Re: Bad Experience with Asha(the company)....
I have been out of town for a week so I hadn't had a chance to respond to any threads. I think there are several misunderstandings here of how online businesses are run and how credit cards work.
The original order was canceled because it was suspected as being unauthorized. When it comes to transactions which are not made face to face, the burden is put 100% on the shoulders of the business to make sure its legitimate. If we ship a product to a customer that was purchased using a stolen credit card, we have no recourse.
In this case, the billing address that was provided was incorrect, was listed in Tennessee, the delivery address was in Texas (and in a different person's name), the telephone number had a South Carolina prefix, and the IP address of the person who placed the order came out of Florida. Given the mismatch of information (and the incorrect billing info to begin with), it automatically throws a major red flag. Whenever we have such orders, we have a 3rd party payment verification service, precharge.com, which will analyze them and cover them, an insurance of sorts. They immediately declined to cover the transaction. Therefore it was canceled and the charge was voided. 99% of online companies would have done the same because it has so many of the tell tale signs of an authorized purchase.
This happened on the morning of 3/14. The customer contacted us the very same morning. Not to mention that Mondays are by far the very busiest day of the week for us, mostly because we have 3 days of work to do (Saturday, Sunday and Monday). Therefore she simply contacted us before we could contact her to explain the situation.
We are not saying she can't order with our company, but in order to do so, at a minimum we require the correct billing information, and we may even require that the billing address be updated to match the shipping address (this is not unique to our company).
I wish there were more online vendors on this forum because I guarantee any one of them would have felt equally uneasy about processing the order.
As far as the refund is concerned, here is how credit cards work. When your credit card is initially charged, the money is not placed in the vendor's account immediately. It is only authorized. The following evening, usually midnight EST, the transaction settles, and that is when the charge officially is made on the customer's credit card, and then funds are moved to the merchant's bank. Therefore if your card is charged and then charge is voided the same day, before it settles, no refund is due. That doesn't mean your bank won't freeze the funds for several days as a 'pending' transaction. Unfortunately the merchant has no means to make the bank release the funds. The customer can request that the bank do it, or they can just wait a few days, and it will happen on its own.
This is what happened in this case. The charge was voided before it settled, and therefore no refund was necessary because the funds were never removed from her account. Paypal may have froze the funds temporarily, but this is out of our control, and she would need to contact Paypal for assistance in getting the funds released.
