You should never require a "good reason" for a commodity software refund:
1) Adjudicating reasons requires valuable support time. Refund and move on does not.
2) This causes customer friction. The annoyance of the prospect of having to justify yourself to an uncaring CS grunt in India destroys the value of having the guarantee in the first place, which is to make purchasing from you look like a risk-free endeavor.
3) Any customer can get a refund any time they want by calling up their credit card company and humming a few bars about "Internet merchant did not live up to their claims". This is called a chargeback and it means the merchant just lost $15 to $25 plus the refunded amount.
4) Product quality is much more effective than hoops in decreasing the number of refunds. ("Good relations with the customer" is more important than either. You know how bedside manner is a better predictor of malpractice claims than clinical outcomes? Same story.)
[Edit to add: incidentally, the reason Apple has refunds is to zealously protect their "All interactions with Apple should be mindblowingly awesome for our customers" reputation. This is the same reason that they make it essentially impossible for developers to be anything other than an anonymous cog behind a shiny new icon -- anything else and you're a risk to the True Apple Brand Experience. And that is why I will never, ever develop for any platform that insists that they own the customer relationship.]
1) Adjudicating reasons requires valuable support time. Refund and move on does not.
2) This causes customer friction. The annoyance of the prospect of having to justify yourself to an uncaring CS grunt in India destroys the value of having the guarantee in the first place, which is to make purchasing from you look like a risk-free endeavor.
3) Any customer can get a refund any time they want by calling up their credit card company and humming a few bars about "Internet merchant did not live up to their claims". This is called a chargeback and it means the merchant just lost $15 to $25 plus the refunded amount.
4) Product quality is much more effective than hoops in decreasing the number of refunds. ("Good relations with the customer" is more important than either. You know how bedside manner is a better predictor of malpractice claims than clinical outcomes? Same story.)
[Edit to add: incidentally, the reason Apple has refunds is to zealously protect their "All interactions with Apple should be mindblowingly awesome for our customers" reputation. This is the same reason that they make it essentially impossible for developers to be anything other than an anonymous cog behind a shiny new icon -- anything else and you're a risk to the True Apple Brand Experience. And that is why I will never, ever develop for any platform that insists that they own the customer relationship.]