most secure way of processing large payments

delllat

I am examining the safest forms of collecting large payments for stock from individuals and business especially paymenets in the 5000-10,000 range

currently considering
merchant account
credit cards
personal cheques
postal orders
tt bank transfer
L/C
paypal
escrow
moneybookers

cant really be too careful thesedays as a 10,000 bounced cheque would be difficult to recover from !

whats the pros and cons and which would be most advisable to use for larger amounts?

antoinolachtnai

bank transfer, I'd say. Good as cash when it lands in your account, very diffiult to reverse, much cheaper than the rest.

Darragh29

Just a tip OP. If you take a credit card or laser card number over the phone and the card holder is not present (obviously), you HAVE to take all charge backs that might come back at you. This means if you supply goods or services and put a 10K transaction through your merchant services terminal, and the card number comes in over the phone or in any event, if the card holder is not present (say they have you their card details on a bit of paper or e-mailed them to you), the customer can subsequently allege that they never authorised the payment at all and you will have pay it back into their account by way of a charge back. You will have already signed up to this when you signed up to your merchant services t & c's. This is grand if you have small transctions aand every now and again you have an issue, but if your dealing with 10K and you do business with someone who "knows the system", you're putting your hand out to be slapped here...

delllat

credit card chargebacks and paypal chargebacks are gettiig more common

i had a friend recently who sold a famous brand of running shoe (asics) which retails for €120 in the shops

after almost 2 months from sale date customer sends an email saying shoes were faulty

demanding instant refund or else

seller refused refund so buyer instigated paypal /credit card dispute

money instantly charged back and buyer returned €120 pair of shoes that were only fit for the bin since buyer had probably ran 100 miles in them (and they looked like that!)


what kind of world are we living in?
People who sell things have practically zero rights

i know in that case it was only 120quid lost but profit margins arent enormous these days


if that was a 10,000 transaction it could ruin a business and thats why i was looking for peoples opinions on how to collect the larger payments safely

Darragh29

delllat wrote: »

credit card chargebacks and paypal chargebacks are gettiig more common

i had a friend recently who sold a famous brand of running shoe (asics) which retails for €120 in the shops

after almost 2 months from sale date customer sends an email saying shoes were faulty

demanding instant refund or else

seller refused refund so buyer instigated paypal /credit card dispute

money instantly charged back and buyer returned €120 pair of shoes that were only fit for the bin since buyer had probably ran 100 miles in them (and they looked like that!)


what kind of world are we living in?
People who sell things have practically zero rights

i know in that case it was only 120quid lost but profit margins arent enormous these days


if that was a 10,000 transaction it could ruin a business and thats why i was looking for peoples opinions on how to collect the larger payments safely

This is the thing OP. If you are dealing with a "customer not present" transaction, then the chargeback is out of your hands completely if it is sought by the customer. If the transaction was authorised with the customer present, as far as I know, you can dispute the chargeback that is requested.

Some products I handle, the amounts involved could be up to 30-40K, so we just get the customer to do a bank transfer and we haven't had any problems with this yet. If your customer banks electronically, this is a simple ask of them. If not, just send them down to your bank with your account details and let them sort it out... The only alternatives are bank draft, cash or cheque I think...

delllat

Darragh29 wrote: »

This is the thing OP. If you are dealing with a "customer not present" transaction, then the chargeback is out of your hands completely if it is sought by the customer. If the transaction was authorised with the customer present, as far as I know, you can dispute the chargeback that is requested.

Some products I handle, the amounts involved could be up to 30-40K, so we just get the customer to do a bank transfer and we haven't had any problems with this yet. If your customer banks electronically, this is a simple ask of them. If not, just send them down to your bank with your account details and let them sort it out... The only alternatives are bank draft, cash or cheque I think...

thanks for the advice ,this is very useful

i forgot to mention in the earlier post that not only did the seller lose the shoes (worth €120) the seller also lost the cost of postage/dhl as well

not only did this guy get to wear (trash) a pair of shoes for a couple of months ,he also got his postage costs refunded to him as well

it just takes the piss on a small retailer when a customer pulls a stunt like this

I think I May still accept c/c for transactions under say 200 or 500 euro but insist on bank transfer for the larger transactions

about accepting cheques,how long should you wait before shipping the goods?
i know some banks add a cheque to your balance straightaway but that doesnt necessarily mean it cant bounce a few days later?

Darragh29

delllat wrote: »

thanks for the advice ,this is very useful

i forgot to mention in the earlier post that not only did the seller lose the shoes (worth €120) the seller also lost the cost of postage/dhl as well

not only did this guy get to wear (trash) a pair of shoes for a couple of months ,he also got his postage costs refunded to him as well

it just takes the piss on a small retailer when a customer pulls a stunt like this

I think I May still accept c/c for transactions under say 200 or 500 euro but insist on bank transfer for the larger transactions

about accepting cheques,how long should you wait before shipping the goods?
i know some banks add a cheque to your balance straightaway but that doesnt necessarily mean it cant bounce a few days later?

Yeah if I lodge a cheque to my bank account, it will show up on the balance of the account, but I won't "get value" for it until it has cleared, which usually means that I cannot draw against it.

I agree totally with you with regard to chargebacks. Unfortunately Credit Card companies are making so much money, they'll just dump a charge back on you. There seems to be little by way of investigation or refusals of charge back requests to discourage this type of behaviour. The CC companies really have you by the nuts if you are a retailer because you have to use them.

What is required is legisation to deal with this, this is another area of business that the banks are self regulated on and we can see where this approach of letting the banks regulate themselves has gotten us recently.

It should simply not be possible for a scam like this to be perpetrated against a retailer. The fact is that it is the retailer who carries the can for this and not the CC company. If it was the CC company, it would have been shut down long ago...

Darragh29

delllat wrote: »

about accepting cheques,how long should you wait before shipping the goods?
i know some banks add a cheque to your balance straightaway but that doesnt necessarily mean it cant bounce a few days later?

Once the cheque clears OP. If you bank with AIB and you lodge an AIB cheque, it will clear overnight usually. If you do the same with a Permanent TSB cheque into your AIB account, it can take up to 5 working days.

If you get your customers to lodge funds directly into your account, and you have internet banking, you are sorted. I use internet banking to pay all my bills and I'd be absolutely lost without it...

delllat

Darragh29 wrote: »

Once the cheque clears OP. If you bank with AIB and you lodge an AIB cheque, it will clear overnight usually. If you do the same with a Permanent TSB cheque into your AIB account, it can take up to 5 working days.

If you get your customers to lodge funds directly into your account, and you have internet banking, you are sorted. I use internet banking to pay all my bills and I'd be absolutely lost without it...

i do use aib so il be starting to insist that substanstial amounts be transferred to the bank before shipping especially to new or unproven customers with no track record

delllat

this thread reminds me of another case last year when a customer bought a very expensive memory card for a professional camera (worth about €400)

Paid by paypal ,recieved card,no communication at all,instant paypal dispute opened and said product was faulty (demanding full refund including postage)

we offered replacemnet but that wasnt good enough......wanted refund only!

We offered to take the card back

card arrives back looking a bit worn so we check and guess what?,differnt serial and batch number! (customer effectively switched the cards)

we fight the chargeback and lose the €400

customer basically exchanged us a broken product for a good product and got his full €400 euro back and kept the good product leaving us with the broken one

paypal didnt even bother to read our side of the argument ,they sent generic responses that werent even related to our case

and because they customer provided tracking he got his refund

theres something inherently wrong with a tracking number being equivalent to the condition or status of the item in the box or the transaction itself

who made up these rules??

buyer must get a refund because he provided a tracking number??

what bearing does that have on the overall transaction apart from proving that someone shipped something to someone else?

Darragh29

delllat wrote: »

this thread reminds me of another case last year when a customer bought a very expensive memory card for a professional camera (worth about €400)

Paid by paypal ,recieved card,no communication at all,instant paypal dispute opened and said product was faulty (demanding full refund including postage)

we offered replacemnet but that wasnt good enough......wanted refund only!

We offered to take the card back

card arrives back looking a bit worn so we check and guess what?,differnt serial and batch number! (customer effectively switched the cards)

we fight the chargeback and lose the €400

customer basically exchanged us a broken product for a good product and got his full €400 euro back and kept the good product leaving us with the broken one

paypal didnt even bother to read our side of the argument ,they sent generic responses that werent even related to our case

and because they customer provided tracking he got his refund

theres something inherently wrong with a tracking number being equivalent to the condition or status of the item in the box or the transaction itself

who made up these rules??

buyer must get a refund because he provided a tracking number??

what bearing does that have on the overall transaction apart from proving that someone shipped something to someone else?

That's just a joke. What traders should do is get together and start up a Pay Pal traders organisation and confront them on it... This is just arrogance that has resulted from PayPal making too much money and dealing with the vendor in a "it's our way or the highway" manner.

delllat

Darragh29 wrote: »

That's just a joke. What traders should do is get together and start up a Pay Pal traders organisation and confront them on it... This is just arrogance that has resulted from PayPal making too much money and dealing with the vendor in a "it's our way or the highway" manner.

unnfortuately there are scores of anti-paypal and ebay sites on the net

its just a pity that these two companies have grown so powerful theyre almost untouchable
they can treat sellers as they like because they have 90% of the worlds auction payments traffic

as soon as theres an alternative il be leaving them both

hkcharlie

......... are there any traders here who were arguing a charge back and won?
You guys are making it sound like this is a common thing and the retailers always lose out.

I'm looking to get into the online sales business and you're putting me off.

delllat

hkcharlie wrote: »

......... are there any traders here who were arguing a charge back and won?
You guys are making it sound like this is a common thing and the retailers always lose out.

I'm looking to get into the online sales business and you're putting me off.

the problem isnt the winning or the losing,its more so that the argument isnt even heard

the dispute process is computerised so u just get generic responses that dont answer your questions

they want to keep buyers feeling safe from the few rogue traders so by this thinking if a buyer gets stung once he wont come back

and sellers can handle a sting because they sell often...

you honestly wont believe how frustrating the process is until it happens you

you will get an email saying xxxx has been taken from your account because bla bla bla

so in that sense theres no "argument" becasue nobody listens-they TELL YOU and u listen

credit card companies and paypal are very powerful and they can do as they like

i ws scammed by a buyer last year and paypal refused to acknowledge this fact
and i sent them emails every day detailing exactly what happened and after the time elapsed they gave the fcuker back his money despite me threatening legal action if they allowed the buyer to scam me

hkcharlie

delllat wrote: »

despite me threatening legal action if they allowed the buyer to scam me

did you take legal action?

delllat

hkcharlie wrote: »

did you take legal action?

To be honest the time a court case would have cost me would have exceeded the 400 i was scammed

How many hours would i waste taking them to court?/
How much would it cost?
How many emails would i have to send?
How many letters would i have to write/post?
Who would i take to court?
Paypal?
Visa/Mastercard?
The Customer?
Where Would i get a Solictor?
How much would he charge?
How long Would it all take ?
How many hours would be wasted icn court dates ?
What happens if i lost the case?€€€€€€€€



in this situation even i WON the case id still be LOSING on the time and effort and cost expended

Darragh29

delllat wrote: »

To be honest the time a court case would have cost me would have exceeded the 400 i was scammed

How many hours would i waste taking them to court?/
How much would it cost?
How many emails would i have to send?
How many letters would i have to write/post?
Who would i take to court?
Paypal?
Visa/Mastercard?
The Customer?
Where Would i get a Solictor?
How much would he charge?
How long Would it all take ?
How many hours would be wasted icn court dates ?
What happens if i lost the case?€€€€€€€€



in this situation even i WON the case id still be LOSING on the time and effort and cost expended

Did you make your case formally to the business involved (PayPal or the Credit Card Company)??? What is worth looking at is investigating the possibility of taking a group action against the company. You could set up a website and start gathering information regarding the number of folks running businesses that are taking regular hits like this... It's just not good enough delllat that businesses are so exposed on this front. There is no way these kind of charge backs should be automatically allowed.

The solution to this is legisalation. We need legislation to put back in place a level playing field. Fair is fair, if you supply goods of good quality and at a reasonable price, you should never have a situation whereby you can be subsequently automatically hit for the value of those goods unless there are reasonable grounds for a refund...

GerardKeating

delllat wrote: »

To be honest the time a court case would have cost me would have exceeded the 400 i was scammed

How many hours would i waste taking them to court?/
How much would it cost?
How many emails would i have to send?
How many letters would i have to write/post?
Who would i take to court?
Paypal?
Visa/Mastercard?
The Customer?
Where Would i get a Solictor?
How much would he charge?
How long Would it all take ?
How many hours would be wasted icn court dates ?
What happens if i lost the case?€€€€€€€€



in this situation even i WON the case id still be LOSING on the time and effort and cost expended

Try the small claims court, or even just report them to the Gardai, what the did could be condsidered fraud or theft..

GerardKeating

antoinolachtnai wrote: »

bank transfer, I'd say. Good as cash when it lands in your account, very diffiult to reverse, much cheaper than the rest.

Actually not true, can be just as dangerous as a cc payment, there is soo much phishing for bank details.

As people who take payment by bank transfer are the solution to those who scam bsnk accounts, how to break the "electronic thread" that follows all bank transfers. All the would need to do it to hack someone bank account and thansfer the money to the OP account in payment for the goods and take delivery before the fraud is discovered.

A fradulent bank transfer can be reversed just as easily as a fraudlent cc transaction...