Getly
Rates first, measured 30 August 2026 across every completed order:
- Refund requests: 3.3% of completed orders
- Of those requests, four in five are approved
- Net refunded: under 3% of orders
For digital goods that is a low number, and it is worth being precise about why rather than taking credit for it.
What a refund on a digital product actually means
The file cannot be returned. Once a buyer has downloaded it, a refund is money back with the goods kept — which is why some marketplaces make refunds nearly impossible and others hand them out without asking.
Getly's position is in between and deliberate: every store has a refund window of at least 30 days, sellers cannot approve or deny requests themselves, and an admin decides. That last part surprises sellers, and it exists because a seller judging a complaint about their own product is not a process anyone trusts — not the buyer, and not the seller who then has to defend the decision.
What the 23 have in common
Almost all of them are the same story told differently: the buyer expected something the listing did not actually say, and the seller assumed something the buyer had no way to know.
The recurring shapes:
- Format surprises. A "printable" exported at screen resolution. A template that needs software the buyer does not own. A font pack without the licence the buyer needed.
- Scale surprises. A pack advertised by its best item, where the rest is thinner. A guide that turns out to be twelve pages.
- Language surprises. The listing is translated automatically into German and Russian; the contents of the file are not, and nothing on the page says so.
None of these are disputes about quality. They are disputes about expectation, and expectation is set entirely by the listing.
The two sentences that prevent most of it
The first says what the buyer gets, concretely: file formats, how many, dimensions or page count, what software opens it, what language the contents are in. On Getly the mechanical half of this is automatic — page counts, format and whether a PDF has selectable text are read from the file itself and shown on the page, so they cannot be optimistic by accident.
The second says what the file is not. "Not editable in Canva." "Print files are US Letter, not A4." "Commercial use requires the extended licence." This is the sentence most listings skip, on the theory that naming a limitation loses a sale. It loses the sale that would have become a refund, and keeps the one that would not.
Why a refund costs more than the money
An approved refund reverses the sale everywhere it touched: the buyer's download access is revoked, the licence key is voided, the seller's statistics are rolled back, and any affiliate commission is reversed. If the money had already been paid out, the amount is recovered from the next payout rather than clawed back from the seller's account.
That last mechanism exists because of a real gap we found this month: refunds issued directly through the payment dashboard used to notify nobody and reverse nothing beyond the money. Both are fixed. But the point stands — a refund is not a neutral transaction that gets undone, and the cheapest one is the one the listing prevented.
The number to keep an eye on
3.3% is a platform average across a small sample. Your own rate is the one that matters, and it lives in your dashboard. A store above the average usually has one listing driving it, not a general problem — and the fix is almost always a sentence, not a new product.
