Yesterday i got and support contact from ex client (i did refund, cause i don’t like inpatient people). Saying the my product is broken, and have a lot of issues, he hired some professional and even that professional could not fix that.
What were the issues ? here they are.
Sever’s temp sessions folder for saving sessions is not writable (codeigniter). Server’s problem is that sessions is not writable into that folder, so that hired professional person could have changed the path to something else.
Login issues , if server is not letting to save sessions , ofcourse you cannot login.
What i did was , i emailed him back saying that, his server have some issues and not letting to write the sessions , please provide me with the server details, i will fix that.
he did provide me with the email , but me being outside , and weekend here , i’m out with family. i thought to do that, once i’m awake the next day, and will fix it’s server issues and make my product functional on it’s server.
When i did wake up (after 5 hours from requested support) , i saw , refund request, and 1 star rating from ex.client saying that, my product have a lot of bugs and it is not working.
i did refund him , cause i’m not feeling to help him now , even if it’s server issue.
I already heard this type of “scam”. Why scam? Because buyers started cheating by leaving 1 star review just to get their money back.
This situation is too annoying and Envato does not make anything in this way .
I always choose to refund a buyer when it is not happy. Don’t understand why clients are not able to understand the fact that when the server is the problem you are not eligible for a refund.
As a conclusion, you did well by refunding the item.
I also had the same type of experience some time ago, the buyer didn’t read product description and bought the project.
I have mentioned this template need Element 3D (plugin). Then he said he doesn’t have that plugin and asked me to refund money after he download the project. I said I can’t refund money after download. Finally he gave 1 star rating and went.
So it’s not my fault to read description. I said this to envato help and they also said they can’t remove 1 star rating that’s really unfair for us. Then I thought envato also don’t want to protect authors from those scammers. So I stop.
If you refunded him, the rating will be removed as per Envato Terms. No need to worry with that. If a buyer doesn’t understand that the error isn’t from your side and does do these things then providing a refund and moving on is the best solution.
Yes the review/ rating was removed. But i’m not worried about reviews or rating cause false reviews does not define my product, so i have trust on my product.
Buyers now days are just scammers , which just needs assistance for every customisation they want us to do. If we say no , or if we say no to help with server issue we end up getting refund and bad reviews.
I think that we need to search for a strategy to get rid of scammers from ThemeForest, because seems that Envato doesn’t care about seller prote tion in this way