I don’t want to be in a business swindling customers out of their money or charging people who don’t actively want to be paying us for the value that we provide.
Because of that, I try to be as upfront with people as possible about the fact that if they’re not happy with the plugin for some reason, they should get in touch with me and we can talk about a refund. In addition, instead of the plugin just auto-renewing, an email is sent out that notifies people that their yearly renewal is coming up.
So with all that in place, I was very surprised when I got an email from PayPal notifying me that one of our customers had submitted a chargeback. The story got even weirder when I couldn’t find the email address listed on the chargeback as one of our existing customers.
Eventually, I found a customer with the same domain email address and when I looked at the record, it was a renewal! He should have gotten an email that his subscription was renewing with ample time to cancel without throwing us under the bus with PayPal!
So I emailed him directly.
I asked him what was going on and if he was looking for a refund. I was really just looking for more information to see if we could resolve this situation differently.
He said the person who purchased the plugin back in June of 2020 had passed away shortly after and that he didn’t recognize the charge or know why the business was still being charged for Kanban for WordPress.
Needless to say, that’s not a response that I expected! But I wanted to refund him, so I went into PayPal and acknowledged the chargeback so that they would release his funds.
This was a mistake.
What I should have done was disputed the chargeback, provided documentation that we attempted to notify him of the renewal and tried to win the dispute from our end. After that was settled, we could refund him directly.
But because I basically acknowledged that we were in the wrong, PayPal refunded his money, which took us into the red in our PayPal account, and they charged us a fee on top of everything. Lesson learned for sure.