My apologies if I have missed a previous discussion, an opensrs notice, or if I am simply clued out.
I just got a melbourne IT notice (long sad story) that said the .biz registry will soon change to a "no refunds" policy... and that they expected the other registries to make the same change. I would humbly like to suggest that this sucks. The registries and/or ICANN should be lobbied to follow a partial refunds model like OpenSRS uses. Currently, if we see a transaction that comes in that we believe is bogus, we blacklist the credit card, the IP address, the domain, and refund the credit card, and request a refund on the domain name. If we're wrong, the client got their card refunded, and we paid a $1 fee. If we're right, we saved ourselves a substantial chargeback fee, and possibly saved the card holder a bogus charge (see below). If the registries shift to a no-refund model, we'll basically have no choice but to hope that there are no chargebacks... we'd be stupid to refund a card for a domain name we've already paid for... better to take the chance that the card owner won't notice the fraudulent transaction until too late... at least for multi-year registrations. We've certainly seen more than a few transactions that in hindsight looked bogus, but which did NOT result in chargebacks. In any case it will clearly mean that the registry's trivial cost has been magnified into substantial reseller costs and in some case innocent card holders.... way, way the ___k better to impliment some small charge for doing a refund than to completely remove the ability. I suppose we could change our business model and run through a real feedback loop for all new clients, but that's going to scare away some new clients and lose business :( Anyhow, I'd like to humbly suggest that losing domain refunds would be a very bad thing. -Tom _______________________________________________ domains-gen mailing list [email protected] http://discuss.tucows.com/mailman/listinfo/domains-gen
