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In both cases, I provided the customer what they paid for and it was a case of an employee using a personal credit card and then quitting the company and filing chargebacks instead of just emailing my support email and requesting a refund.
I sent all the documentation of receipts and email correspondence with the business showing that they indeed did request, receive, and intend to pay for our service.
In both cases I lost the dispute and was charged the fee + the refund.
Neither Amex nor Stripe had any answers for me. Seems unfair.
Now it's $1.50/1000 CPM and a $20 minimum.
Most of the increase in prices seems very recent.
Advertising business is the only one where you don't need to tell your existing customers that prices are going up I guess.
It's no longer a good deal.
Decent designers ask a minimum of $100/hr but no designer wants to be held accountable or be compensated on the basis of driving actual business results.
More often than not a company will spend $50,000 on a web design and get 0 business results.
Then the design itself becomes outdated over time and is less and less valuable for "credibility" each month.
Is design just another depreciating asset?
Valuable defined as increases your income.
Learnable defined as fluency in 2 years or less.
You spend hours writing and formatting a blog post but have no guarantee that'll generate traffic, email subscribers, & sales.
I created something that smartly promotes your post for you (without spamming) and guarantees you atleast 100 email subscribers per post.
Is 100 email subscribers enough for a blog post to be worth your time?
And yes, FB & Google are not alone. There are many other people offering ads with little chance of payout.
As a small business owner and fairly experienced online marketer, I still think most PPC ads are a ripoff, especially for non-sophisticated advertisers (I've had mild success w/ Reddit ads & FB ads FWIW).
The fact that Facebook will construct a crappy ad for you by scraping your site is alarming (do they still do this?).
It's like a casino offering to bring the black jack table into your room and play your hand for you (and ignoring the probabilities).
I'm just frustrated that there's not a lot of transparency on what you should expect in terms of payout when you advertise on these PPC sites.
The advertiser bears almost all the risk of the ad and can't get a refund if it totally bombs - which if FB is going to do the ad for me, why not offer a refund if it bombs?
The US government makes online gambling illegal but doesn't take a second look at PPC ads? Hypocrisy, IMO.
The isn't the most elegant prose I've written, but I want to see if others share my opinions and if there might be a good solution out there.
I don't have any insurance.
I haven't incorporated, etc. I run it as a sole proprietor & have no employees.
So, I'm wondering what's the minimum effective dose to de-risk my business. I'm looking for an 80/20 solution to minimize my legal risk without dumping a bunch time & money into lawyers.
Any suggestions?