I purchased a WP theme through Themeforest. It didn’t work, and wordpress wouldnt accept it.
After 12 hours of messing around, I decided to use a different solution, so applied for a refund.
After 2 weeks of no response whatsoever, I lodged a paypal dispute.
After another week and a half of no response, paypal stepped in and decided the dispute in my favour.
Immediately afterwards, Envato contacted me ‘coincidentally’ claiming that they were ready to process my refund request, but all i needed to do was cancel the paypal dispute. A further clarification email stated that:
my account is locked because of the dispute and it is impossible to unlock it unless I withdraw the paypal request and cancel the dispute;
I need to cancel the paypal dispute, and pay the purchase price for the refunded item AGAIN to envato, at which point they will unlock my account and consider the refund request.
Until and unless I do the above, My account will be permanently locked and unusable.
Am I taking crazy pills here? Is this remotely normal behaviour?
It looks to me like Envato is simply trying to avoid looking bad to third parties like paypal by forcing customers to cancel disputes.
A PayPal dispute will automatically lock an account for security issues. For the Help Team to refund your account they will need to unlock it after the PayPal dispute is resolved.
If you have any questions about the process I’m sure the Help Team will be happy to go into more detail.
I have received a refund, so the dispute is resolved - in my favour.
Envato is telling me I need to pay the purchase price again or they will not unlock my account. After a month of attempting to get a refund, the last thing I’m going to do is pay it again.
You seem to miss an important point and not have a clear picture of the situation.
You haven’t received a refund nor has the dispute been resolved in your favor. Rather, you cancelled the transaction directly via the payment provider while still having gotten the digital good you bought. This is called payment fraud and is “frowned upon” in most parts of the world.
Now, Envato is offering you a chance to make things right and go through the correct channels, so that you can have both your refund and keep having access to your Envato account.
I have a similar case. After I purchased a WP plugin that didn’t work as described I asked for a refund on a plugin owner support forum. They declined that.
After that, I contacted envato support and they declined a refund too.
So I started a PayPal dispute and my envato account automatically got blocked. Now I can not use any items I purchased before. This is a pure blackmail.