At the beginning of this year, affected by changes in the South African Rand currency exchange rate, Taobao iOS game recharge merchants used this to make profits and earn the price difference, which once caused huge losses to Chinese iOS game developers.
Not long ago, Fengji Games CEO Zhang Ting posted a message in WeChat Moments, claiming that due to receiving a large number of malicious refunds from Taobao recharge merchants using Apple's refund policy, its games have suffered more serious revenue losses than the South African exchange rate loophole. .
On the same day, we contacted Fengji immediately and reported it. However, there are still many doubts. For example, Apple's refund policy has been in place for a long time, so why have refund bad debts exploded in the near future? How do Taobao recharge merchants exploit refund loopholes? How do they operate? What is the current scale and influence of this industrial chain? How should this problem be solved?
After a series of surveys and interviews, we finally came up with the following answers.
Apple's refund policy
Reports about Apple’s App refund policy first appeared in 2009. In that report, a clause was mentioned:
When Apple receives notice or statement from any end user that: (i) the end user wishes to cancel the authorization of an authorized application within 90 days of downloading it; or (ii) the authorized application does not meet your specifications or you Apple may provide a full refund of the price paid by the end user for the Authorized Application, subject to the product warranty, or as required by any applicable law.
To put it simply, when a user pays for an application, within 90 days, he can choose to refund the fee he paid for it, and the second article is a supplementary explanation, which can also be used as a reason for the user to refund the application. , and it also means that even if it exceeds the scope of 90 days, if the user believes that what he paid does not match his expectations, that is, he is "cheated", then he can still get a refund.
Another point is that Apple’s refund policy allows users to only communicate with Apple officials when applying for a refund, completely bypassing the developer part of the application. Even if the developer agrees to a refund, it must be reviewed and approved by Apple.
In the following years, in addition to the news in May this year that Apple began to ban updates and reinstallations of purchased apps for refunds in the App Store and Mac Store, and then in July, the South Korean government ordered Apple App Store and Google Play to modify Apart from the news about its "no refunds" policy, no other specific changes to its refund policy have been reported.
This provision regarding App Store application refunds is still all or mostly applicable today, and a large number of tutorials and successful refund cases on the Internet prove this.
A refund trial
Although Apple does not provide a conspicuous refund entrance in the App Store, and you have to click through the menus on Apple's official website to enter the relevant refund page, this does not mean that the refund process is more complicated than the process of finding this function entrance. .
We tried a refund request.
First, on the homepage of Apple's official website, you need to click the "Technical Support" button in the menu. Thereafter, select "Contact Us" at the bottom of the page. At this time, you need to confirm again whether you need to contact Apple support and click "Start". Then in the new page, select "" and further select "Store".
Apple will next ask you which topics you want support for, so select "Purchasing, Billing & Redemption" and then "Quality of Purchased Content."
Next, you will have the option to contact Apple via email or phone. If you choose to contact by email, you will enter a page and fill out the form. In the form, you need to fill in the information related to Apple ID, as well as the refund item and refund order number, and the reason for the refund.
If you want the order number, you must open it, view the account information, and then select View All in the "Recharge History" column. Only by clicking on the inconspicuous gray triangular arrow in front of the corresponding order list can you view the order number.
Next, you need to fill in the basic information, and then simply write down the reason for your refund in the refund reason. Apple will send an email to your mailbox telling you that you will be notified of the refund result within 24 hours.
Although the process is cumbersome and complicated, you can find a large number of detailed tutorials by searching for App refund strategies in search engines. For most players who want a refund, this does not pose a high threshold.
Since 2011, in developer forums, developers have begun to mention the problem of users purchasing apps on the App Store and getting refunds. If you query the Baidu Index, you can clearly see that since 2013, the search index change curve of the keyword "App refund" has shown a large upward trend since August last year.
In the past, there have always been bad debts due to App Store refunds caused by individual players. However, because the proportion is extremely low, usually less than one percent, most developers have not paid attention to this.
It wasn't until the second half of this year that things began to go wrong.
On August 22, 2014, Zhang Ting, the developer of "Three Swordsmen" and CEO of Fengji Games, publicly stated in WeChat Moments that due to the recent impact of Apple's bad debt refunds, their share of revenue from Apple has been less than 55%, or even lower. Affected by the South African currency exchange rate in the first half of the year, the refund rate reached 58%, and the refund rate in some areas reached more than 40%, with the highest refund amount reaching US$60,000 in one week.
How did all this ferment? Although Zhang Ting pointed the finger at Taobao iOS game recharge merchants, we still tried to clarify the entire communication process starting from the players.
Dota Legend Forum and 14,000 refund results
Apple’s “unconditional refund mechanism” has spread among players much faster than I thought.
I used the command "Site: Dota Legend Bar Refund" in the Google search engine to search, and soon, I got 14,000 results.
In the first 20 pages of search results, there are basically highly relevant posts surrounding Dota Legends and App refunds. When looking through the speeches of players, I found some interesting things. The word refund often appears in this context: "Refund if xx is modified/weakened!"
Of course, there are also players who want to take advantage of manufacturers and want to be a little clever. A player’s App refund guide posted on May 10 this year received 150 responses. A "practitioner" who successfully refunded the money replied proudly: "I have been playing with the refunded VIP10 for a month and it is still fine."
Earlier in March, some players had already discovered this "secret".
Of course, in fact, in September last year, a large number of players abandoned Shanda's "Millions of King Arthur" due to operational problems. At that time, the App Store refund guide had been widely circulated among these players, and some players released refund policies. Successful screenshots prove it can work.
In the past, whether it was the era of PC games, web games or the domestic Android platform, players could only vent their grievances against manufacturers through words. At most, they would call and harass customer service. The more radical option was to leave the game and give up. In the Apple Store, this situation has suddenly changed. Players have obtained a privilege called "unconditional refund." Between the confrontation and hatred between players with Chinese characteristics and game manufacturers, the "refund" privilege is becoming increasingly popular. It is regarded by players as the most effective and deterrent weapon and has been popularized in various contexts.
But the real blow to Apple developers came after Taobao recharge sellers got involved. During the entire interview and investigation process, I felt that mobile game recharge services have formed a huge industry under the water.
The growing Apple game recharge market
South Africa's currency exchange rate issue once caused developers' income to shrink. According to Zhang Ting, CEO of Fengji Games, they could only get back 58% of their income from Apple at that time. In April, Apple adjusted the prices of in-app purchases in the App Store in countries such as South Africa. Taobao rechargers could no longer earn huge price differences through the exchange rate, which brought the South African currency crisis to an end. But behind the incident, although they can no longer provide recharge services that are much lower than the official selling price, the Taobao iOS game recharge merchants who make a living have not died out because of this, but have become more and more prosperous.
A store owner who engages in Taobao's iOS game recharge business generously posted the sales volume for the past three months in his store. In July, the monthly sales of this iOS game recharge Taobao store called Tianmei Mobile Game Recharge have reached More than 10 million. Judging from the screenshots provided by the store owner, in May and June, the store's sales were 6.49 million and 8.63 million respectively, with monthly growth exceeding 30%.
I tried searching for the keyword "iOS recharge" on Taobao and got more than 100 pages of results. And until I turned to page 20, I could still see a large number of commodity transaction records. It is difficult to estimate how big this market is now.
The No. 1 item in the search results was a Dota Legend monthly pass sold at a price of 21.88 yuan, originally priced at 25 yuan. More than 17,000 pieces of this item have been sold so far, and as of 3 p.m., more than 160 pieces of this item had been sold that day. On average, one item is sold every 5 minutes.
Perhaps tempted by profits, many Taobao stores that originally focused on other fields have also joined the iOS game charging industry.
In addition to Taobao, there have been two trading platforms that specialize in providing recharge services for mobile games: 7881 and Honghonghu.
Unlike traditional mobile game trading platforms 8868 and Moyouyou, which provide equivalent recharge, 7881 and Honghonghu provide recharge services that are lower than the official selling price. For one of the games, I contacted the developer of the game, and the other party But we were told that there was no cooperation between the two parties.
I tried to contact 7881, but did not get a response from the other party. I also tried to contact merchants on Taobao that provide iOS game recharge services, hoping to interview and get relevant information, but as expected, most people were unwilling to talk about it. .
One shop owner even said to me directly: "Brother, leave a way for others to survive. Use your own work to make others unemployed. Do you think this is meaningful at the expense of others but not yourself?" Let's not talk about the term "benefit yourself at the expense of others". Definition and media stance, in his tone, I smell some gray atmosphere: If he is not concealing some behaviors that are not suitable for exposure to the sun, why should he be afraid of it?
Finally, a shop owner who had just joined the industry expressed her willingness to be interviewed by me. Let’s call her Weiwei.
Multimillionaires in third-tier cities
Weiwei's Apple recharge Taobao store has just been open for two months, and she is the only one who manages it. In order to avoid the fierce competition in Apple game recharge, she chose a relatively unknown but uncompetitive direction, namely QQ reading and Apple recharge for Baidu Reading.
Weiwei lives in Lianyungang, Jiangsu Province. In her own words, this is a "relatively poor" third-tier city. Weiwei previously worked for a company that makes European and American game trading platforms. When I asked her why she came to Taobao to work as an Apple agent. When recharging, Weiwei told me that the biggest recharge agent on Taobao and Apple is her classmate.
"A Crown store has no less than 1,000 orders per day. My classmate's store now ranks first in sales on Taobao, and it has made more than 10 million yuan through this." Weiwei told me.
In Weiwei's eyes, the reason her classmates can do so well is because they "did it early enough." Weiwei’s classmates were among the first batch of people to work as Apple recharge agents on Taobao. They have now opened four Taobao stores with more than 20 employees in total. Every time a new hit game appears, their stores also have agents for the corresponding games. Rechargeable products will also become "hot items". Weiwei also said that 95% of Taobao's Apple recharge services are now in the same city. "Because a multimillionaire has emerged," many people have followed suit.
Of course, I'm skeptical of the "95%" number.
When Tencent's "Happy Journey to the West" was first launched, Weiwei went to a relative's house to help manage the Taobao store and made more than 700 orders in one day. Weiwei recalled: "There were four of us, working from day to night."
It was only after this that she decided to join the ranks. "It's like following the trend. You find that others are making money, and you want to try it yourself. But after you get in, you find that it's not what you thought at all."
The more people doing it, the more competition becomes fierce. Weiwei discovered that the current situation in the industry is that 70% of people do not make money. Just enter a popular game to search for recharge services, and the number of products has already been listed in hundreds of pages.
Then, I asked the question I was most concerned about. What is the business model of these merchants that provide Taobao recharge services for Apple games?
Weiwei's answer confirmed half of my guesses.
two intertwined lines
Regarding Taobao iOS game live top up , based on the information collected, I have made this conjecture.
Taobao recharge is mainly divided into two parts, one part is "buying", that is, Taobao sellers use lower prices to recharge their own accounts, and the other part is "selling", that is, sellers use their own accounts to recharge players' games. Then earn the difference.
According to the operation method that broke out during the currency exchange period in South Africa, that is, buying gift cards at a low price and then recharging domestic games. In fact, Taobao recharge sellers are still using the same method, but the profit and discount space are far less than at that time. Because there are a large number of Apple gift cards circulating in the United States and other countries, and these gift cards are often given away with some promotions or sold at a discount. Even in China, you can buy a large number of cheap foreign gift cards on Taobao.
For example, a ten-dollar gift card costs at least RMB 60 according to the exchange rate, but it can be purchased on Taobao for only RMB 55. In this way, by purchasing low-priced gift cards in RMB, then recharging them to foreign accounts, and then recharging them for domestic games, you can complete the process and earn the difference.
Weiwei told me that if there is a large demand, there are channels where you can get lower prices.
In the actual operation process, you will encounter some obstacles. For example, foreign accounts cannot recharge games that are only released domestically. Firstly, foreign accounts cannot download games from the App Store in China. Secondly, even if you first use a Chinese account to download the game and then switch to a foreign account, you will encounter the problem that you can only use the account that downloaded the game to recharge the game.
The solution is actually very simple, that is, register a Chinese account to download the game, and then use the country change function to modify the country of the account to complete a series of operations. The only threshold is to convert the account in China to an account in the United States and other regions. Sometimes, a local credit card or other payment account must be bound, otherwise the conversion will not be possible. However, since one credit card can be bound to multiple accounts, the actual operation is not difficult.
If you just earn a small price difference, this thing is not new, but now the situation is a little different – the developer of "Three Swordsmen" and the relevant person in charge of Fengji Games once told me that after obtaining money from the United States, At the same time that Japan, Canada and other countries have a large number of recharges, major refund bad debts also occur in these areas. According to Fengji Games CEO Zhang Ting, the refund rate in some areas has reached as high as 40%.
The two clues are intertwined. What we see is that some Taobao recharge merchants make money from the difference paid by players on the one hand, and on the other hand, they make money from the game developers through the refund policy.
The reason for this phenomenon is that on the one hand, as the competition in Taobao's Apple game recharge business becomes more and more fierce, merchants continue to lower prices to attract players to buy, making it increasingly difficult to make money.
On the other hand, as players of popular games such as "Dota Legend" use Tieba and other communities, the context of "refund rights" is becoming more and more widespread and more frequent, and there are more and more successful cases. Many places were "showed off". This phenomenon appeared at the right time in front of Taobao recharge merchants who were suffering from competition and thin profits, and when they also held the "refund rights" of a large number of players, everything happened naturally – mobile game manufacturers After receiving the bill from Apple, I discovered those unusual refund bad debts.
Since Apple requires an order number for refunds, and the order number is bound to the account used for recharging, the refund rights of players who purchase recharge services are actually in the hands of Taobao merchants.
Regarding my above conjecture, Weiwei, who was new to the "Taobao recharging circle", only agreed with the first half, that is, making some difference by selling gift cards lower than the actual price. As for the "refund" part, she did not She doesn’t agree. She still seems to believe in the self-discipline of her peers. At the same time, she also believes that merchants who have to process thousands of orders every day will not have more time to spend on refunds one by one, and because of the same The account cannot make too many refunds in a short period of time, otherwise it will arouse Apple's suspicion and review. She believes that this cost is not cost-effective.
However, in my opinion, her logic does not hold up: unlike recharging, which can only earn a few points of difference, refunds can obtain all the benefits at no cost; and Taobao buyers certainly do not need to process all orders. For refunds, they only need to pick out those large orders and refund them in batches to make enough money.
Judging from the previous currency turmoil in South Africa, it is difficult for you to believe the self-discipline of Chinese Taobao sellers.
As a "self-disciplined person", Weiwei already regretted entering this industry. Although she mentioned an income of about 3,000 yuan a month, she seemed quite satisfied – in this third-tier city, the salary level is not high. But she was already thinking about transition.
Fengji Games is a firm supporter of this conclusion. Generally speaking, although the information obtained from all parties has almost been able to lock in the conclusion, I still cannot make a conclusion on this. On the one hand, I was not able to interview Taobao sellers who were deeply involved in this matter to confirm some details. There are still some issues to be confirmed on how to improve the refund success rate and refund efficiency; on the other hand, I asked Many developers, but most of the answers I got were "we are investigating." I am not sure how much impact the bad debt refunds have caused.
In any case, this is a hidden mine hidden under the water and very powerful. The most uncomfortable thing is that you know the existence of that mine, it is visible to some extent, but you can only do nothing about it. .
Helpless developer
The information obtained from Fengji Games, the developer of "Three Swordsmen", is that bad debts caused by refunds are much more serious than black cards.
Fengji Games told us that there are two reasons. First, bad debts caused by refunds are considered "valid orders" in Apple's judgment. In the past, when developers cracked down on black cards, an important detection method was to conduct secondary verification of the order. After the black card was detected, the order would become invalid. By checking the order status, developers could obtain Know which players have used black cards to recharge, so we can take action. However, this method is invalid for refunds. Firstly, because the order status is always "valid", and secondly, Apple will not disclose specific refund information to developers, so developers will have no way of knowing which players have recharged. A refund was made.
Secondly, because the orders after refund are still "valid orders", Apple will still charge a 30% platform fee for these orders. For developers, this is a heavy blow.
During the interview, some people disagreed with this and believed that refund bad debts can be queried and controlled. The main disagreement lies in whether the refund order will be judged as a "valid order". Since the information I obtained was not enough to make a judgment, I sent an official email to Apple to inquire, but received no reply.
But for now, it is more likely that a refunded order will still be a "valid order". Fengji Games is worried about this, and in order to prevent it, they have put forward some solutions.
The main idea is to judge based on the user's behavioral data, such as analyzing whether the user's frequent login device and recharge device are consistent, whether the recharge device recharges multiple accounts, and if one device recharges (≥5 ) or more devices are recharged, then this device is probably a charging device, so it can be blocked so that it cannot be logged in.
But this only treats the symptoms, not the root cause. If you delete the game and reinstall it, or change the login device, you will not be able to deal with it. They are also considering sending warning emails to suspicious accounts that have participated in finding someone to recharge on their behalf. After all, for agency deposits, the account password needs to be provided to the seller, which is detrimental to account security.
There are also some methods that can be tried. For example, in a strategy game released in North America, during a certain period of time, the developer found that there were a lot of bad refunds in the game, with the highest amount reaching 6,000 US dollars in one month. They found that these refunds The money mainly comes from the active actions of players, and the relevant information is disseminated in the game through the world channel, so they blocked related words in the game and even closed the world channel for a time. Later, the situation improved greatly.
Nowadays, in many games with world chat channels, you can often see Taobao ads constantly being displayed, claiming to provide low-priced game recharge services. Many players actually learn about and use Taobao's recharge services through this way, blocking Related words, and controlling the world chat channel to clear advertisements can also alleviate this problem to a certain extent.
But in the end, this requires the joint efforts of Apple and Taobao officials to solve it. One solution is a black card-like processing method, which allows developers to locate users who have refunded, so as to recover purchased items; another solution is to strengthen the review of refunds, distinguish and reject them as much as possible Malicious refund.
Apple's dilemma
For developers, an embarrassing problem is that even if you can get the specific information about bad debt refunds and be able to locate specific players, how should you deal with it at this time? Should these players’ accounts be banned? One possibility is that most of these bad debts come from Taobao recharge sellers. To some extent, players may be "innocent".
As for Apple, on the one hand, it is facing the South Korean government's accusation that " yalla ludo payment cannot be refunded". It is considering modifying the refund system to make it more convenient and easy to use for refunds and considering promoting the new standard to the world; But on the other hand, this will inevitably make it even more difficult to distinguish between "malicious refunds" that are already difficult to distinguish from refunds that are really due to the purchase of junk software. While it is convenient for ordinary users, it will also make it more difficult for people with various malicious purposes to distinguish. Will also make a profit.
Google Play once supported unconditional direct refunds within 48 hours. A survey showed that 50% of users chose to refund their apps 48 hours after purchasing them, which caused dissatisfaction among developers. At that time, the same app was withdrawn from the App Store. The payment ratio is only 5%. Later, Google had no choice but to modify its policy and shorten the time limit for unconditional refunds to less than 15 minutes.
So what will Apple do? I don't know, I wish they would at least reply to my email first.
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