My First Refund

[czarekpiast]

Hi guys!
Just wanted to share you my latest experience. I’m seller here for around 11 months now (active seller) and I’ve completed around 400 orders so far. Yesterday was ‘the day’ - I needed to give buyer my first full refund ever. Still don’t feel good about it but it was the best choice in my opinion. Here is the story:

1. Buyer contacted me on private that she need some help with creating opening&ending slide - she gave me script for what it should say + wanted 24h delivery time with some gig extra. Yeah, totally normal process. I sent custom offer and deliver everything as we discussed after around 9 hours. Here is her response to my job:

For me it was pretty unusual to hear something like this - buyer using words terrible and dislike it so much. She didn’t ask me about any specific colors, fonts or whatever so I kindly reply: (I pick blue, white and gray theme)

She didn’t reply on it and the clock was tickin (as she said that it need to bne done ASAP). After around 9 hours of waiting I decided to once again pick everything by myself as I didn’t got any reply. Here is reaction for corrected video:

At this point I was like ‘uuuughhhh’, really frustrated. I had 100% sure that she’s going to leave bad review anyway but I didn’t think about refund as I never ever did it so far (it was just like there is no option like that available for me in my mind). So, I tried to reply as kindly as it was possible for me at the moment and response which I got ‘killed’ me:

Lets just skip fact that colors were already with 1 version blue, white and gray (just like her company). Now the main problem is that video is dark which he didn’t mentioned before (or I can’t read, don’t know). When I got question ‘Is this what you do for a living?’ - I got literally angry. This project was so small and so easy to do and I was just about get bad review for something meaningless + I don’t think that my job was bad. I’ve done everything just like we discussed - colors were something subjective and easy to change if only someone want to cooperate.

At this point I realized that I can cancel this order and refund all money to the buyer so I can avoid bad review. So, I redelivered it once again with again blue (slightly different than the first one), white and gray + suggest that I can give her refund if she is still not satisfied. Here you can see:

Then got next unkind response:

And all this nightmare end. By the way, I was trying really hard to try to everything what I can so I replied to her every message immediately and done every revision within minutes. Sometimes - it’s not worth it.

In conclusion, people can be really different. I’ve worked with hundreds of buyers and 99% of them were polite and easy to work with. I knew that it is a part of job like that to deal with such buyers - just never faced such issue so far by myself, only heard about it from others.

I can understand that buyer have right to be unsatisfied with my job - that’s totally normal. However, I always offer as many revisions as needed to make it look how they want to. It feels bad to hear words like that and face kind of rude answers.

I think that I managed quite well to still show that I’m professional. Let me know if there was any other (better) option in situation like this one. By the way, thank you for reading if you’re still here! Wish you all the best guys.

P.S
After this whole conversation and me sending request - she went offline and didn’t accept it. As I waited 2 days with posting this, order got automatticaly canceled and she never respond. Is that will hurt my rating even worst than if she would accept it?

[cyaxrex]

Your buyer purposefully tried to make you feel small, inadequate and incompetent in order to make you feel out of your depth and get work for free.

You should not have refunded this. You should have put your foot down.

[prince_eusufzai]

Hello bro,
Today I’m in the same situation. There should be some rules to avoid this type of client. I think they just come to get some work on free.😥

[shawnwashburn]

Most of my orders have gone fine, but I’ve had a few where I realized once we got deeper into it that I wasn’t going to be able to provide what they wanted. In those cases, I was able to cancel and refund early on.

I had another one, though, where we had agreed on all details of a creative writing offer. I communicated along the way to make sure we were still on the right track. But then, when delivered, buyer acted similarly, tried to act like it wasn’t anything like we discussed, etc. Thankfully, the order still ended up as completed, but it was hard for me to get over the feeling that I had done something wrong even though I didn’t feel I had.

Sorry for how this above experience went for you. Hope you’re able to see that this was just a small blip and that they didn’t treat you well and forget about it and move on. Sounds like there are 400 other people who have had good experiences with you. Keep providing value to people.

[czarekpiast]

Your buyer purposefully tried to make you feel small, inadequate and incompetent in order to make you feel out of your depth and get work for free.

You should not have refunded this. You should have put your foot down.

Yeah, I thought about that. However, I still decide that 10-15 minutes of work (it was very simple project) are not worth bad review. She didn’t get anything for free as fortunately I delivered it by fiverr attachment with watermark on. At least I hope that it’s how it works.

Maybe I shouldn’t cancel this but it was hard for me to think that I will get such unfair 1 star review.

Thank you guys for sharing your thoughts and experiences! Hope that you won’t deal with buyer like that in the future 🙂

[mymaha786]

Your buyer purposefully tried to make you feel small, inadequate and incompetent in order to make you feel out of your depth and get work for free.

You should not have refunded this. You should have put your foot down.

The op was worried about a bad review!

[mymaha786]

I really feel for you 😦

[anon17757046]

So much cringe… I fend off buyers like this.