Follow On TwitterCustomer Stories: The OverDraft Fee Fiasco
BizSugar
Close to 99% of our customers pay either by credit card or by Paypal and usually the payment transaction goes perfectly smooth. Customer enters credit card and/or Paypal information, hits the ‘confirm’ button and we deliver their goods on time. It’s like clockwork.
Photo By MSMail
But every now and then, someone pays for an order by echeck. And it’s a royal pain in the arse because one, the customer expects us to ship out their order right away even before the check clears and two, their check sometimes bounces. This particular customer had her check bounce on us and called us in a fit of anger.
Customer: You owe me 22 dollars!
Me: I apologize ma’am. What did you just say?
Customer: You owe me 22 dollars and I demand that you pay me back.
Me: I’m sorry, can we please take a step back? Did you make a return that was not refunded? If so, do you have an RMA number?
Customer: No, I do not have an RMA number. In fact, I never received my order. The only thing I received was an overdraft fee for my account.
Me Hold on….Do you have an order number that I can look up?
Customer: Order xxxxx. You charged the wrong account and I got charged an overdraft fee.
Me:: Hold on one sec…Ok. It shows here that you paid by echeck and that your check was recently declined.. I apologize, but we can’t ship out an order when the check hasn’t cleared.
Customer: Yes! It didn’t clear because you guys used the wrong checking account to withdraw my funds. As a result, I had to pay a 22 dollar overdraft fee and I’m not going to pay it. You are!
Me: I’m sorry ma’am. But we use Paypal as our third party payment processor. I assure you that we have absolutely no idea about your checking account. If funds were withdrawn from the wrong account, then you must have supplied the wrong account information.
Customer:I don’t care if it’s you or Paypal. Your company withdrew funds from the wrong account and I got charged a fee.
Me: Once again, both Paypal and our company do not have any knowledge of your bank accounts. We only know what you entered when you made the purchase.
Customer: Fine!! I’m going to give Paypal a call right now and call you back.
**Click**
Phew! At this point, I hoped that Paypal would tell her the same thing and that we’d be done with this transaction. Unfortunately, she called us back 3 days later.
Customer: I can’t believe you people!!!! I just got charged another 35 dollars in overdraft fees. I called my bank and it says that you guys tried to withdraw the funds again from the wrong account!!! Now you owe me 60 dollars!
Me:Huh??? We haven’t touched your order or issued another Paypal transaction at all. We are simply waiting for your echeck to clear which it hasn’t.
Customer:: That is because you issued another charge to the wrong checking account! You know what? I’m fed up with you. Cancel my order and I want my 60 dollars back.
Me:: Hold on ma’am. It looks as though Paypal retried your payment again this morning. It says here that Paypal automatically retries denied echecks after 3-5 days. It looks like Paypal automatically tried to withdraw funds again from the same account. Did you ever clear this up with Paypal?
Customer: CANCEL MY ORDER!! I want a full refund and I want 60 dollars to cover the overdrafts fees!
Me:(Actually, it’s only 57 dollars in overdraft fees. This lady can’t even do math). Technically, we never successfully received payment from you so there is no money to refund. I’m sorry, but once again, we have no knowledge of any of your accounts. The fact that funds were withdrawn from the wrong account is because you entered the wrong account number when you filed your echeck. We will promptly cancel your order right now and Paypal will no longer reissue any charges. If you have any further issues, please take it up with Paypal directly.
Customer: I’ve already contacted Paypal and they won’t do anything.
Me: Well, unfortunately we can’t either.
Customer:I’m never shopping here again!!!!
**Click***
Good riddance. Technically, she never shopped with us in the first place because she NEVER PAID! The scary thing is that this isn’t the first time that this has happened with an echeck purchase. I wish there was a way to disallow echecks altogether. Who uses checks anymore anyways?
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People with bad credit use checks, and people over 90 years of age.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by mywifequit, David Leonhardt. David Leonhardt said: RT @mywifequit: New Customer Story At MWQHJ: The OverDraft Fee Fiasco http://su.pr/9nWxLm [...]
Apparently irrational and grumpy people use checks too. Egads!
[...] Customer Stories: The OverDraft Fee Fiasco [...]
You can “disallow” (aka block) eChecks. I had a couple negative experiences as well and changed a setting in paypal with respect to eChecks. Steps: Profile->Payment Received Preferances->Select the Block eCheck Option you want
So far, it’s helped alleviate future occurances so that customers can submit payment with an echeck.
See I had a simmilar experience from your customer’s point of view. It wasn’t echeck though. I was doing facebook ads and paid through paypal. When checking out PayPal never asked how I wanted to pay and my default is always my debit card so I assumed thats what would be charged. Sadly, they charged another account and tried to charge it twice causing me to go 70 in the negative. I feel that PayPal has a few things to fix. Thankfull my bank refunded one of the overdraft fees because of our customer relations but this made my facebook ads experience horrible.
Fortunately we don’t get a whole lot of e-checks, but whenever we do, it’s a nightmare. People don’t seem to realize that it can take an e-check a while to clear, so they get really upset when seven days have passed and they haven’t received their order (I find this particularly interesting because many of our e-check-using customers are in Europe, so unless they choose expedited shipping, it’s going to take at least ten days for them to receive their order anyway!)
I love most aspects of my job in internet retail, but the customers…sometimes they drive me nuts. I’ve been reading some of the posts on this website and I keep thinking, “Hey, I can relate to that!” It’s like you took excerpts straight out of my work life…
If you can’t block e-checks, add an outrageous processing fee to them. That will discourage e-checks.