Withdrawals - german law

Question

Created May ’17

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We have a website where we offer an additional premium membership on top of a free standard memberhip. The membership can additionally be booked for given periods: 3, 6 or 12 months. After that period the membership gets downgraded to the free standard membership. After that, one can decide to book the premium membership again or not, or even later.

The premium membership can be bought through our website, but also within our app as an in app purchase. When bying the in app purchase we trigger the user to become a premium member in our own database. Due to the german law we have to handle the customers right of withdrawal within the first 14 days since payment. If a customer buys the premium membership within the app, Apple seems to be the contractual partner of the customer and the customer has to declare his withdrawal to Apple and not to us.

If a customer, who bought the premium membership within the app, contacts us, we send him this link:

http://reportaproblem.apple.com/

We ask him to choose the option to withdraw the payment to Apple within the 14-day period. A few times this worked perfect. But now it happened once, that Apple refused to agree to the withdrawal and will not refund the money to the customer, although the 14-day period was not yet expired. In fact, the user tried to withdraw 2 days after his payment.

Now here come my 3 concrete questions:

1. Has anybody similar experiences and advices for me, how to handle this?

A phone call with apple resulted in something like: "Please ask your customer to contact the Apple customer support". But this he already did before and they asked him to contact us. How can it be, that Apple in this special case refuses to refund the money? They also don't give me detailed information about their decision.

2. When creating our in app packages we first wanted to sell "consumables" that can't be withdrawed within the Apple eco system. We planned to handle the withdrawals by ourself as we already did on our website. But Apple told us to implement packages of type "subscription without automatic renewal". Is there anybody who has a similar setup and uses a different package type that allows more easily to handle withdrawals?

3. When a user withdraws his payment, we don't get notified about this withdrawal. But in our database the user is still marked as a premium member. After withdrawing he should be downgraded to a standard member. What is the best practice to handle this scenario?

If anyone could answer these questions or at least one of them, it would help me a lot!

Thanks in advance!

Alex

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Answer 1

KMT OP

May ’17

I think in your example of needing to abide by local laws, the most straightforward method of avoiding conflict w/Apple's store policies is to simply not use IAP.

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Answer 2

PBK OP

May ’17

If Apple is the provider of the software to the customer than the question of whether or not the customer is entitled to a refund and whether or not the customer gets the refund is between Apple and the customer. Why do you care?

Perhaps your understanding of a certain 14 day period is incorrect. One article on German law includes the following: "In relation to purchases of intangible digital content, such as music or movie downloads, under German law the withdrawal period already commences upon conclusion of the contract. In this case the right of withdrawal will – under certain conditions – expire as soon as the seller has started executing the contract, meaning as soon as the consumer has started downloading the digital content. In addition there are a couple of exceptions to the right of withdrawal." Therefore - refer the customer to Apple.

Regarding a consumable - consumables cannot expire after a certain time. They can only 'expire' after they are used by the user. You could sell, as a consumable, a certain number of "active days" but you can't sell, as a consumable, "a limited time period" if the user choses not to use the consumable during that time period.

Regarding refunds - they will show up in a refreshed receipt as a "cancelation_date" field. It's awkward inspecting that receipt.

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Answer 3

studio3w OP

May ’17

Ok, thank you very much for your answer.

I just care about the customer, because it is also our customer and not only a customer of Apple. He uses our app and I would like him to be happy and to continue the membership after expiration.

In our case it is not a music or software download. It is the access to a premium membership for a given time period. So the right of withdrawal is valid in this case, I am very sure about it. But meanwhile I didn't hear any further complaints from this user. Obviously he could solve the problem with the Apple customer service.

Thanks for the hint with the "cancelation_date" field. I will check this out.

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