Hi,
Pretty sure abusive refunds are hurting our app placement. Noticed we had two refunds in the exact same hour from Poland and thought it odd since Poland makes up a very small part of our user base. Extra odd since we've had few refunds in general (~2% when comparing against activations + renewals) so I was worried our backend servers were down and the app not working but noticed no problems. I then checked the past 5 months (life time of our app) and noticed that over 60% of our refunds are all from Poland even though it makes up a very, very tiny amount of our sales.
I then also remembered my user support team member telling me they get endless emails from one user in Poland who is making rather unusual and paranoid statements about how various governments are out to get them along with complaining about our app not stopping them...at least that's what the machine translation is telling us, it's all in Polish.
Assuming it's all done by this one guy, their pattern is purchase, a few days later a refund, a few days go by, another sale, a day or two later, refund, etc. Then one day two sales and then two weeks later, two refunds at the same exact hour (presumably from two different Apple IDs this person has). As I was writing this it happened again, two more refunds (although this time I don't see the purchases they are tied to).
I'm considering just removing Poland from the list of countries for my IAPs. I don't want my app placement ruined by refunds associated with one user in one country! I've already noticed a sudden drop in installs in the past week corresponding to this guy increasing the frequency of this and I'm starting to get very worried!
I also noticed that nothing is pro-rated, the refunds match the proceeds exactly while the person does things with the app that cost us money on the server/cloud costs side. Fortunately it's not a lot so more surprised than concerned. I thought each day they waited after a purchase to request a refund they would still owe 1/30 of the monthly subscription price.
My questions are:
- Can this truly be the same user or would Apple have blocked them from doing this cycle by now? I assume even if they used a new Apple ID that using the same purchase method would get them flagged.
- Are a few refunds hurting our app placement in the App Store or as long as we're relatively low overall it's fine? It's been a marked change in # installs per day in the past week...
- Is there a way to ask Apple to block one specific person from buying your app? I know their Apple ID (or at least one of them) since they emailed our support team with it.
- Is 2% refunds an acceptable rate? We'd be below 1% if not for Poland.
- Aren't IAP refunds pro-rated?
I checked events for Poland over the lifetime of the app and I get the following, which seems odd to me. Like how could we have a reactivation or does a purchase after a refund count as that? If so, would mean same Apple ID being used.
9 refunds 7 activations 3 reactivations 1 cancellation 1 enter grace period 1 entered billing retry 1 renewal
Thank you!
Colin