✦ Field note
What a refund spike on day two usually means
Store refund reason codes are blunt. ‘Purchase not as expected’ covers a child tapping through a family iPad, a Play billing client that double-charged during a bank outage, and a paywall that billed before the first lesson finished.
When we see a spike on day two, we split the table three ways before anyone talks about copy.
By SKU. A consumable that refunds while the annual plan does not is not a trust problem; it is a pack people cannot find in the inventory screen. By country. A Malaysia-only spike on a weekday afternoon is often a payment method, not a paywall. By hour. If the refunds cluster in the same two-hour window as a store outage, rewrite the retry string, not the price.
What day two is usually not: a price that is ‘too high’. People who object to the price tend to bounce on the paywall. People who refund on day two have already paid, opened the app, and decided the thing they bought is not in the build they installed.
If your day-two line is fat, export refunds with product ID and country before you schedule a copy workshop. The workshop may still be needed. It should not be the first move.