Being Charged For A Product

[Hey QuicksDraw!]

Rant on/

On Sunday I buy a new shooting product on a web site. On Monday I see that my credit card had been charged. Cool! I paid for three day shipping so I should get it by Wednesday.

When it didn't arrive today I called the company to get a tracking number. The woman told me the item was back ordered and would not ship for a couple of weeks. I told them to cancel the three day shipping.

Most companies don't bill you until the product ships., this company sucks! Tommorow I'm going to cancel the entire order. Why should they get to use my money when I can't use the product?

Rant off/

[blackdragon]

I agree!! I don't bill/Charge until I ship!

Ivan

[kimel]

Cancel the order and then report them to your CC company.

It is against most payment card companies policy to charge prior to shipment unless you are ordering a product that is being drop-shipped from a supplier or other special circumstances.

[Cactustactical]

Stuart,

this is a practice that a large number of smaller e-commerce companies do. The reason behind it is related to the secure shopping cart in use by that company. Some of the less sophisicated carts do what is called an "authorize / capture" at the time of an order. This means the credit card is "authorized": validated (fraud stuff), monthly limits are checked and order amount is available (for debit cards) and then "captured" during the nightly batch process (order amount is applied against a credit card or pulled from a debit account). Money does not flow to the merchant and away from the customer until the capture is done.

Carts that have more complex features allow the merchant to select "authorize" only at the time of an order. As mentioned, this checks the card validity and whether the $ amount is availble for the order and that is all. The order is then manually "captured" using the processors web site at the time of order processing. Once an order is authorized, it remains available for capturing for 30 days, IIRC. This is the fairer way to do things from the customer perspective, it takes into account out of stock type issues and other shipping delays. It is more labor intensive for the company, the authorize / capture requires no backend work by a company at all.

When dealing with a company you are unfamiliar with, I would check to see how they process credit cards. It should be listed somewhere in their "practices and procedures" area.

Also with the proliferation of e commerce web sites, there are a number of companies who actually carry no stock and rely on drop-shipping. They notify the warehouse who ships the product out. Great for the company, they bear no inventory costs, but they are at the mercy of the warehouse as far as available stock. These companies also usually have really attractive pricing, their margin will be next to nothing because they have little to no overhead and draw more attention from those who shop strictly on price

.

Check to see what a companies stats are as far as delivery time frames, what % of orders are shipped within 48 hours, etc. This is usually a good clue as to whether they rely on drop - shipping, etc.

Anywhere from 1-4 % is usually normal for a company to have in delayed orders. That is due to manufacturer / wholesaler issues that are unavoidable from the merchant standpoint. Any more than that makes you wonder.

Sorry for the lengthy reply, but e-commerce is one of my passions. I spent 20 years working in the main stream credit card industry from a card provider aspect and also the last 6 years in e-commerce from the merchant perspective. I can usually look at a competitor and tell what their shopping cart is, how they process cards, do they rely on drop ship, basically whether they provide a good customer experience, etc.

kimel,

you are correct to a degree. The credit card processors rules pretty much state that an order has to be shipped within 30 days of the order. If Stuarts order is shipped in that time frame, the processor is fine with it.

[bobert1]

Order from Blade-Tech and they do tell you up front that with the big demand by Uncle Sam there is a 4 to 6 week delay. They still charge you when you submit your order though.

[EricW]

OK,

Can someone enumerate shopping carts by name/vendor where one has the option to only charge when the item ships?

We know what the problem is. What's the solution?

What shopping cart systems are dialup bandwidth compatible? I tried the stock cart system from my domain provider and it absolutely blows chunks. Totally inflexible and it takes FOREVER to set up one silly item. And it requires massive amounts of bandwidth.

(Until I drop several grand on a 100' tower and have a broadband repeater installed, I'm stuck on dialup. The satellite dishes do *not* work - or at least they don't work here. My neighbor is in dish hell - paying 4X more than dialup for dialup speed...)

[ipscbob]

OK,

Can someone enumerate shopping carts by name/vendor where one has the option to only charge when the item ships?

We know what the problem is. What's the solution?

Quicksdraw, I agree completely! Right now, I think the solution is to ALWAYS call in direct by phone to place an order. This option is almost always available if you look around a website a bit. I refuse to use any retailer or service that forces me to actually place the order online without talking to a human. This does not guarantee that these things won't happen but atleast I can ask about availability, when the order will ship, and when I will get billed. I have completely stopped using any type of online bill pay as well because of similiar issues. Dispute the charge and let the CC co. deal with the retailer.

[Cactustactical]

Eric,

popular shopping carts:

osCommerce - open source solution. Allows modules to be added on to add more functionality, like afilliate programs, RSS readers, blogs, etc. You have to be fluent in html and especially, php. The database in the background is mysql. You have full control over the look and feel of your web site / shopping cart. But, you must be fluent in the languages / dbms's I mentioned above. And since its open source, its free.

Zen Cart - open source solution. This is similiar to osCommerce. osc has a wider support community and has many more community contributions. Zen is easier to install and works well in its own right.

Monster Cart - full fledged solution. This is a pay cart system that is charged for. Not cheap. A lot of functionality, for those who are not that technically inclined, since you work from panels defining atributes and skins, etc. Not bad for those who don't know computer languages, but not cheap.

There is 1 other full featured cart Joomla / Virtue mart which I can think of at the moment which is open source. I did not look at it in a lot of detail. but it seems like a decent product.

At the other end of the spectrum are carts like Cool Cart. This one is a shopping cart only and you embed bits of html code in your web page that tracks items selected, prices etc. You then send this info to the Cool Cart server via https when the customer wants to check out. Cool Cart handles the credit card processing, email sending, etc. You pay per month for this service. Nice if you don't have the expertise to deal with php coding, pretty easy to embed the tags in your web pages to interface with Cool Cart.

Down side is the data is on someone elses server and you can't control up time, speed, etc. Still not bad if it fits your needs. This cart has a parameter to run"offline" when processing credit cards. Does not interface with the cc processor real time, you have to do that at your convenience if you set that parameter. The cart defaults to "authorize / capture".

There are several other "rentable" carts like Cool Cart getting some use. Most don't advertise the "offline" functionality they offer because they want to control the security around the cc #, expiration date, etc. If you go offline, you necessarily have to have that information in some fashion and their fraud exposure is greater.

Full feature carts have the credit card collection embedded for processing by a payment gateway / cc processer, so you have to configure the security on both the client and server side properly to protect your store, liability wise.

There are several carts that are poorly written and have "issues". In keeping with the flavor of the forums, it is best not to bring them up. Best thing to do is to know what features you want a cart to have for your store, research the existing ones and pick the ones which has the most features you need given your web page building expertise.

Edited July 22, 2006 by Cactustactical

[DrawandDuck]

I personally dont have an issue with charging me AS LONG AS THEY CONTACT ME FIRST AND LET ME KNOW FIRST. This gives me the option of canceling the order or waiting. Just for instance, Rene at SS_ has the backpacks...I wanted one in yellow.....I place the order...he e-mails me back and tells me it is a Special order from Brazil and will be 6 to 8 weeks. I tell him to go ahead and bill me....he stated he will place the order and then bill me when he receives it....this was in February and I still have not received it but I am OK with that because I have been kept in the loop about the delays...I EVEN RECEIVED A CALL FROM THE MANUF. IN BRAZIL....YES BRAZIL CALLED ME TO APOLOGIZE TO ME FOR THE DELAY IN MY $189 BACKPACK....I have never called Brazil but I sure it is more than a local call to the next state. Anywho...my point being, as long as I know what is going on I am OK......

Randal

[smokshwn]

DD,

AMEN BROTHER!!!!!

As long as I am HONESTLY kept in the loop a wait or delay is fine. When the lieing starts, you just lost a customer and will receive a whole batch of negative advertising at no charge.

[Cactustactical]

I personally dont have an issue with charging me AS LONG AS THEY CONTACT ME FIRST AND LET ME KNOW FIRST.

Randal, great point from the customer point of view.

[shred]

Everybody makes mistakes, it's how they act after that that separates the good from the bad...

[Rob Boudrie]

One of the big problems with on line shopping carts is security. It is much, much easier to have a shopping cart you THINK is secure than it is to have one which IS secure. Sometimes system security ends up wiht the equivalent of a Medeco lock on a hollow core wood door with a glass window .

I have used Americart and CoolCart for a number of sites, but generate the HTML to submit to the cart from a Perl/Mysql/PHP database setup - which gives me absolute control over what is goes to the cart. It also allows USPSA (and others) to add new products to their store via a control panel without HTML programming or use of FTP.

This allows me to let Americart or CoolCart worry about the security while I concentrate on other issues. In other cases, I collect the data and then transition to Authorize.net for CC# collection. In each case, I am relying a company which specializes in maintaining a hardened system for the actual processing of credit card numbers. [ Incidentally, Brian Enos uses Cool Cart, however, I am not sure what he uses to create the HTML - I'll ask him at dinner this weekend ]

I looked at OS Commerce and liked it - but was concerned about the need to "harden" the server to be secure against highly motivated and well funded attackers.

OS Commerce is nice, but to run it effectively, you need a "hardened" server. Consider the following:

(1) OS Commerce runs on PHP + MySQL

(2) About a year ago, security flaws were found in PHP, and a corrective update issued.

Now ask yourself:

(3) Did the OS Commerce users apply the PHP patch within 24 hours of release?

(4) Did the OS Commerce based vendor send all existing customers a notice "a security flaw was found, and we have no way to know if it was exploited on our site, so we are notifying you?"

(5) Does your vendor, or their sysadmin, stay current on all security issues for the server's os?

(6) Does your vendor have any unencrypted ports on the server open? Is the MySQL port 3301 open? Is unencrypted FTP allowed? Does the vendor use unencrypted FTP to upload code, but use secure sockets (https://) on the customer visible end? What about Telnet, cifs, nfs, rsh, etc? If you don't understand these questions you probabaly can't evaluate security directly but will end up taking someone's word for it

For me, security came first followed by features.

[lcs]

Just my two cents worth. My rules for shopping on the internet. (I have been doing it since the internet started).

(1) If they did not have an 1-800 order number, I did not deal with the site unless they had a posted contact number I would call them to see if they would respond.

(2) First question, "Is the item in stock?"

(3) Second question "Do you charge before you ship?"

(4) How do you figure your shipping charges? You can loose your savings with hidden "shipping and handling" costs.

You can do two things to protect your credit card:

(1) Notify the credit card company to ONLY approve orders sent to the address you specify.

(1) Use a low limit credit card, so if the card is hyjacked they can not do much damage.

[Scooter]

That's like trying to deal with Botach. They don't tell you if the order has shipped or back ordered for two months and of course they charge you ahead of time. Trying to find out the status of an order is just as painful.

[chuckbradley]

I pretty much follow the guideline of not charging your credit card until I have the product boxed up and ready to ship. I print the shipping label and process the card at the same time. There are some exceptions like deposits on custom gun orders or special order items, moslty special configurations from STI. On occassion we will utilize a drop ship if its something we dont have in stock. My goal is to get your product to you ASAP, drop shipping is a useful tool sometimes.

I wont mention a name here but I had one manufacturer just bill my card for 16,000 for product that wont be delivered for 6-8 weeks. I have just become used to their way of doing business. I guess you just have to get to know who you are dealing with.

[benos]

Rob,

Actually I use http://www.800cart.com/, which looks like it works similarly to cool cart. The owner of 800cart/Oakland Group, Ron Robinson, is a shooter, and we've became friends, which is a good thing.

be

[lcs]

I pretty much follow the guideline of not charging your credit card until I have the product boxed up and ready to ship. I print the shipping label and process the card at the same time. There are some exceptions like deposits on custom gun orders or special order items, moslty special configurations from STI. On occassion we will utilize a drop ship if its something we dont have in stock. My goal is to get your product to you ASAP, drop shipping is a useful tool sometimes.

I wont mention a name here but I had one manufacturer just bill my card for 16,000 for product that wont be delivered for 6-8 weeks. I have just become used to their way of doing business. I guess you just have to get to know who you are dealing with.

Everyone,

I want to say I have bought a lot of stuff from Shooter's Connection and Chuck does what he says. Chuck goes out of his way to support us.

Thanks Chuck for the great service!