Dear Apple: Help Us to Build a Successful Business on the App Store

Dear Apple,

As you know, building a successful business requires positive customer interactions. Like most businesses, we get customer complaints; like any good business, we want to address each complaint to provide a fix or compensation for the user’s time spent on the problematic app. We strive to be like Zappos and we want to deliver the WOW experience.

When a customer emails us about an app that doesn’t work on their phone, we would like to be able to provide a refund, as any good business would. On the Android App Store, we’re able to do that. It’s as simple as clicking the button “Process Refund” for any transaction and selecting the refund amount. The money is seamlessly transferred back to the customer. Why can’t we do this on the Apple App Store? When we get complaints about our iPhone apps, we’ve resorted to sending Amazon Gift Cards. We don’t send iTunes Gift Cards because we then would have to use iTunes; iTunes is typically linked to our personal iTunes account. Also, the minimum iTunes gift card amount is \$15.

I urge you to consider implementing customer management into the Apple App Store. It may not seem important today, as I suspect many users don’t mind wasting \$1 - \$3 on a problematic app. But, with your upcoming Mac App Store, it’ll be imperative to give developers the ability to refund money to customers. I don’t think many customers will just shrug off having spent \$30 to \$50 on a Mac App that doesn’t work on their system.

Kind Regards,