Refunds In Your Membership Site Using These Five Techniques

When I ask people, “Why haven’t you launched your membership site yet?” the most common response is, “I haven’t made any content because I’m afraid everyone’s going to hate me and refund from me.” Luckily, that’s not the case especially when you apply all of these techniques to reducing refunds. You’re always going to have some but these will keep them to a minimum.

1. Announce bonuses ahead of time.

A big chunk of my refunds come from people who simply drive by. They purchase and a few minutes later, apply for a refund. A way to prevent this is to announce upcoming bonuses in your membership site ahead of time. If you have a new video coming in a few days, tell them right now. That way, they can be ready for it and will stick around and give you more of a chance before cancelling or refunding immediately.

2. Use PayPal instead of ClickBank.

If you can help it, use a payment processor such as PayPal instead of ClickBank. ClickBank is great as an affiliate payment processor but they let many refunds simply go through whereas with PayPal there’s a little bit more to it and the buyer has to deal with you directly to get the refund instead of going over your head and to ClickBank.

I have offered the same exact product on both PayPal and ClickBank and had sometimes a 10% refund rate while on PayPal, the same exact product had under a 1% refund rate. The reason is simply because it’s far too easy to cancel or refund on ClickBank even accidentally.

3. Make customer support very easy.

Even with PayPal, your buyers can go over your head and go to your payment processor to try to get a refund. And usually people try to get refunds for silly reasons that you can avoid. For example, they didn’t get a download link or they lost their link or they couldn’t get your e-book or software to run on their computer. Make your customer support very easy so people will go to you first instead of simply going over your head for a refund. This is a very simple step and reduces your refunds dramatically.

4. Add contests or challenges so your customers have a tangible result from what they paid.

What do you think is more impressive, somebody paying $20 to get information about how to set up a WordPress blog or pay $20 and get the butt kicking to actually set up that WordPress blog? It’s the second, right? For that reason, you should add contest or challenges into your membership site forcing your members to apply what they have learned. That way, if the time comes for them to decide whether to either cancel or refund your membership site, there is solid proof that they got more out from your site than what they’d put in because they actually took some action.

5. Avoid trials and simply price upfront.

If you offer time limited discounts or time limited trials, you are attracting the bottom of the barrel buyers. You are attracting the cheapskates. I know it sounds mean but I would rather turn away the cheapskates and bring in the best buyers possible because it means less customer support for me.

That’s why I have eliminated trial offers on almost all of my membership sites. So if I have a $100 a month membership site, I’m selling that immediately. You do not have to have a trial offer to get people in your membership site. You simply have to be a better marketer.

Those are my five ways to reduce membership site refunds. Announce bonuses ahead of time, use PayPal instead of ClickBank, make customer support easy, use challenges and avoid trials.