On Sep 27, 10:26*am, "Bob La Londe" wrote:
Ok... *Sometimes you just gotta wonder. *Yeah I'm sure I'll get some
judgmental superiority replies, but I thought some folks might need a
reminder about how the world sometimes doesn't make sense.

Last night I went on-line and ordered some lead screws from Roton to repair
a little CNC machine I have been playing with. *I checked my credit card
balance to make sure there was enough available credit to make the
purchase... and there was with a plenty of spare. *I was annoyed that Roton
does not have a freight calculator in their website, but I didn't think any
more of it. *I just figured if they raped me on "handling" I just wouldn't
buy anything else from them.

Well, they don't process the payment on the card in real time. *Nor do they
just process it later after adding on the freight charges. *Instead their
system puts a hold on the credit card effectively reducing your available
credit for the amount of the materials ordered. *Then they process it
manually later when they calculate they freight charges.

I got a call this morning letting me know that my card had been declined.
Since I had checked the balance prior to the order I was very surprised. *My
balance had not changed, but my available credit had been reduced by the
amount of the lead screws. *Their own system had caused the problem that
lead to my card being declined.

So.... *In summary. *If purchasing on-line from Roton (or probably other
vendors who do not process order charges in real time or add freight charges
later) you need to have MORE THAN TWICE the available credit as the amount
of the materials you want to buy.

Sigh. *I just cancelled the order. *They seemed peeved at me. *Oh, well.

This is typical of a webified manual process. Probably if you'd
phoned in the order, they could have told you what the freight was
going to be, added it all up and run it through their POS terminal
with no problems. They probably couldn't justify a 24/7 web charge
card service at the time they put their web site together, what they
don't realize is what a poor implementation costs them. You're not
likely to do business with them in the future, right? They'd also
need something to keep track of current stocking levels, this is not
rocket science, but not something the owner's nephew in high school is
likely to know how to do, databases NOT being something they usually
cover in Web Sites 101. And maybe they don't have any sort of
automated inventory control, some small businesses still work off
pieces of paper.

Stan