They offer no guarantee that your site will be listed but they will still take your money regardless of if its accepted or not. There is very little work required to see if a site is suitable or not, but what gives them the right to snatch your money regardless. I know its there site, there rules etc. To me its fraud. Ive yet to list on any of these sites simply because of this, I would be furious if I paid and then got a no and that was them away with my hard earned money, so I stay away. I dont mind the ones where you pay and if its rejected you get full refund, thats fair enough. Whats your thoughts and opinions on this? Have you paid for submission and been rejected before?
My directory is free and there are days where I get 20 or more spam submissions from the same user (I get way more than 20 spam submissions daily). Imagine if it was paid and I had to do a refund for each submission. Spammers would have nothing to lose. The non refund part in my opinion is useful to keep spammers from submitting, if you have a legit website you have nothing to fear imho.
I totally agree with you though I refundwhen I reject a site. This is mainly because only featured links need payment. All spamlinks are not accepted, nor rejected, I set them to inactive and ban the submitters ip, after checking. To me this is more usefull since sites once submitted cannot be submitted again. Saves alot of time
This isn't true, although the time spent will depend on what kind of directory it is and how strict the editors are. At the very least they should visit a few pages, and read a paragraph or so to check you aren't writing nonsense. There's also an admin cost, because it takes time to refund your money and record it in their books. However, I think directories should refund partially, to take account of this cost, and they should state their refund policy clearly. They should also refund if the directory is down for a sustained period of time. So if you pay £20, it would be reasonable to get £15 back if you're rejected.
What they charge is the time to review a site, and listing is free. So they won't refund 'cause there's no money involved for listing. They'll discourage many low quality sites for submissions, but many good sites will stay away from them too.
I certainly am not advocating a policy of no refunds if rejected, by I can understand those that do implement such a policy. It is really frustrating when you state clearly what you WILL NOT accept in your directory, and some people submit them anyway. If I say no porn and you submit your porn site anyway, hey thanks for the donation! I say English-only sites. You submit a site in Russian. Another donation! P.S. I do refund the rejections but it still upsets me when people blatantly don't follow the rules.
It's the minority that always make it harder for people who do. By the way, I was curious how much you do charge, but your submission pages are sending me in an infinite loop at the moment, as though the "Submit Link" is not redirecting properly.
I have just started a site which gives submitters the ability to upgrade their listing by paying a fee. Since my credit card processing company charges a fee both the for the initial listing and for the refund I have adopted the following policy: -- we collect no payment information for unapproved links -- we will not request payment until after the submission has been approved -- after we approve the link, the submitter receives an email with the URL of a page where they can complete the upgrade purchase and make payment -- and we clearly state there will be no refunds given -- choosing not to make payment does not affect whether a site is listed -- it affects its appearance and priority This approach makes the most sense to me and gives people oodles of chances to back out. And it gives me the opportunity to make sure the site submitted fits into the directory! The only way I would precharge is if I had a category of paid links which were really ads as opposed to just premium listings.
Most web directories that have a "non-refundable submission review fee" actually do refund the payment if the listing gets rejected. Except Yahoo.