One of the questions many new Internet marketers ask is whether or not they should offer a money back guarantee. It is a question worth serious consideration because the answer could deeply impact your sales as well as your overall success.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You don’t know the person or company on the other end of the computer screen. Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable knowing you could get your money back if you weren’t satisfied?

Of course you would.

Most people do and you will most likely see your sales reflect that fact. This would actually be a great basis on which to test your offers. Just run two identical offers; one with a money back guarantee and one without.

Then notice the difference in your sales and you’ll know which way to tailor your future offers.

Guarantee Limitations

If you decide to implement a money back guarantee into your offers, you may choose to limit the time in which you will offer a full refund. Most such offers are limited to either 30, 60, or 90 days, although you will find some money back guarantees that are good for an entire year. This may be another point you will want to test to see which time span converts the best.

Refund Limitations

Some marketers offer a full refund with no questions asked while others will refund the purchase price if the product is defective.

If you require a reason to issue a refund, be sure you are very clear in your wording or it could cause problems and you will have unsatisfied customers. By the same token if you offer a full refund with no questions asked, make sure you honor that and don’t make your customers feel uncomfortable.

Make it Easy

If you do offer a money back guarantee, make it easy for your customer to get his or her money back. If you make it too difficult, your run the risk of destroying the trust you have worked so hard to build up.

The fact that your customer is requesting a refund may have nothing to do with you or your product so don’t complicate things by making them beg for it. Perhaps they have simply overextended themselves or perhaps your product isn’t quite what they thought it was. At any rate, keep their confidence by issuing their money back promptly.

Conditions

If there are any conditions attached to the refund process, be sure and state that up front.

For example, if you charge for shipping and you have paid to ship the product, you probably don’t want to refund the shipping cost or you could end up losing money on the deal. Do state that at the outset, though, to avoid upsetting the customer who may not realize that the refund will be for the amount of the product only and not for the amount of the shipping. You might also state that the product must be in resale condition in order for it to be accepted for refund.

Whatever your specific policies are, be sure and state them at the point of purchase.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

While some of the products you may create will cost you nothing but a huge amount of time, and maybe even some blood, sweat, and tears, you will undoubtedly pour money into other creations with the hope of recouping your investment in addition to a tidy profit. Before you can accurately price your products, you’ll need to consider how much they have cost you to create.

Just as the cost of baking a cake can be arrived at by adding up the cost of all the ingredients, you may have several different types of cost to consider before you can arrive at the accurate amount of your initial investment.

Time

What is your time really worth anyway? How do you go about placing a dollar value on your time? Some Internet marketers like to be able to measure their work by earning so much per hour while others like to earn so much per job. However, if all you put into a job is essentially time and hard work, how do you gauge the value of the work? These are questions you will need to answer as you go about figuring the pricing of a product that involves a great deal of time. However, there are other expenses to consider as well.

Overhead

Even though you may be working from your own home you still have overhead to consider.

You may or may not have any employees to pay but you most likely have a mortgage payment or rent, and utilities to consider. You might even be paying for the equipment you use to do your job so all of this must be taken into consideration when you set your prices for your products.

Sometimes, you may set your price in such a way in order to get some quick cash. Other times, you may be more interested in obtaining and retaining long term customers.

It’s important to realize that your prices may change as your own needs change so you will want to be aware of your present goals when you price your products.

Money

Now if you have laid out cold, hard cash to produce your products, you most certainly need to recoup your investment plus make a profit on top of that. When this is the case, you might decide to go with a simple markup pricing protocol. That just means you take your cost and mark the product up a certain percentage over cost in order to arrive at the final price.

There really is no certain markup standard; some Internet marketers mark up their products as much as 100% or more; others only mark them up a small percentage. One thing is for sure; there is no sure thing when it comes to pricing your products and you will most likely need to test any system you decide to use to make sure it is the best pricing protocol for you and your customers.