It seems counterintuitive that you should want to offer your customers a money-back guarantee. After all, the customer’s money is really what you came for. Once you’ve got it, and you’ve delivered your product, it makes sense that the transaction should be finished, right?

But this idea makes customers nervous. What if they buy the product only to find out that they can’t make it work for them the way they had hoped? What if they misunderstood the promotional literature and come to find that a critical feature is missing? What if they just plain change their mind? We’ve all experienced these worries when making a purchase, and your customers are no different. Your job is to put their minds at ease. Because nervous people don’t buy. They put it on hold and then forget to get back to it. It happens. You can probably think of plenty of times when you did this yourself.

Enter the money back guarantee. If you know you can get your money back, you worry less. You feel less pressured. You have some breathing room. So you go for it. As a business owner, you’ve told your customer that you are willing to shoulder the burden of their potential buyer’s remorse.

This is actually a win-win situation, because if you know that you’ve represented your product accurately, and that it is of a high quality, you can already predict that the vast majority of people who buy from you will not ask for their money back. You have the advantage in the situation: you already know that your customer needs what you are offering. As long as you are actually delivering what you promise, the only people who will ever take you up on the offer are the ones who simply misunderstood. And, frankly, you want them to return the product to you for a refund. Otherwise you’ll have a dissatisfied customer out their talking about all the things your product can’t do. This build up a perceived deficit in what may otherwise be a great product. The moral of the story is that you only ever want happy customers who will tell people nice things about you.

Offering a money back guarantee not only alleviates your customer’s anxiety about purchasing, it also conveys confidence. If you’re willing to give them 30 or even 60 days to make up their minds about whether the product is worth it, they know you mean business. If you’re selling crap, this strategy is not going to work for you. But when you’ve worked hard to produce a product that meets your clients’ needs, the sales you will gain by using this strategy will vastly outweigh the refunds you end up paying out.