but I feel like I just saw a unicorn and wanted to share.
Post reply on HN