Many customers make use of the 7-day-free trial of my software. A few of them contact me with long series of support emails, that fill almost the entire trial period. They mostly need help with setting up features or customizations (which are not included in the product, but there is of course no hard limit when to say no), or they have trouble with their payment, or another plugin is doing something weird and until I have figured that out, I cannot be sure if this isn’t a bug. From the current selling price of $47, after paying fees to the sales platform and Paypal, I receive around $37, which still is gross income because I need to pay taxes and health insurance and finance my equipment and the Internet connection and my website and the software etc. You can imagine that this amount has already disappeared through a bundle of lengthy support threads for one of those mentioned trial customers. So it is really funny (or should I say: absurd?) how some of these …

Hi there,I’m not getting the results I was expecting and getting it in line with my site takes too much work and manual adjustments. Can you please give me a refund?Thanks.Kind regards, User in a support forum somewhere on the Internet I recently came across an article where a plugin developer explains why he stopped selling on CodeCanyon. There are numerous reasons that have to do with their pricing structure and the increasingly difficult role of authors. And it somewhat confirms what others have concluded looking at available numbers. Not everything is a direct criticism of CodeCanyon. In the case of customer service the problem seems to be that sellers are underpaid and insufficiently protected against ridiculous refund claims. Sometimes a funny example tells more than 1000 words of explanations. Mike compared software to other products that you can buy online, for instance books. If you translate some of the buyers’ feedback to the other settings, it is quite revealing how things suddenly look absurd. A) Unfulfilled Expectations eBook: Hey, Stephen King. I bought your …

Before I started my Czech-related blogs, I worked for several newspapers, radio stations and news websites. Repeatedly it happened, that press officers of botanical gardens, galleries and other institutions1 surprised me with a totally irrational stinginess. Sometimes, after long exchanges of emails, they would grant a single-entry ticket. In other cases, like now the DOX gallery in Prague, I simply felt too bothered to follow up. Usually the task of press officers is to promote their institution, and that, of course, in a favourable and cost-efficient way. So why haggle about a free ticket? What is at stake? If that ticket will eventually convince some paying visitors to come to that place – hasn’t it already paid off? I understand that with a tight budget, you don’t just give away items of a limited quantity. But what is the actual price of a free press ticket? It’s the value of a piece of paper, plus the time you need to instruct your cash desk to issue it. No space in your precious premises will be …