During the State of Udemy this past May, we shared that we’re working on improving the refund system in 2020. Throughout the coming months, we’ll be releasing a series of experiments and updates to our existing refund system.
The new refund system will help us set better student expectations and identify refund abuse. Our goal with the new system is to provide a better experience for revenue-driving students, while protecting your course content — and your revenue — from bad actors.
The first improvements that we will be making are to our refund platform. These changes will allow us to track and process refunds efficiently for students and help us to better monitor and enforce our refund policies. With these updates, we hope to better flag and catch refund abuse, while providing risk-free exploration for the majority of students.
In addition to these backend improvements, we will be updating our refund-abuse policies to identify bad actors and limit their ability to request a refund. We will be implementing new thresholds based on:
- Refund rates
- Course consumption
- Repeat course refunds
While these are the currently prioritized changes, the work on refunds will not stop there. We will continue to monitor refund trends, reasons, and behavior to identify opportunities for additional improvements, and explore alternative modes of refunds including a credit system.
As our work on refunds progresses, we will continue to provide updates on the project.
You can learn more about the new refund system in our FAQ here.
Teach on!
