This happened to me once. I purchased an hour of time from a consultant who offered a money-back guaranty. I didn’t feel that I had obtained my money’s worth and requested a 50 percent refund. He went nuts. He said that no one had ever asked for their money back before. He threatened to smear me on the internet. He sents e-mails to me with obscenities in them. Eventually, he backed down and refunded the full amount. But it wasn’t the “easy” refund promised in the sales materials.

I think that one way to make a money-back guaranty stand out would be to provide easy instructions on precisely how to obtain the refund. For example, the company could have a web site with a form for obtaining refunds on which all you needed to do was enter your name and click a button and your refund would be sent. You could even have a counter showing how many refunds had been sent and how quickly the money had been sent. That would help me gain confidence in a guaranty claim. I dread the idea of filling out the paperwork or figuring out where to send it.

Rob