I don’t disagree with you. What I am saying is that online retailers have no receipt. No signature. The standards of proof for us are way much higher than for card-present merchant. I don’t own a brick and mortar shop so my comments only apply to online retailers.
I finally got hold of Customer Two: yes, the charge was cleared (as I told her it would). She doesn’t know why and how but she believes it is still our fault and we were trying to keep the extra money. :smack:
Man, can I come by and watch you work sometime?
“Cite?”
One very justified bitch about retailers is this scenario. Do you remember having to take a rain check because they didn’t have the item during the sale and they wouldn’t issue a rain check until the last day. You had to return on multiple days to see if they got the sales item in. You finally have the rain check and you call them after a couple weeks about the item, then in a month, then in two months, and they don’t have that item in stock yet. You go back to the store and ask about the rain check. They don’t have that item. You see a shelf with a few of the items you have the rain check for. You ask the clerk behind the counter for one of the items, and comment on you were lucky to find them. She tells you they’ve had them for the last month. You take your copy of the raincheck and the item to checkouts and they adjust the price. You go home thinking I’d like to have stuffed the raincheck up somebodies ass, like the manager. You go home without making a scene. Later you receive the rain check with a post mark a month older than when you bought the item, thus knowing they just mailed it. The post office didn’t sit on it. You return the raincheck to the manager next time your in the store telling him you bought the item a month earlier from off the shelf from where it sat for a month before you bought it, and the whole time you were always told that the store had none in stock. I didn’t yell, I made a point about what a bunch of baboons they were. I always hated that store, but when it’s the only local one around your pretty much stuck with them. The store went out of business years ago when local competition showed up.
You can blame that on a number of places. They stuck that crap on the employee literature at Kmart when I was there. That was when they also had the policy that they would beat any competitor’s price which they dropped about 20 years ago.
That’s pretty close to my own theory; that they harbor an unconscious self-consciousness about what they did to get where they are. I imagine–totally making this shit up here; no authority whatsoever–that the more they love their rich husband–the less important the money is to the relationship, in other words–the less likely they are to have to prove to every serving-class person they meet that they’ve slept their way out of the same class.
Another possible originator - at least of its use in English, as he adapted it from a French hotelier’s slogan - is Harry Gordon Selfridge when he worked with Marshall Field. I find it darkly amusing that his fortune evaporated and he died in poverty - I guess that wasn’t sufficient.
I find it amusing that he was born in the town that got the Republican Party started. Having started in Wisconsin, you’d think they’d give a shit about this state during the campaigns, but we don’t attract them.
Man, I have to say: one of my best friends is like this. She’s that kind of person who loses her cell phone and then freaks out because she can’t get her new phone immediately. She’s not stupid: she knows that cell phone companies don’t typically just hand a person a brand new phone when they say they lost theirs—they have procedures when dealing with claims like that, and it’s typically never a 5-minute turnaround. But she creates a giant scene, uses giant words, makes giant threats, and gets what she wants after an authorizing manager gets involved.
She has no problem being an asshole so that her wants can be put on the fast track. She has no shame—she knows it gets results in most cases, so she does it.
It’s kind of like when you always give in to a kid—they get wise to what works. She’s a product of “The Customer Is Always Right”
I have to say, I don’t agree with being an asshole about it, but I think I"d be good and pissed if I bought something (as in the OP’s scenerio) and was told “Oh, it’s charged through twice, but it should drop off any time now.” What? Why? I’ve shopped online vendors, in store vendors, and about every other sort of shopping. I’ve never seen a charge go pending on my credit or debit card twice, then have one get released later. Why would that even occur?
I’ve seen where a merchant charges you card like $1, then your regular charge and the $1 gets credited back, but does the OP mean the entire purchase price being charged/pending?
Yes, as is standard with credit card transactions. You probably just haven’t looked at your account at just the right moment, or your bank doesn’t update your online account information in real time.
It’s not charged twice. The first amount is a pre-authorization, meaning that the customer’s bank sets aside the money and guarantees the money will be there when the merchant wants it.
You are familiar with the concept of “we charge your credit card when we ship” I imagine. Well, when the merchant ships he requests the money from the cardholder’s bank (not directly, but lets forget about that).
I don’t know what type of stupid bank policy is this, but what happens is that the cardholder bank instead of giving the merchant the money that was set aside (this is debit cards remember) they give him the same amount debited *again *from the balance. Now the cardholder sees the same amount twice, as their bank has now taken that amount from their balance twice, but here’s the trick, only one goes to the merchant, the other the bank holds for 24 hr then clears it. In a couple of days all evidence of this will be gone.
The problem is that the merchant has no control whatsoever over this. Each bank has its own policies (within the law) and we cannot do anything but tell the customer to wait until their bank clears the first hold. The reason most people miss this might be twofold: their bank doesn’t do it the stupid way or because they don’t pay close attention to their accounts and don’t check daily. Few will notice until their account go on overdraft and things go horribly wrong and checks bounce, etc. Another reason they might not notice is if they buy online with merchants that authorize and capture at checkout. This is not uncommon, but a lot of retailers prefer to do it the way I do it to give customers the chance to make early changes to their orders, or because some items might take longer to ship and you do not want to hold their money more than it’s strictly necessary.
Lest you think I am making this up, I inquired with other online retailers when it first happened to me, it is not uncommon at all. I then noticed it when I used my own debit card (I never noticed before). I checked with my CC processor: same answer, they told me I had no control over it.
And this is from Bank of America (first bank I thought of):
I believe they are referring to what I explained before. Only that they say 3 business days, my bank clears it in two and Customer Two’s in one.
So getting what she wants a little faster justifies being a royal bitch to strangers trying to do their job? Nice policy. OTOH as a consumer I’ve dealt with companies that purposely jerk you around and being nice to them doesn’t do any good. I’ve gone to bat for customers who were being jerked around by separate divisions of the company I worked for. I don’t resort to making a giant scene or making giant threats. Once it’s painfully obvious they’ve been incompetent I point it out to them and get through to someone who has the authority to fix it.
I worked for Sears for a number of years
“Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back” was over the door. Managers knew that if a customer took the time to call the district office they would get the call to give them whatever they wanted no matter how outrageous. That really affected how the managers reacted to complaints and in general is a horrible policy. It gave customers the license to be real prize winning pricks and they weren’t afraid to use it. Some of the shit really amazed me. Customers using a cordless phone for a year and then bringing it back and expecting a refund. Ridiculous crap.
Wow, that’s pretty bizarre behavior. I can’t imagine people even having time for that kind of nonsense.
I remember when video rentals was hot and everyone was getting in on it. A local pizza shop in our small town added a video rental section. They would put up lists of names in plain view of people who could no longer rent there. One list must have been every family member of a certain clan for miles around. 8 to 10 listing with the same last name. Pretty funny.
Sometimes one of the salespeople I manage will say to me “Yeah, but he’s a good customer” in trying to explain why a certain person should get special consideration.
I tell them a good customer is one who shops here fairly often and we make money when they do. Someone who constantly asks for inappropriate discounts and freebies, or is trying to finagle free tech support is not a good customer. Simply coming into the store on a regular basis does not make you a good customer. The more you give in the more they expect it as their due. Then when you say, “no discount this time” they act like you kicked their dog.
We have one guy who stops in every now and then and says. “I never pay what’s on the tag.” No matter how it’s discounted he expects more. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to mark something up right in front of him after he says that so I can ask how that previous price looks now.
Talking to our bookkeeper in the office I was told something like this. We have a chance to dispute the charge back but if the bank decides we lost the dispute we take the hit.
I imagine it’s much harder for online vendors because they never have a signature , but if the item is shipped to the cards billing address and signed for I have a hard time figuring how it’s disputed. Even if it’s the child scenario , a parent is legally responsible for the willful damage caused by a child so unless they can return the merchandise how can they do a charge back. The whole charge back fee thing also seems like one more way for the CC companies to get rich by creating some bogus fucking fee.
This does seem awfully complicated and I can see banks streamlining the process by pushing a charge back through and skipping certain steps. Especially on low dollar amounts. They know many merchants won’t fight it so they just do it.
Well I have plenty of customer/asshole stories but…
See, I generally don’t complain. I let a lot of things go. So to actually complain either means that I’m having a really bad day and 10 different idiots have shoved their dick, just an inch into my ass times or I really feel that the place has shoved their dick 10 inches in my ass all at once.
So when I do complain, I come loaded for bear and I don’t fire warning shots. If I am complaining, someone at the business has screwed up, badly, and I am going to freak out like a Ninja on your ass. Even if it isn’t ‘your’ fault, I hoping the anger will be transfered to the soon to be unemployeed person. If I’m going to complain, I fully expect to end up on the customers are assholes websites and I want to be spectacular.
Of course this only happens about once every three years.
It is much harder for online vendors, but thats why you should always be sure to capture things like the CVV2 value, address, phone etc… And be sure that information is sent with the auth. Generally the more information that is sent with an auth, the better protected you are as a merchant. Some sites ask for that data, but never pass it along. And if possible sign up for things like Verified by Visa (and whatever MC offers). Things like that automatically (99.9%) protect the merchant in fraud cases
I’ve been lucky to get a lot of chargebacks reversed, that is because most of them are people who forgot that they bought something online and instead of trying to keep their finances in order the file a claim. A few I’ve won despite the buyer insisting they never made that purchase, that’s because in some cases it was a largish purchase and it was shipped with required shipping, the customer probably emailed me asking something and left a trail of “incriminating” evidence.
Now, I sell books. It’s not a high value item. Furthermore, I specialize in a very small niche, I don’t sell Harry Potter or Danielle Steel. Crooks, like regular crooks, will not get a dime off my books on the street. So what I have a is a collection of people who renege on their debt later on, after all they have read the book already, why pay for it?
If you buy one book worth, say US$7.56, I can’t expect the customer to pay for signature shipping. They’ll want super saver (in book retailing that would be media mail). You also have to offer shipping to locations different than the billing address because, well, people work, they like to receive their mail at the office, or they are sending a gift, or they are in college, or have just moved, etc. You can now see how that can make things very difficult for me to fight chargebacks.