Thanks Frugal Corner

[M. A. C. Newsome]

They had no problem in charging my credit card immediately. Most reputable businesses wait until the items ship before charging.

I'm no fan of Frugal Corner for a variety of reasons, but since I'm not a customer of theirs, I have refrained from commenting on this thread.

But this reply isn't really about them individually, but any on-line business that uses PayPal to accept funds.

A lot of on-line shops use PayPal as their shopping cart system, including the Scottish Tartans Museum gift shop. It's readily available, and easy to use. I know we use it because I don't have the know-how to set up our own shopping cart system. Using PayPal's I can change, add, or delete any item information myself within minutes and have the change updated on our web site, as opposed to having to pay a tech guy a high hourly fee to make the update and perhaps have to wait days for the change to be made.

In any case, point it a lot of folks use PayPal for their on-line shopping cart. When you check out, you are essentially using PayPal to send funds to the person/business you are buying from. They get an email from PayPal to say, "Hey! This person just sent you money. This is what he ordered and here is his address."

To my knowledge, this is not all that unusual and a lot of other shopping cart systems out there operate pretty much the same way. So it's not just a PayPal thing, but this is the one I have the most direct experience with.

I don't know how Frugal Corner does it, but we send the buyer an email as soon as we get payment notification either saying, "Your order is in stock and will ship today," or "your item is temporarily out of stock and may take _____ amount of time to be ready to ship." In either case we thank them for their purcahse. In the latter case, if someone replies back and says they can't wait the wait time and wants to cancel their order, we refund their purchase. PayPal lets you do that pretty much with the click of a button.

But my main point is, the business here never actually sees any of your financial information. PayPal handles all of that -- we just get an email saying the funds have been transferred. So you can't claim foul because the business "charged your card" even though the item was not in stock. What happened was that you sent them money, and they would have gotten notification of that at the same time as they recieved your order request.

If you ever get into a situation with an unreputable business that is refusing to refund your money after requesting that your order be cancelled, you can always take it up with PayPal who will immediately put those funds on hold and act as a third party arbitrator to resolve the issue (what it basically adds up to is that the seller must be able to provide proof that an item was shipped, or else refund the money).

For what its worth, I always reccomend to people that if they need to know if something is in stock before they order, to call that order in. That way we can confirm that what you need is available within your time frame before hand.

Anyway, that's it. Like I said, I'm not attempting to defend Frugal Corner here. I just read the above comment, noticed that they used PayPal as their shopping cart, and thought I'd share a little bit about how that works.
Aye,
Matt

[pipesndrumsnun]

Thanks, Matt!

[Larry124]

...I always reccomend to people that if they need to know if something is in stock before they order, to call that order in." That way we can confirm that what you need is available within your time frame before hand.

Helpful but that's an extra and "business hours" step.
Ideally and as much as possible the in and out of stock should be on the website.

I'm currently awaiting my first order from FC. Not overdue yet. I'll post how it turns out.