Last week, I wrote about a chargeback I got on my Most Valuable Email course. I solicited advice for dealing with this chargeback and preventing others in the future.
I got advice. I also got the folllowing question from a reader:
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If you’re so inclined, I’d be interested in hearing about advice you got to handle chargebacks, but of course more importantly prevent them in the first place!
I’m newer to the solopreneur arena. Chargebacks are just a cost of doing business in the large company space, usually as a consequence of not following large customers’ procurement/delivery rules, not automating transactions, etc.
For smaller enterprises, I can imagine they could be debilitating…
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Since I’m so inclined:
I got lots of what might be called tactical or technological advice for dealing with and preventing chargebacks.
I’m sure much of this advice is solid but the fact is, it’s overkill for my small info publishing operation, and more than I want to do at the moment. The fact that this kind of tactical advice could change from today to tomorrow is even more of a reason to not invest my limited time or energy into such solutions.
But I also got several people sharing what can be called principled advice on dealing with chargebacks. Advice that will stand the test of time, that’s not subject to a change in technology or the whims of banks.
That advice boiled down to simply this:
Don’t sell to every rando off the street who struts up to your counter and pulls out a credit card.
I first heard this advice a long time ago. It’s taken me a while to accept it.
The fact is, just because somebody offers to pay you today doesn’t mean that they will prove to be a good customer today, tomorrow, and the day after.
If you have your eye on LTV as the main metric in your business, then it makes sense to do lots of things, even counterintuitive things, to turn away people who might be bad customers tomorrow, even if they seem to be willing buyers today.
And that brings me to my current offer:
I announced yesterday I will make my Influential Emails training available once again next week.
But I won’t simply send a bunch of emails linking to a sales page for Influential Emails.
Instead, if you would like to get this training once it’s available, you’ll have to get on the waiting list first.
The main reason fr this is the anti-chargeback, pro-LTV idea above. A waiting list allows me to filter through people who want to buy. I can see if they are already good customers. And if not, I have to take a closer look at who they are and whether I want to sell to them.
Of course, the the velvet rope effect of a waiting list doesn’t hurt either.
I will have more to say about Influential Emails, and why you might want to get it, over the coming week. But you will have to be on my list to be able to buy it. Click here to get on there.