CSSmania: Our way of fighting SPAM with submissions

I sure hope these guys ran this plan past PayPal. A high refund rate is a risk trigger at any payment processor. It's seen as a possible sign of there being some kind of fraud or widespread customer dissatisfaction going on, which might be a predictor for an onslaught of chargebacks. If they haven't vetted the plan in advance and had someone add some notes to their account, it could lead to another "PayPal froze our account and we have no idea why" story.

They're a payment processing company, not a free security deposit holding service. Visa and MasterCard also enforce maximum return rates (as a percentage of processing volume), so PayPal has incentive not to allow this kind of use of their service.

I understand the motive and for sites like Etsy, charging to list certainly helps with some poor quality (it doesn't stop bad listings initially, but eventually when your stuff does not sell you don't come back).

However, a lot of people genuinely think what they list is good (just watch an episode of a talent show audition and see how surprised people get when you tell them they are shit).

So you'll still get loads of people submitting, but you'll have the added time-sink of dealing with those people who thought they were good enough, lost the $10 and now opened a case against you on PayPal.

My advice would be (if you're going down the charge route) to simply charge everyone for submission and don't give the money back whether they make it or not.

They could have just hired someone with a little design sense at oDesk. A designer from Philippines would have probably cost them like $5/hour. All they would have to do is approve the selections already made by the review guy(s).

I say just keep the money. It's a reasonable deterrent for junk. And if you're doing a ton of refunds on paypal (or any other payment service presumably), you will eventually get banned.