I need to replace one of the filters over the pump in the bottom of my dishwasher (and of course it's only sold as part of a set).
The Bosch website quoted £27 (including postage, handling and VAT), but I thought I'd rather give the business to my local appliance dealer (an official Bosch agent) for around the same price. I was surprised when he quoted £40.50 (including VAT) for the same set!
I thought manufacturers sold spares at a discount to their own dealers so they could sell them on at the same price. Is this kind of discrepancy normal these days?
When it comes to spare parts the situation is /much/ better than a few years ago. Local spares shops have only one thing of advantage over an net shop, namely they have them for immediate collection, that is worth a premium and some landlords,tenants or customers /might/ be prepared to pay the extra to get the appliance back in order sooner.
If the shop has to order it then you might as well do it yourself, online spares shops are getting better all the while. More info, more pictures, more diagrams. Often the price is high but the alternative a new appliance...
Often you can find the spare part at one online shop find out more about it (spec, numbers, picture etc.) and then search with greater confidence for the best online deal.
It would have taken a few days for the shop to get it --- possibly not as long as I'll have to wait for it from Bosch, but it's not so urgent (the filter needs replacing soon, but not immediately).
However, I ordered it on Thursday and it arrived on Saturday.
(Normally I'd grumble about the dishonest practice of charging your credit card at the time of order rather than shipment, but those two seem to have been on the same day in this case.)
Your card is always[1] charged[2] at the time of order rather than shipment. It's just that vendors can make the date of the payment appear on your statement as the date of shipment rather than purchase, and this is often misleadingly presented as being a charge at the time of shipment rather than purchase.
[1] Unless you've given a continuous charge authority, but that's far, far worse than paying up front!
[1] Strictly speaking, the money is "reserved" rather than charged at the time of order, and then "captured" later when the product is shipped. But the effect to you is the same as if the charge appeared on your statement at the time of order, as once it's reserved you can't spend it on anything else - it's effectively lowering your credit limit by the value of the order for the period of time in between placing the order and the charge appearing on your statement.
I think it's entirely reasonable for them to _reserve_ the money at the time of order, and (since I've never been close to my credit limit) it doesn't affect me.
I object strongly when the supplier completes the charge, it clears a billing cycle, and I have to pay the credit card company before the supplier even bothers to ship the part. A few years ago I had to order a knob for my cooker (plus an exhorbitant "handling" charge) and it arrived over a month after I had really paid (i.e. from my current account to the CC issuer) for it. That's dishonest.
On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:27:09 +0000, Adam Funk put finger to keyboard and typed:
That's a separate issue though. The vendor can't reserve a payment for that long (the actual time depends on the payment system provider, but typically the maximum is no more than a week). With a lengthy lead time, the vendor has three options:
Store your card details and process the payment when they're ready to dispatch the goods.
Get you to authorise a CCA so that they can charge you when they want to.
Take the payment at the time of order.
The first of these is only legitimately possible if the vendor has the right security procedures in place in order to be able to store credit card details securely. Otherwise, it's not only unwise and potentially unsafe but also places them in breach of their agreement with the card companies. Unless they have the ability to store your details securely and have the agreement of the card companies to do so, then offering to defer the charge until time of dispatch is misleading at best and possibly close to fraudulent if anything does go wrong. The second is fine for the vendor, but, if not presented correctly to you, is equally misleading and, in any case, many people are (rightly) wary of CCAs as it can be almost impossible to cancel one or get a refund if it all goes pearshaped. So, in practical terms, the final option - taking payment at time of order - is often the most sensible course of action.
The underlying problem is that electronic card processing systems were not designed with deferred payment in mind. Cards are supposed to be an alternative to cash, and when you pay cash on order you always pay up front no matter how long you wait for delivery. And, for over-the-counter payments, that's how cards are, indeed, processed - the payment is charged at time of purchase, and everyone is happy with that. But, for distance selling, expectations are different. People expect card payments to work like a cheque, which the vendor can hold for several months before banking it. Prior to the mass adoption of the Internet, vendors usually handled that by simply keeping a physical record of card details and then keying them in to the terminal at the appropriate time. It was low-tech, but it was reasonably secure - short of a break-in at the shop, the card details were unlikely to go astray. Online, though, it's a different matter - a system which takes card payments over the Internet is a prime target for those with nefarious intent. So the card companies clamped down on the practice of vendors storing card details, and insisted that, unless acceptable security was in place, all card payments had to be processed at the point of order and the vendor was not permitted to store details at all. But that creates a disconnect with customers' expectations that their card will not be charged until the point of dispatch, and so vendors looked around for a solution.
For big companies, like Amazon, which can afford the necessary security, it isn't a problem - they can store card details and therefore really can take payment at the point of dispatch. (Although it's still worth considering the risks involved. It's easy to imagine how much it would damage Amazon's reputation if any card details ever did leak from their systems.) Smaller vendors, though, don't usually have that option (and, in this context, "smaller" includes any organisation that doesn't do a lot of online sales direct to consumers, even if in other respects they are a major company). The usual workaround for them is to use the "deferred capture" function to give the impression of a deferred charge. But that's not what deferred capture was intended for, and, as I've already mentioned, it has a fairly short time limit. It works well enough most of the time, but "well enough" and "most of the time" aren't reliable enough to avoid creating problems, so it's often simpler and more transparent to just take the whole payment at the time of order. it may not be what the customer expects, but it is at least entirely honest with them and the most reliable and secure way of handling the payment.
In case you're wondering, deferred capture was originally intended to benefit the vendor, not the customer. The problem with online sales is that you get a significant number of cancellations, either in between order and dispatch or as a DSR return shortly after dispatch. All of these require you to refund the card payment, and, as a refund is a transaction, it results in a transaction fee. Since there was a transaction fee on the payment in the first place, this means that a cancelled or returned order costs the vendor two transaction fees - and without any income on the order. It doesn't take many such instances for it to be a significant overhead. Deferred capture was devised by the card companies to offer a solution to this - instead of the money being taken at the point of order, it's simply "reserved" at the point of order and then subsequently "captured" (ie, transferred to the vendor's account) at a later date. The transaction fee is charged to the vendor at the point of capture, not reservation, which means that if the order is cancelled before the payment is captured then the capture can be cancelled and no transaction fee will be charged. Because the charge is invisible to the customer until the point of capture, many vendors started to utilise this by presenting it to the customer as a deferred *payment*, as if they were not actually placing a charge on the customer's card until the point of dispatch.
This is all well and good, but, because reservation involves making an invisible debit against the customer's card (which later becomes visible at the point of capture), there is a fairly short time limit on how long the payment can be reserved - otherwise a customer who does a lot of online shopping could easily find themselves in a situation where there is a huge discrepancy between what their credit limit appears to be and what it actually is, and that in turn could cause them to accidentally breach their limit and incur charges. Using deferred capture as a method of appearing to delay payment is really just a fudge, and one which can often create more problems than it solves.
This raises an interesting point. AFAIK companies are not obliged to reveal fraud to the public so would "we" find out if card details were leaked?
A couple of years ago a credit card of mine was used fraudulently. As I had only used it four times the source of the fraudster should be easy to find. I contacted all four companies (one of them was Amazon). Only Amazon replied at all and with a boilerplate text, basically saying it couldn't be them. No-one seemed interested in catching the criminal(s).
Since I did not lose out finacially I did not pursue the matter, but I am surprised at the attitude of everyone involved.
[Thanks for the (snipped here) explanations --- you have a lot of knowledge in this area!]
I had thought it was designed for things like car hire, so the supplier can "reserve" some money in place of taking a deposit. Is that a side effect of the deferred capture system or is it a different process?
...
My credit limit has always been higher than I really need, but it could be a problem for many people. Mainly I just very strongly resent paying a business well in advance (unless something is custom-made, of course).
That's a different process, because the reservation in this case has to last at least the length of the hire period - and that can often be longer than the maximum deferred capture period. There's a separate facility for this, therefore, which requires a different kind of agreement with the card companies or the card handling provider. The key difference is that the reservation can last longer in this case because there is an explicit contract agreed to by the customer which permits it to last longer, and the reservation period is directly linked to the period of the rental contract. There is also a special facility for a rental company to charge additional fees to the card after the end of the hire period (eg, to cover things like refuelling or damage), which, again, requires a special contract with the card companies as well as being explicitly agreed to by the customer - it's not a continuous charge authority, since it isn't ongoing and unlimited, but it is authority for more than just a single payment. But I don't really know any detail about how it all works, as I've never worked for that type of business and never written the software to handle that type of payment.
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