Quoted from Whysnow:I personally would like them to switch to a only 50% refundable. Keep it simple. 1k down, if at anytime you want your money back then they will refund 50% of it. This would only be fair since they need to deal with the actual refund and reselling a game that you committed to.
Then just charge a $500 deposit to begin with?
To me the entire point of a deposit is a commitment. Same as buying a house a car anything. To put down a deposit says, "I am committed to buying this and I will be back with the rest of the money." It's money left with the seller as good faith, that the seller will have some sort of compensation if the deal falls through. The seller then tells all the other potential buyers it is sold. Then all of those buyers leave, if the deal falls through, the seller has to start over, thus wasting all the time and energy previously invested.
The whole point of a deposit is to be non refundable. Making the deposit refundable defeats the entire point....commitment, it eliminates the commitment, and anyone and everyone will place a deposit knowing at anytime they can get their money back at anytime.
So instead just take their word for it, most people value their word. Making a deposit is like backing up your word/promise with cash. Since in many cases people will promise to buy and never come back, the deposit was put in place to eliminate these types of untrustworthy people.
I have rental property, and quite frankly EVERYONE says "I'll take it" until I say I cannot reserve the property until I have a deposit, then all of a sudden, um oh well we have 2 more to look at yet today.
I sold a pinball machine on word to someone I didn't know....packaged it all up, palleted it, etc. Just for the guy to never contact me again. Unwrapped it and set it back up, relisted it. Kind of wish I would have charged a $200 deposit or something. Might have found out right then he wasn't 100% sure he wanted it.