RE the whole credit card thing:
We know customers want to pay with credit cards, and we definitely want to be able to receive credit cards. When I buy from an online shop I've never dealt with before, I definitely prefer to use a CC - so I completely understand where you are coming from. Now, before I continue - I'm not trying to make excuses below, or to say that what I've chosen is perfect for all our customers - obiously, it's not. As with every choice in business, when you have two choices you are often choosing between which group of customers to help and which to hurt! What I am doing is trying to explain to you guys the decisions we've made, to show that we are on top of things and trying to offer the best service possible.
Unfortunately, running the overall margin that we run, selling the products we sell, at the volumes we do, we are just at the tipping point of accepting credit cards being feasible. We have twice implemented and run a credit card system in the past, and we have twice had to stop running the system because of pressures on the margin and because of poor service from the CC company. I can tell you know - there's nothing more frustrating to a client getting charged twice, or getting charged and us not receiving the money!
CC implementation was a priority for us for 2009, unfortunately during the course of the year for various reasons we chose to implement other changes to our system - changes that we have seen huge improvements from in sales - bigger improvements than what we saw when implementing CC transactions previously, to be honest. We are frequently re-evaluating the CC situation, and as soon as we can make it work we will do it, but I can make no guarantee as to when that will be.
We are not the only South African online shop struggling with this issue:
http://www.sybaritic.co.za/store/forum/viewtopic.php?t=146
To answer your question why the "Hacker safe" (Trust Guard) stuff if we don't accept credit cards? Well, it's specifically to respond to your point above about how you are dependant on us for a refund. We include those logos, and what they represent (that our physical address, phone number, and company registration information have been confirmed) specifically so that you will feel comfortable purchasing from us, knowing that we won't steal from you.
Because we know the lack of a charge back feature is a major concern for people paying with EFT's, we have taken the policy of always being very happy to do refunds. If something never arrives, we are happy to refund you. If you order something and it's the wrong thing because of our error, we are happy to refund you. If you order something and it's the wrong thing because of your mistake, but it's unopened, we are happy to refund you. If it's open, we still refund you, but less a restocking fee of 10 to 20% depending on the condition. If you have repeated failures of a product (IE, you buy something, it dies, we swap it out, it dies again, we swap it out, it dies again), we are happy to refund you. If you have a single failure but we can't get swap out stock after two weeks, we are happy to refund you. So far we've done a poor job of promoting our refunds / RMA / etc policy, but we are making changes to make it more well known. Also, we've done a bad job of pro-actively offering people the option - one change we want to do is that after two weeks of waiting on an RMA you get an automated email saying "OMW, we suck, it's been two weeks - do you want a refund, or are you happy to wait?".
To the people stating that we don't support CC's because we have to pay the fee, and we do support EFT's because you have to pay it. Well, that's not really true - I'd have no issue paying the EFT charges. The EFT charge is usually around R10, I'll happily pay that (Infact, we happily pay the charges when you pay with cash at an FNB branch, which is more than the EFT charges). An amount of 4 to 5% through a CC processing gateway? That's much tougher to do! In order to accept CC's at this point, we would basically have to push our prices up for everyone, including those who pay via EFT. Now, considering the vast majority of our customers are happy paying EFTs, we've decided this is not the route to take at the moment.
You may also ask, why don't we just charge an extra amount for CCs? Well, unfortunately this is specifically against the terms of the CC companies, so we aren't allowed to do so.
Another question you might have - how can other companies offer this when Prophecy doesn't? Well, there are a few possibilities:
1. They sell something besides computer components that have a lower failure rate and a higher margin, so they don't mind losing out on CC payments, and can still make money. (Or they sell the same stuff as us, but at a higher margin.)
2. A small percentage of their orders are CC payments, and they lose money on these payments, but they make money on other orders so they don't mind.
3. They are quite a bit larger than us, so they have efficiencies of scale, and they get a better deal on CC payments.
4. They save money elsewhere in their business. For example, for us, if a supplier / manufacturer decides your card is out of warranty for no good reason, and I consider it to be within warranty, Prophecy will replace your card. Now, this doesn't happen often - but it does happen, and when it happens it costs us 100% of your amount, plus shipping! If we didn't do this and a couple of other things that our customers love but that cost us money, we could then offer CC payments. To be honest, I sleep better at night knowing that I cover my end of the bargain even when the supplier / manufacturer doesn't.
Finally, the last problem we had was incorrect charge backs. Believe it or not, on the 100's of CC transactions we had we never, ever had a legitimate charge back - IE, someone who took their money back because we didn't keep our end of the deal. However, we did have many customers who charged back accidentally - two months later they look at the CC bill and can't remember buying anything from us, so a charge back happens. Now, we have some time to respond to it, but because our processors where often late in telling us we could only respond after the charge back had gone through. The client then had to pay the amount again (after all, once we explained to them who we where they would generally say something like "freak sorry I didn't know it was you guys"), but by that time we've lost the original CC charge, the charge back charge, and so we are in the red on the order. (We've come up with some ideas to mitigate this problem in the future, but it's still a factor)
- that was Take2.
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