Refund to Buyer after 3 weeks?

[Nickie Cochran]

Does this happen often? I made 2 sales, since publishing my first book on Smashwords on the 9th of last month, and was thrilled to no end. Then today I saw on my sales report that both sales were refunded to buyer yesterday - that's over 3 weeks later!!!

Being a newbie, I can't help to think that my book sucks (which I hope it doesn't) and I know it'll take a while to crank things up, especially when it's the first book, but both books returned at the same time and after that long???

Not very encouraging, but I'm hanging in there regardless. Just out of curiosity to the veteran authors, do returns happen a lot around here? I also hear that folks buy e-books, read them and then ask for a refund. What think you?

Nickie

[Ted]

I have 31 ebooks, mostly under 2.99. I haven't had any ebooks returned from Smashwords, Kobo, Apple, or B&N yet, except when a fraudulent credit card was used and Smashwords notified all authors who had ebooks sold on that card.

NOTE: I should have checked Smashwords site update page before starting this reply. Here is the latest poop:
***
October 2, 2012 - In the last couple days we reversed a large batch of fraudulent purchases that were made with stolen credit cards. Several Smashwords eagle-eyed authors and publishers alerted us to the suspicious purchases where someone was purchasing up to 999 copies of a single book, with purchase amounts ranging from $.99 to over $2,000. We suspect this was a case of a criminal testing the credit limits of stolen credit cards, because if their intention was to steal a book, one copy would suffice. The affected authors will see the line items for the reversed sales in their Sales and Payments report.

***

I've had a few ebook returns on Amazon, mostly my free ebooks which didn't make sense to me as they were free so why return them.

[Nickie Cochran]

Geez, would've been nice if I had at least one that sold legitimately. But I did have 3 from Amazon in my first month. Maybe I need to lower the price to 2.99 instead of 3.99 until things get rolling. I'm currently studying for a certification exam and when that's done, I'm getting going on the next book in the series - I'm starting on my plot, though, because one can only take so many drugs a day (that's in relearning drug names & uses...lol).

Returns on free books, seriously??? (shaking head in disbelief)

[Ted]

Nickie, you may not find many sales on Smashwords itself but instead mostly sales from the retailers like B&N, Apple, Kobo, etc. One reason being readers already have accounts established at those retailers.