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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

Well yeah, I still need to pay shipping for amazon to send me a product even if I need to return it because it's broken. I would have no product to return if I did not pay for the shipping to receive the product.

Apple would justify that 30% being non-refundable by saying "you would have never had that client to refund if you did not give us that 30%". They did their job, they got you the client, you were the one who did the bad job and made the client pursue a refund.

You pay a toll to cross a bridge, but it turns out to be the wrong bridge. You don't get your toll back, you still crossed the bridge.

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Apple is not giving a 70% refund when you refund an app. They are giving a full refund and charging the seller for the 30%.

In your analogy, it would be like giving the toll back and charging a portion of it to the bridge builder.

Apple's responsibility is to the transaction. Their job as a marketplace is to make transactions happen. By making the initial transaction happen, they get their 30% cut (if you think 30% is too high, that's fine, but that's not what we're talking about here).

The customer's experience is now in the developer's hands. If the experience is botched, somebody has to cover the full refund. Since the bad experience happened outside of the transaction, it's not Apple's responsibility, it's the developer's; they need to shoulder the full refund. It wasn't Apple that fucked up.

If the user didn't understand the app before buying, that's still on the developer. If the app has issues because of some dependency on wonky Apple implementations, that's up to the developer to communicate to potential clients. The developer is responsible for the experience after the purchase is made, therefore they are responsible for the full refund if the client wants one.

Isn't marketing Apple's job. If the message was communicated it would be upto them.

The problem is Apple doesn't need paided third party apps as much as they use to. The app store gave them runway to develop important apps internally. Big name/vendor free apps are welcome.

Where this analogy fails is that shipping is not a fixed percent of a product cost.

And the cost of refund is the same to Apple for a product that cost $1 just as it is for products that cost $100.

My point is that the fee is about “delivering you the customer”. Apple delivered you the customer. That the customer and you were unhappy is no bearing on their ability to deliver that customer to you.

They didn't deliver a customer. They delivered a non-customer.

Exactly this.

Apple has all the reasons to entice the customer into buying the product and encouraging them to do so by offering a full refund, and they take none of the risks because the make the same money either way.

I am surprised of how many people don't see the conflict of interest here.

I don't usually have to pay shipping with Amazon, so that doesn't make sense.

Except apple's marginal cost like 0.

Marginal cost is often not a good way to evaluate things.

A person who focuses only on marginal cost will say "It only took you an hour to make that" while discounting the decades of training it took to be able to.

A person who focuses only on marginal cost will say "I could have made this at home" while discounting the reasons why they didn't.

Prices relate to provided value, not just cost.

How much value is provided for a refund?

The amount refunded minus the continuing value to the user of the returned product (absent the value already extracted from the product by the user), of course.

That is not the right reason to refund. Price should have nothing to do with marginal costs.

it has to do with who is being made to carry the cost, and the griefing that can occur that way. Not worth the trouble IMHO.

Based on what?

I’ve never had to pay shipping for an Amazon return.

Dude... what? Both of those are false analogies.

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