MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => iStockPhoto.com => Topic started by: B8 on January 31, 2012, 07:19
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I'm trying to get an idea if it was a big month for charge backs for many other people too on iStock of if I just had a run of misfortune.
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You need a category for zero. Also it is relevant how many actual downloads you have in the month. You can expect someone who has 1000 to have more DLs than someone who has 50
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You need a category for zero. Also it is relevant how many actual downloads you have in the month. You can expect someone who has 1000 to have more DLs than someone who has 50
Good point. I just added in zero at the end of the poll. If I put it at the beginning at this point it would have disturbed the 2 polls already placed.
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25 refunds on how many DLs? I guess whatever the case, 25 refunds is terrible.
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The poll is still meaningless unless it is expressed as a percentage of total downloads during the period or, even better, as a percentage of money lost compared to total earnings during the period.
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I should have clarified a bit further on the purpose of this poll. All of the charge backs I received in January were from sales that occurred over a 3 month period in Q4 2011. So none of the sales that were charged back this month were actually from sales made in January. So January was a big month for charge backs for Q4 sales for some reason for me.
The purpose of the poll I created is to find out if I was an isolated case or if other people also had a large number of charge backs in January for sales that were also made in Q4 2011.
Sales you made in January, and which were charged back in January, would appear to be normal refunds when a buyer mistakenly purchased the wrong image and/or image size. Charge backs that occur up to nearly 4 months later would not appear to be so common or typical.
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I have seen several threads in the IS forums over the last month or two where someone asks about a rash of refund notices. Do a google search of the forum threads (http://refund site:istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php) as IS's native search is useless. You can then look at just the last month or a date range of your choice.
My sales have been terrible lately - so perhaps that's why no refunds - but I don't recall people in the past complaining about batches of refunds, refunds going back many months and so on (except for that big highway robbery clawback that was the subject of the conference call and a promise they wouldn't do this again.
Perhaps this is Getty practice bleeding over to iStock - any big customer calls and complains that they never actually used the images they bought and they can get a refund. I think the micro model should preclude this sort of thing (barring accidental duplicates, damaged files, flawed images, size upgrades, and so on). You buy it you keep it, whether you end up using it or not.
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Perhaps this is Getty practice bleeding over to iStock - any big customer calls and complains that they never actually used the images they bought and they can get a refund. I think the micro model should preclude this sort of thing (barring accidental duplicates, damaged files, flawed images, size upgrades, and so on). You buy it you keep it, whether you end up using it or not.
Certainly there should be a fairly tight cap on how long a customer has to ask for a refund. 30 days is normal with physical shops if the goods aren't faulty (with some more generous companies) - and with them you have to haul yourself over to the shop maybe many miles away to return them. Refunds can be requested at the click of a mouse.