Inspiring. The integrity of the thesis with the implementation really shines through. Will be interested to see what is learned from your refund philosophy and anti-criminal philosophy. Wonder how much time and energy will be devoted to walk-throughs that never monetize? “Just browsing” with no real intention.
Loved your ZoHo blog as well. Can completely relate to the pain and frustration, but your advice to them was perfect.
Onward.
Thanks for the comment, glad to see you've really read things through!
I actually wrote the refund policy back when I thought it would be possible to have credit card payments. I was leaning into the reality of payment clawbacks: people are able to just pull back payments through their credit card provider, even when everything has gone well for them. The banks will side with their customer, not the merchant. In many cases it's completely unfair for the merchant, but it is the reality and cannot be changed.
With bitcoin payments, customer-initiated refunds are of course not technically a thing, but I think building on a bitcoin standard effectively "requires" the refund policy to be very much on the side of the customer.
It is extremely important to protect the long term reputation of the business and not let short term greed get on the way. If the customer feels that the service wasn't up to snuff, the situation needs to be corrected and at that point it's already too late to "fight" over money. The refund threshold has to be extremely low.
It is of course possible that some people might abuse such a policy, but then it becomes a question of numbers: is the increased trust of the majority worth the losses from a few bad apples? I guess that remains to be seen, but I'm betting that this is the correct approach.
