For all of you who use a paypal merchant account/checkout

[poppyseed]

For all of you who use a paypal merchant account/checkout, we are having the following issue, and I would like to hear if any of you are having the same problem and how you deal with it:

We have had (far to many times now) people place an order with us, who have moved house but not updated their paypal accounts with their new addresses, so when we receive their order it is dispatched to their old address. Now for the most part the packages get bounced back to us, but it means that we have to end up paying a double postaged fee to resend the order to the customers correct address. We have just included a clause in our Terms and Conditions which says:

Please note customers providing us with the incorrect postal address through their paypal accounts at the time ordering, will be required to cover the cost of any subsiquent postage. (Sorry we have been bitten to many times to keep on absorbing this cost).

But we recently received an email from a customer who hadn't received their package, and it turns out they had provided us with there old address by not updating their paypal account, and we have not had the package bounce back to us. What do we do now. We are only a very small home run business, we can not afford the lose of sending out a new order to this person, and we can not claim from Royal Mail, as it is not their fault (it is the customers fault for providing us with the wrong address, and they are aware of this).

The thing that really bugs me is that the minute we print off postage through paypal, the customer gets an email telling them we have done this, and includes the address that the order will be dispatched to.

So offer me your advice and experiences.

[Night Owl]

My advice is to switch to a shopping cart system that allows you to collect the customers shipping information at checkout, instead of relying on potentially outdated information at Paypal.

I can recommend Mals-e.com. I know a few hundred people who seem to be happy with it.

[kriket]

s: I totally understand what you mean. I get it ALL the time. Ebay is the worst because everyone uses paypal

I suggest using google checkout or amazon payments.

Google has really low fees, is backed by google, and they have to put their address in when they order.

Amazon payments (in general) people keep their account updated because they have the OPTION to change their address. Every now and then someone forgets that they moved or whatever, but thats very rare.

I see you are UK so YMMV but in the situation you are in right now. I would just say sorry, and maybe offer the guy a discount code. There is really nothing you can do, and frankly, he did it to himself.

[Kristine233]

Use a cart system and collect the shipping information with the order via the cart instead of using only paypal's information. You can still use paypal to collect payment. I generally reccomend Mals-e with Watersweb SKP (or other similar carts) to make it easy.

[CawMama]

I've had that happen twice in a year and a half. One time it was an order to my brother, so it wasn't a big deal. The other time, it was a small order that didn't cost much to ship, so I just covered it.

[kokonutmama]

i agree that another shopping cart option could avoid the issue.

for your present problem of the package being "nowhere" I don't know what to say. I had that happen once with an international order and stopped offering First Class International (in favor of Priority Mail International, which has tracking) so it wouldn't happen again. Can you require a premium shipping service so all packages are trackable? At least then you'd know that they didn't receive the package and decide to try to scam you into a refund.