About This 100% Money-back Guarantee for Custom Academic Papers

Many students fall for the marketing gimmick mentioning that an essay company offers "100% Money-back Guarantee". There are nearly half a dozen ways in which this is (almost always intentionally) misleading.

The obvious implication to a casual student would be that the company offers a full refund should the client be disappointed with what they receive. There are numerous dubious essay companies that are misguided and desperate enough to offer this kind of guarantee, and they often land a few clueless victims. Such sites hope the clients will either be too lazy to pursue the refund or will somehow not mind the mediocre papers they receive. Worst case scenario, they figure, is that they get one refund request out of a hundred sales.

Not all these sites are that stupid though. Many scamming sites hope that this first impression created by the mention of the guarantee lasts with potential customers up until the point they part with their hard-earned cash in hopes of receiving a quality paper. This is because hidden somewhere in the fine print are disclaimers that are as varied and unintelligible as those who draft them.

Some sites state that the offer expires once the client's order is "assigned to a writer". Their insurance against this is that the papers are normally almost automatically "assigned" once the client completes payment, thus guaranteeing no refund claims.

The truth is that this kind of refund (full refund after service delivery) almost NEVER occurs. Actually, considering the nature of this industry, a customer should (for several reasons) question any service provider who promises to refund money on account of their (client) dissatisfaction with the final product.

There are those outfits that are a bit evolved. They calculate refund amounts according to how much work has already gone into the paper at the point of a refund claim. This sounds like a fair policy. As a writer, I have faced moments when a client cancels an order after I'm done with all the background research (which is sometimes the bulk of the work). The problem with this policy for most companies, however, is that discretion for determining the amount of "work already done" lies solely with said companies. Time-to-deadline is not what is used to calculate refund owed. A client has little claim over the amount of refund offered. They have to sit and eat it, even if it is 10% refund being offered 5hrs after payment on an order with a week's deadline.

Then there are the real bottom-of-the-barrel leeches who have absolutely nothing to lose. These are the shameless entities who take clients' money, don't deliver anything at all, refuse to offer any refund (since all this was their intention all along), threaten clients with exposure to their academic institutions should they raise a stink (either by filing charge-backs or whistle-blowing elsewhere), extort the clients further in a few cases, then move on to the next victims in love with claims of guarantees.

This money-back guarantee shouldn't offer ANY comfort to a student, nor should it be used as a criterion for picking a service vendor to use.

Thorough vetting remains the surest and safest way to pick a reliable, competent, and honest service provider.

In my opinion, it's a lot simpler and doesn't typically involve terms in fine print or pro-rata calculation methods. The most common situation is that the "guarantee" is simply an outright lie on which the company has no intention of ever following through in the first place. It provides a competitive advantage over companies and writers who don't advertise any such claim to whatever extent inexperienced customers actually believe and fall for that "guarantee." This forum is replete with examples of such cases where customers found out that these kinds of guarantees mean absolutely nothing as soon as they tried to request a refund. As the old rule says, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

A legit company or writer will always provide free fixes for genuine mistakes, but nobody legit offers any kind of blanket "guarantee" to refund a payment simply because a customer says he's "not satisfied" with the product after delivery, and unless the writer fails to follow the original instructions, nobody has any right to expect a refund based on subjective satisfaction where there wasn't some outright objective mistake or omission in the project. In principle, it's not much different from ordering a meal in a restaurant: If a customer asks for a refund because there was an insect or a piece of glass in his food, he'll either get a different meal for free or sincere apologies and no bill on the bad meal. Conversely, if a customer requests a refund for the meal because he says he just "didn't like it," a restaurant owner would be perfectly right to tell that customer to order a different item from the menu next time, or to try a different restaurant altogether.

Exactly! Similar to the "I'm not satisified" is the "I'm not happy" complaint. No one is going to say, "By all means, let's refund your money." One things that concerns me when a customer says they are not happy but doesn't specify what is wrong is that they are simply trying to get their money back. AKA "I have the paper now and I want that large fee back, too."

As a customer, I would be clear on what I feel the writer or company didn't do or how they did not fulfill my instructions. However, before demanding a refund, if time permits, I would list what needs to be corrected and allow them the chance to make the corrections. Customers can be as unethical and companies, sometimes. It's important that writers--whether indies or those working for a company--learn how to spot those who may be future problems. If I see any red flags, I don't proceed with an order. It's better to pass on an order now than to risk a chargeback/dispute later.

In my experience, the only way this issue really ever comes up is where a new customer doesn't understand that there are no free revisions for anything not communicated and requested clearly and specifically in the original order. That's another reason why I won't have those types of conversations by phone, where it's up to both of us to interpret and remember what was (and wasn't) discussed. I use my FAQs to make clear that objective mistakes on my part (such as answering the wrong prompt or leaving out a requested section) are always free fixes, but that subjective editorial opinions, (such as how the client might have used space differently or what subtopics he or she might have included) are never free fixes. My regular clients sometimes ask for revisions based on feedback they receive from professors about their submissions, but they fully understand that these are always paid edits if I made no mistake and they simply ask for the price when they communicate their revision requests.

Recently, a regular client indicated that the professor radically changed the guidelines for the whole assignment after I delivered it and demanded (essentially) entirely different essays for the assignment on the same day that it was originally due by me to the client. The client paid me to write roughly 80% of the project all over again but understood that this kind of thing is caused by the professor and not the fault of the writer. In the past, I've had new clients who did not immediately understand that kind of thing until I explained it. Other times, I've had clients order a simple project for a Composition course and then request a free "revision" a week later, after the professor gave them follow-up assignments to change the original essay by incorporating a new issue from the class discussion or from another reading from the course. In those cases, I actually had to explain that no project includes subsequent "revisions" to include additional requests from professors issued after their submission (or my delivery) of the original project, and that I'm more than happy to continue developing the same project according to weekly additions to the specs, but that each one of those additions must (obviously) be paid for the additional work that it represents.

*Quote edited to meet the word-count limitation of quotes on this forum.

I adopted some of the UK writing services guidelines in respect to revisions, but only in a limited number of cases. When a client needs a dissertation I will offer them two prices - one that does not include revisions (unless they were my fault), and one that does. Most of the time, my US clients take the former, and UK/AU clients take the latter. However, I never offer free revisions for regular work unless it's objectively my fault.

As for refunds, the only time I would consider giving a refund is if I ruined the work entirely, missed the topic entirely, or missed the deadline. I make sure my clients understand that beforehand, to avoid problems down the road.

That makes sense. Ordinarily, US thesis advisors and dissertation review committees are quite reasonable and don't demand extensive revisions unless there's at least arguably something deficient in the submission. That still reflects the subjective view of the reviewers; but at least in US programs, it's often quite possible to have the first submission approved without revisions. That is relatively rare when it comes to UK reviewers, even when the submission mirrors the approach and structure of approved previous submissions. They seem to view revisions as part of a necessary "process" practically regardless of the quality of the first submission. Some of them probably enjoy kicking cats, too.

Exactly. I learned this after two clients kept coming back for revisions that, at the time, seemed completely redundant to me. After some digging I realized that's the norm in the UK/AU, so I adjusted my prices to reflect the extra work required.

P.S - this new look is horrible.

A student should question the credibility and writing talent of any company that guarantees a full refund without specifics / guidelines as to how the client can avail of the full refund. Most of these companies just proclaim that in big bold letters on their site as part of the mind games they play on the potential client. The students don't really look for specifics when it comes to the guarantees which is why they end up in hot water when they try to get the guarantee enforced. It was never an actual guarantee.

When a company declares a full refund and/or unlimited revisions, that almost assures the client of sloppy work and even sloppier client care services. A company that has confidence in its writers will never offer either guarantee because that takes time away from other clients on their writer's part and messes up the work schedule of the writer. There are companies out there whose writers are capable of doing the work right the first time. That is the company that students should be looking for.

A reliable company should not offer a 100% refund for any work ordered from them. The only reason a company would offer a refund program is if they know their writers are not of the caliber required by the students. They are the writers meant to fill the writer requirement, just a body to assign the order to, but not really provide the expected service. I would avoid dealing with the companies that offer refunds because, it says a lot about their writers pool. Additionally, a student who believes a writing company will give a full refund has another thing coming. The most they will get out of the company is a 50% refund, and that is if the company is feeling generous. Otherwise, they will find a way to avoid refunding the student, while penalizing the writer for a supposed "refund" to the client.