Originally Posted by TankGuys
There are two reasons we bill early (though we do give people the option of waiting, most chose to pay right away).
1 - If we don't capture the credit card funds within 24 hours, and instead capture them later, using the same authorization, we get hit for nearly twice the discount fees. Since that's far more than our profit margin, we lose a lot of money. We learned this the hard way with X2 pre-orders last year :(
2 - We don't store CC info, for security reasons. So if we don't bill at the time of order, we then have to contact each and every single pre-order customer, and get thier card information, to manually run it again. This in and of itself is a monumental task, but add to that the fact that it sometimes takes 3-4 calls to finally reach someone, people complain when thier shipment is delayed when we can't reach them to pay, etc. etc. It's a gigantic logistical nightmare, and customers hate it since it takes forever to actually get the parts shipped out once they arrive.
And yes, I hate the fact that some people may get hit with interest. Though, I'd hope most people wouldn't buy the chip if they can't pay it off anyway, but some will. It's just a necessary evil I suppose. Both customer and merchant are floating together in the U.S.S. Risk right now I guess :D
Oh, and we don't re-invest any of that pre-order money. While it would make nice financial sense, I'm not going to risk locking up customer's money in the event we get mass cancellations - that money needs to be readily available in our checking account. So there really isn't any financial gain on our end for sitting on the money.
I wish :( I don't know if it's a new thing or what, but now we get charged the discount fees for each and every transaction that runs through the Visa/MC clearing houses. So I get charged for the initial billing, and then again for the refund. So for each cancelled pre-order, we lose about $17.00. No fun!
