The 18th century entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood pioneered many of the marketing strategies used today, including the satisfaction-or-money-back guarantee on the entire range of his pottery products.
[1] He took advantage of his guarantee offer to send his products to rich clientele across Europe unsolicited.
The money-back guarantee was also a major tool of early U.S. mail order sales pioneers in the United States such as Richard Sears and Powel Crosley Jr. to win the confidence of consumers.
Very often, unreliable businesses use it as a tactic to reel the customer into a false sense of safety.
For example, Visa and MasterCard explicitly bar the seller from offering a money-back guarantee past 90 days from purchase.