Pretty serious number of non paying buyers.. time for clearer penalties?

Teup

I'm getting pretty bummed by NPB's and I did some statistics on it.

On BL, 19 out of 2859 orders I received resulted in an NPB. This is 0,66%
On BrickOwl, this is 11 out of 495 orders. This is over 2%

NPBs happen over 3 times as often to me here than it ever did on BL. (!)

It happens about once every month, and if the ordeal drags on for a week or two, it means that 50% of the time part of my inventory is in limbo, making me unable to synchronise my store across platforms, potentially resulting in administrative mess and double ordered parts.
I'm pretty tired of sending message after message begging for the payment, calling people on the phone (especially if they hardly speak Dutch), only to put everything back in the end..

Can we have some more serious measures to deal with NPBs than just a small number at the bottom? A more serious warning, account suspension, etc, like on BL? I don't mind going through this if the buyer learns from their mistake, but at this rate they don't really seem to learn at all... it has happened twice now that I called someone who didn't respond to messages and they were (or claimed to be) unaware there even was an open order.

Lawrence

I'm sorry to hear about the trouble you're having, we have in the past taken action against users that make multiple orders without paying, but this is very rare and most users only do it once.

Teup

Thanks, good to hear repeating non-payers can get in trouble for it. That fact makes it feel like it's not a complete waste of time, at least I feel like I'm contributing to a cleaner BrickOwl.

As far as I can recall the users that I ended up marking as non payments didn't show any history of non payments, just like you said. I guess BO is probably growing fast and there's a higher influx of new members here than on BL, so buyers are relatively new.

I wonder what could be done about it.. an option to disallow new (in whatever definition) members to buy, although that may be undesirable for BO as a whole.

The main part of my problem is basically getting ignored. One time I sent message after message after message, and then 2 weeks later the customer sent me an e-mail like "hi, I placed an order but I'd like to cancel it now, thanks" either ignoring what I wrote or simply not having read it. Today I called a buyer and he was like "yeah I sent it, it was 28 euro", and I said "actually it was 68 euro" and he was like "huh? oooh that one, I forgot about that one".
I wish messages by sellers would somehow seem more urgent and get through to the customers better. Especially for orders that haven't been paid for.

I could solve most of my problem by cancelling any order that's left on "Pending" right away without notice, but that feels pretty unfriendly to me, I like to be a patient and flexible seller..

OvertheBrick

Maybe forcing some payment methods like Paypal for buyers with less than x amount of orders ?

DadsAfol

I think this is the tradeoff for not forcing payment at checkout. I understand there is expense for payment processing (PayPal, credit cards, etc.) but that's what everyone is used to with ecommerce now. Especially new customers to BO, which tend to not be sophisticated AFOLs. We're closing in on 5,000 orders and have 0% NPB, but we require payment at checkout.

Since you say the NPBs are mostly new BO customers, I imagine the order totals are fairly small. You could experiment with setting your minimum order value for non-immediate methods higher. For example maybe 100 euro minimum for bank transfer, but 0 minimum for PayPal. That way the new customers are more likely to be forced into an immediate payment.

steendorp

I do not experience any problems with non-paying buyers. At this moment I have not encountered one here on BO. So I think the system is working fine, at least for me.

Hoddie

I've had a handful but to be honest I don't care less. I don't pick/pack orders until payment has been received, and usually send a message if payment hasn't been received within 5 days. If there's no response to that within 2 days I file a NPB and cancel the order. The only downside it that this ties up stock for up to 7 days but I'm a relatively small store so I don't feel this is losing me sales.

Teup

I think this is the tradeoff for not forcing payment at checkout. I understand there is expense for payment processing (PayPal, credit cards, etc.) but that's what everyone is used to with ecommerce now.

Well, you're talking about the US, but a large part of my sales are domestic. Over here, people do not have credit cards and most online consumers do not even know what PayPal is. Sure, the AFOLs and the internet folks do, but I'm pretty sure nobody in my family has PayPal, for example. We do everything by bank transfer. I'm not seeing any increase in popularity of other methods anytime soon, especially given the latest smartphone online banking developments. Many common webshops don't even feature a PayPal payment option.

I personally wouldn't mind switching to some online service altogether, but it's not really up to me to decide that I guess the sentiment over here is that when it comes to money, it's something private between you and your bank, not something you trust a third party to handle.

I've had a handful but to be honest I don't care less. I don't pick/pack orders until payment has been received, and usually send a message if payment hasn't been received within 5 days. If there's no response to that within 2 days I file a NPB and cancel the order. The only downside it that this ties up stock for up to 7 days but I'm a relatively small store so I don't feel this is losing me sales.

The main reason it bothers me is because it blocks store synchronisation while the order is open. But also sending messages and logging onto my bank account again and again is very tedious. Especially if your bank's security device has very un-ergonomic buttons, like mine

Teup

Maybe forcing some payment methods like Paypal for buyers with less than x amount of orders ?

I agree, that would be welcome, as an optional setting. It doesn't have to be many, really, if they just placed like 3 orders they should know the ropes That would probably already filter out like half of these cases.