# The Refund Policy — Copy You Can Use **From Chapter 4.3 of *The 4-Hour Side Hustle*.** Two pieces of copy — the sales page version and the receipt email version — plus the reasoning, so you can adapt them without accidentally removing the part that works. **This is copy, not legal advice.** Refund and consumer-rights rules vary by country and by what you sell, and a digital product sold internationally can attract obligations beyond whatever you publish. Have someone qualified look at it before launch if the numbers are meaningful. --- ## The policy, in one line **Thirty days. No questions. A form, not an email. Processed within the hour, without you.** Every word of that is doing work, and the temptation will be to soften three of them. --- ## For the sales page — block 8 Short version, for a file at $47–$340: > **$47, one time.** Thirty-day refund, no questions — there's a form, and it processes within the hour. Slightly longer, where the price warrants reassurance: > **$340, one time.** No subscription, no upsell. > > If it isn't what you needed, there's a refund form linked in your receipt. Thirty days, no questions asked, no reply required from me. It processes within the hour. **For a live program or cohort**, where an unconditional thirty days doesn't make sense: > **$2,500.** Payment plan available — three payments, no interest, ask. > > Come to the first two sessions. If it isn't what you needed, tell me before week 3 and I'll refund you in full, no questions. After week 3 I won't, because by then you have the material. Notice the last one **states why the window closes.** A conditional guarantee with an honest reason reads as fair. The same condition with no reason reads as a catch, and readers assume the worst. --- ## For the receipt email Put it at the bottom of every receipt, not just the first one: > **If this isn't right for you** > > There's a refund form here: [link]. Thirty days, no questions, and you don't need to explain yourself or wait for me to reply. It processes within the hour. > > There's one optional box on that form asking whether there's anything I should know. It's genuinely optional — the refund goes through either way — but I read every one of them, and it's the most useful feedback I get. Two reasons this belongs in the receipt rather than only on the sales page: **It's the moment of maximum doubt.** Someone has just spent money and hasn't opened the thing yet. Telling them plainly how to leave is when it counts most. **It routes refund requests to the form instead of your inbox.** Which is the entire point — the emotional cost is the thing you're removing, and a refund request in your inbox is exactly the cost you were trying to avoid. --- ## The three things you'll be tempted to remove **"No questions."** The instinct is a retention flow — one email, one offer to help, one "what could we have done better." Don't. At a 2–4% refund rate a business doing $5,000 a month refunds $150, and what that $150 buys is the single largest consumer of your emotional energy, permanently removed. Not the money — the dread. The request that sits unopened for two days. The retention email drafted three times. The forty minutes of feeling bad on a Tuesday you'd earmarked for recording. **"A form, not an email."** A reply-to-this-email refund policy is not a refund policy, it's an appointment with yourself. The form is what makes it automatic, and automatic is what makes the promise true. **"Within the hour."** This is the most quietly persuasive phrase in the whole block, and it's only there if the chain is actually built. Don't write it before module 2 works. --- ## Why this raises revenue rather than costing it The second-order effect is larger than the first. A visible, genuine, frictionless refund policy raises conversion on the sales page by more than it costs in refunds — because the thing standing between a stranger and a $47 purchase is risk, and you've just removed it. **You are buying sales with the refund policy. The refunds are the price.** The rule underneath: *make it easy to leave, and fewer people will want to.* --- ## The optional box, and what to do with it Make the reason field optional. Nobody should have to justify themselves to get their money back. It will fill up anyway, and it's the best product research you'll get for free — people who just paid and left are the most honest audience you have. **Read them monthly, in one sitting.** You're looking for patterns, not individual feedback. | Refund rate | Read it as | |---|---| | **Under 5%** | Healthy. Do nothing. | | **5–8%** | Watch it. Usually a sales page promising something slightly different from what's delivered. | | **Above 8%** | A product problem, not a customer problem. Fix the product, or fix what the page promises. | Marcus sat at 3.5% for a year. Two refunds in month four said versions of the same thing — they'd expected the workbook to import their loan data automatically. He added one line to the sales page clarifying that setup is manual and takes about an hour. The rate dropped to 2% and stayed. A fifteen-minute fix he'd never have found without the box. --- ## One boundary worth keeping Automate refunds **up to your rung-two price.** Route anything above it to Telegram for a human yes. Chapter 1.2 says never automate anything that moves money without a receipt, and this chain moves money without asking you first — deliberately. The distinction is direction. Money flowing *out* to the person who paid it, capped at what they paid, is bounded and self-limiting; the worst case is you refund someone who wasn't entitled and you're out $47 and a shrug. Money flowing anywhere else is unbounded, and that's what the rule is about. --- ## Checklist - [ ] Thirty days, stated plainly, on the sales page - [ ] Refund link in the receipt email as well as on the page - [ ] A form — not "reply to this email" - [ ] Reason field present and optional - [ ] "Within the hour" only claimed once the chain actually does it - [ ] No retention flow, no win-back offer, no request for an explanation - [ ] Conditional guarantees state *why* the window closes - [ ] Refund threshold set at your rung-two price; above it routes to Telegram - [ ] Monthly reason-reading added to the Sunday routine - [ ] Refund rate tracked against the 5% / 8% thresholds - [ ] Reviewed by someone qualified if the numbers are meaningful