Here’s a timeline of what happened:
- First payment from client: April 8, 2021
- Client got featured in the news: April 22, 2021
- Second payment from client: April 28, 2021 – for a different service
- We started work on the client’s Amazon ads account: May 2, 2021
- May 9 – A Sunday, or a non-working day – Client sends us an email to contact him
- May 10 – Monday – Client files a chargeback on both payments
- May 11 – Tuesday – We responded to the client (at this point we were not informed by either the client or the bank of the chargeback)
His complaint points out a few things:
- Ineffective results from our first marketing service (“met with the sound of crickets”)
- He did the work for the project and we did nothing
- Ineffective results from our second marketing service, and also tripling his bill
- It is difficult to work with us
We will address each point in depth following this, but this is our summary response:
- We had a lapse in getting back, responding on a Tuesday instead of a Monday. We acknowledge this lapse and have taken steps to improve our communications.
- However, the client is also pretty extreme to file a chargeback for a 48-hour delay in response when we have been working closely for over a month.
- Marketing effectiveness is not the real reason the client is dissatisfied because not only will we prove this with screenshots below, the best proof is that we finished our first marketing service with him on April 22 and then he paid us again to continue working for him on April 28.
Will a dissatisfied customer pay us to do more work, if what we previously did was ineffective?
Proof of satisfaction
The client first paid on April 8, 2021. We got him featured on April 22. He then went on to make another payment on April 28. The second client payment is the best evidence that counters his claim: “met with the sound of crickets”. Screenshots of payment below. As the client used a pen name, we can only show a partial screenshot to protect his name on PayPal.
He even confirmed that he liked it. See email below (“Yes, that was nice! What’s next?”)
Above is his email showing satisfaction, and below are the 2 PayPal payments from him.
This is lie number #1, because he was satisfied and paid us to do more.
Ads budget complaint
While his second payment was on April 28, we needed time to setup the ad campaigns and began on May 2. See screenshot below. Our campaigns are always titled with EOP to represent our company name Ebook Or Print. There are other campaigns but we can’t get a screenshot of that (now) because we don’t have access to his account anymore.
Luckily we captured some proof of work. There are multiple other campaigns belonging to the client and multiple other campaigns setup by us. This was not captured because we didn’t expect the client to kick us out of the account halfway.
Just from one of our campaigns, you can see that it spent $16 and already made a $9.99 sale. He had other campaigns inside (just one example is the one with the _2_5 ending to its name) that spent $30 and netted $0 sales. Our campaigns were doing infinitely better than his. While the campaign in the screenshot was not yet profitable, bear in mind that this was only 1 campaign and the client didn’t give us time to optimise our campaigns. This was only the beginning.
You can look up his other review of Amazon KDP here: https://www.trustpilot.com/reviews/60dfbca5f9f487075037b2f9 he already had costs being racked up on or before May 2 – which was the date that we started.
His review of Amazon KDP has now been deleted, so it only makes us more certain that the client was throwing a tantrum and doing this out of spite.
You can see our campaign creation date was May 2 and that’s when we began all our campaigns:
We also couldn’t stop our campaigns because the client was basically throwing a tantrum when we didn’t respond on a Sunday. Firstly, we only control the campaigns that we create and the client’s overall billing was due to his other campaigns that were a result of his own management or the previous company he hired. Secondly, by kicking us out of the account, we simply have no access to turn off our campaigns. (It’s just physically/digitally impossible?)
When Jerry responded on Tuesday to setup a call, Robert did not ask us to stop the Amazon ads either.
This is lie number #2 – he conveniently merged the costs of all his other ads and did not allow us to optimise or stop our campaigns.
Why we didn’t fight the chargeback
This author was writing about his experiences with childhood abuse in his book. Because it wasn’t logical for someone to file a chargeback within 24 hours of not getting a response, we knew something was off. It wasn’t about effectiveness of our service either since we completed the first part with proof of satisfaction above, with the client requesting us to do more and then making a second payment.
It wasn’t about the effectiveness of this second service – which is basically running his Amazon ads for 1 month – because the month wasn’t even up. It was just slightly over a week.
To us, it seems like the side effects as a result of his abusive childhood was that he needed a lot of attention and very quickly. Please see following screenshots of just a few instances of an hour long phone call and requests for Jerry to call him back. There was even another hour-long phone call where Robert wanted to get Jerry’s opinion on another company’s course on getting clients for service-based businesses. This has absolutely nothing to do with our business. He just wanted Jerry’s personal opinion.
That was the kind of personal relation Jerry had built with Robert.
But all of a sudden, with a 48-hour lapse in response time, the client turned nasty. Note that by May 9 the client and Jerry had around 10 phone calls totalling over 3 hours, multiple emails, and chats about non-book topics.
As we knew about the author’s background, we felt that the abuse he suffered led to him wanting a lot of attention. A next day response may be seen as being ‘uncaring’ from the client’s point of view.
We wish him all the best.
Please see from below screenshots that we typically got back within an hour.
Fraudulent chargeback
This review in itself just shows that the author will lie. In his spite, he decided to make a claim that we didn’t provide the service to his credit card company. Note that he never made a refund request with us, he just filed a chargeback instantly after sending us an email on Sunday. He of course tries to make it sound like we made it difficult for him to get a refund when he said “Thank god my bank was able to refund my monies”, but the truth is that he never sent us any refund request. After we got back to the client late, he simply ignored us. It wasn’t us who went missing.
This is lie number #3: claiming to his bank that we provided no service.
In this review on TrustPilot, he’s saying that we did provide the service but claims that the service was ineffective. In his chargeback, he claims we never provided the service. See the screenshot where it says ‘Item Not Received’. This is because it’s much easier to say that nothing was received, and so doesn’t need to provide any documentation to the bank. If he needed to send documentation to the bank on how our service failed to meet agreed upon standards, he would not be able to do so.
This fact alone should kill the credibility of this review.
The truth of the matter is, we let it go because we tried to be understanding of his situation after going through childhood abuse. In this rebuttal, we have to explain about the client’s personal situation or it wouldn’t make sense (who files a chargeback after a 48 hour delay in response? Most people send a second email?).
He’s now portraying our explanation as a personal attack, but we wouldn’t need to explain anything if he didn’t post a review full of falsehoods. If the client wanted to harp on that 1 single incident (after a month of working together) where we got back in 48 hours, we acknowledge that as our lapse. But everything else is untrue and we have to fight it.
We have to ask the question to the client though: since you got refunded, meaning you got a news feature for free, why are you posting this since we never asked you to retract your bank request or anything like that? We let it go to let you win, but for some sinister reason you have to leave us a negative and wholly untrue review – about a month after you got the refund. We did not pressure or harass you despite your actions, which we find to be unfair, but somehow we stayed on your mind for 30 days?
Other positive reviews
The client also wants to reduce the believability of our other reviews when this review was made out of spite. Below you can see that the only 2 cases we have in PayPal are the cases with him. He’s the only one with cases against us.
Other unaddressed points
Our questionnaire has 7 questions, totalling around 60 words. Each question has less than 10 words. Questionnaire screenshot below. We clearly ask for brief points only:
What the client failed to mention is that he chose to type an essay when we already said “brief points are sufficient”, then claim that “he did the work for us”.
Closing summary
The words the client has used against us is more telling of himself and his intentions. Because he wanted to make this a personal attack against us – a full 30 days after the incident happened – he feels embarrassed and attacked when met with real evidence. This is why he needs to edit his review and also delete his other review of KDP. He needs to delete proof to shape a narrative.
Again, the fact that the client would pay us after we completed our first service shows that this is nothing to do with service effectiveness but is just the client throwing a tantrum. That is the unfortunate truth.
We truly wish the client all the best. Should you wish to reach Jerry, you can email him anytime.
