Lots of times, we as authors, get refund requests for issues that are not in our power to fix, like a shared server with lots of limitations, customers that don’t read docs, or because there are customers that get items from us for free by abusing the refund system, we all know they exist.
In these cases, rejecting a refund request results in a bad star rating in 99% of the time, and the rating isn’t related to the item but to the customer frustration that he didn’t get the refund.
Even if later Envato removes such ratings for good reason, what’s the point of going through this from the start?
My company has a very strict refund policy, once our items have been downloaded we don’t issue such refunds because customers get our product and we have no way to know it won’t be used anymore after we refund.
Of course, we’re not absurd, there were cases when we did refund because the client purchased by mistake, or got same item several times, etc, things that are common sense to refund.
Anyway, right now we also have a few refunds in “pending” state because we’re sure that if we reject them we’ll get bad ratings for sure, so we keep this in this state.
Now, i think the right choice here is that once a refund has been rejected, customers should not be able to rate anymore, after all, it’s up to us and the legislation we abide by to refund or not and Envato should help us. If customers don’t think we did right by them, they can address Envato for further info/actions.