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Marketplace ... Why can't merchants REFUND customers who demand a refund?!?


Brandy Little
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Why can't merchants REFUND customers who demand a refund from within Marketplace? They allow to redeliver an item but cannot REFUND a customer. Basically, this means that every time a customer contacts a merchant for a refund merchants are stung for the commission.

For example... a $500 item ... Marketplace take $25. Why should merchants foot the bill for this if they decide to refund customers? This is unfair and needs to be looked at.

The other thing is that a disgruntled customer who demands a refund and gets one will still be able to REVIEW an item after they have recieved a refund therefore causing people to avoid their product for no fault of the merchant.

Seems that LL need to look at fixing this.

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Not likely to happen in our lifetime.

I do not, however, see what is "unfair" about it. Who exactly is being unfair?

I just refund, even when the commission is much more than 25L (a dime), even when the customer accidentally bought two of a copy item or whatever. It doesn't cost me much and buys me goodwill. 

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It's a cost of doing business.  If you're not happy with it, don't sell via Marketplace.

I'm not saying you don't have a basis for comment but it could be argued that MP has done its job, that is to offer your item for sale and provide a transaction service.  In that goal it has succeeded and a 5% payment taken for that service. 

If you then have a subsequent reason to refund outside of the remit of Marketplace, under what basis should the service providing the sale function be required to refund?

Now, if you were to say that MP should NOT take money for a duplicate purchase where the permissions permit copy but instead should offer the customer the option to self redeliver then i'd be for that.  My inworld vendors do this, it's a trivial database query at the point of sale.

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  • Moderators

Greetings All!

If you find cause to refund a buyer, please submit a Support Case with a copy of the refund from your L$ Funds Transation Log and the SLM Order Number and Linden Lab Customer Support will be happy to refund the commission to your account.

https://support.secondlife.com/create-case/

Choose the ticket type/option of General Marketplace Issues

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To amend my previous post, you and Torley may be exceptions to cleaning up after the kennels that is LL. Would send you a new stainless steel pooper scooper, but I'm suspecting you two may need bulldozers and bucket loaders.

We'll keep this between us, because the powers that be tend to fire LL'ers that are too well liked by the lab rats.

A message to your boss on monetization though: When running a lemonade stand, it's better to focus on making a better glass of lemonade than it is to to develop a straw with more holes in order to sell more lemonade.

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Thank Dakota for making it possible. This is good news. For the past few months, I have made several refunds to the customers who paid twice for the same product.  I have all the transaction records in my computer. Hope LL still keeps avatars' transaction records even that are over one month old. :matte-motes-wink:

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  • 2 years later...

Hi all,  

Dakota's post is most helpful here.  The first couple of posts are confusing to me.

As a new merchant, I sometimes receive refund requests, and I want be nice and helpful to customers but at the same time, do not want to bare the costs as every transactions affecting the bottomline.   I don't want to speak for LL here, but AFAIK, in RL, credit card companies do help merchants with refunds and not charging a transaction fee, because they want to encourge good customer services, and therefore more transactions in the future.  Afterall, a good percentage is charged for every transaction the goes through, and therefore, enough to cover processing costs, fraud, insurance and other exceptions.   I am not sure there is full automation for credit card companies in RL, so I think LL support case handling is appropriate, although some automation will be helpful to everyone include LL.

 

Just my 2cents

 

 

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Just to recap as this is an issue at least 3 years old .. and probably much more:

Instead of investing a few person-hours to resolve the issue once and forever, LL has chosen to address each occurrence with direct personal intervention at an ever-growing and ever-accumulating overhead cost.

 

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Darrius Gothly wrote:

Just to recap as this is an issue at least 3 years old .. and probably much more:

Instead of investing a few person-hours to resolve the issue once and forever, LL has chosen to address each occurrence with direct personal intervention at an ever-growing and ever-accumulating overhead cost.

 

It depends on how many sellers request refunds. 

If there are only 10 requests a year for refunds from sellers, it makes more sense to spend resources on higher impacting aspects of the system.

If the employee to has to imput the refund to the seller is getting paid 10 dollars an hour and it takes less than 3 minutes to process the refund, there isn't much cost associated compared to the time involved in changing, debugging, and releasing code.

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Jacob Cagney wrote:


Darrius Gothly wrote:

Just to recap as this is an issue at least 3 years old .. and probably much more:

Instead of investing a few person-hours to resolve the issue once and forever, LL has chosen to address each occurrence with direct personal intervention at an ever-growing and ever-accumulating overhead cost.

 

It depends on how many sellers request refunds. 

If there are only 10 requests a year for refunds from sellers, it makes more sense to spend resources on higher impacting aspects of the system.

If the employee to has to imput the refund to the seller is getting paid 10 dollars an hour and it takes less than 3 minutes to process the refund, there isn't much cost associated compared to the time involved in changing, debugging, and releasing code.

Absent input from someone that's sat on the business end of that firehose .. (Yo! Dakota?) .. we can only guess. But my sense is that your low-ball estimate of 10 per year falls a very sizeable distance from the real number. And an employee like Dakota, even if someone like that were to be remoted in and have very low direct overhead .. still charges out on the balance sheet as something like $75 and up per hour, not $10/hr.

The broader view Jacob .. as I mentioned elsewhere. The amount on the paycheck is just the BEGINNING of the costs to keep that employee on staff.

(Not to mention, the 10 interactions saved in the first year would probably pay for the 2-3 hours it takes a programmer to plug the hole permanently. Following years are just gravy.)

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The other side of this is that if that number IS low, it's because either a) merchants don't know that they can claim a refund, b) it's more trouble to submit a ticket than to just move on.

Either way...

If LL are willing to hand that commission back, it's a completely trivial function to enable it in the marketplace and even neater would be to include an inventory sweep to delete that item from the customers inventory.

Now, if only we knew of a company that had access to the Marketplace sale information, the billing system, the users inventory.

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