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When is it reasonable for merchant to charge?
jonpress
Posts: 13 Forumite
in Credit cards
I ordered some wardrobes from B&Q online and they charged my (VISA) card immediately, although when I called to confirm a delivery date it turned out that it would be at least 7 weeks before the goods were dispatched. In the meantime, I've received a credit card bill which I'm going to have to pay before I receive anything.
I know in the US, VISA requires merchants to warn shoppers if their cards are charged before dispatch, however Barclaycard were completely clueless when I called them to query the situation in the UK. Anyone know what the position is? It seems unreasonable that B&Q can sit on my money for 7 weeks while they get around to assembling the order, especially as there's nothing on diy.com about the policy that I can see and you can't get a confirmed delivery date until after the checkout process. I can see that they might need to do an authorisation for the amount, but can't see why they need to make a charge.
Apologies if this question is answered elsewhere, but searching the forums I cannot find an answer.
I know in the US, VISA requires merchants to warn shoppers if their cards are charged before dispatch, however Barclaycard were completely clueless when I called them to query the situation in the UK. Anyone know what the position is? It seems unreasonable that B&Q can sit on my money for 7 weeks while they get around to assembling the order, especially as there's nothing on diy.com about the policy that I can see and you can't get a confirmed delivery date until after the checkout process. I can see that they might need to do an authorisation for the amount, but can't see why they need to make a charge.
Apologies if this question is answered elsewhere, but searching the forums I cannot find an answer.
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Comments
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Hi,
I think you're stuck with it if they've explained that's how they operate.
Legally you were/are entitled to cancel the deal and get your card credited when you found out it was going to be 7 weeks for delivery as this is not a 'reasonable' length of time.0 -
Well, as indicated, there's nothing in the T&Cs. I'm particularly interested if anyone knows what the Merchant Agreement normally has to say about this.0
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is it a pre-auth ? But as above you can cancel, but to be honest they always give the worst case senareo0
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The form I signed as a merchant-applicant asked if it would be our policy to dispatch immediately on charging. We were happy with that - mainly cos our customers were decent trade types and charging and not dispatching would have annoyed them immensely. It did then become part of our T+Cs.
I did investigate further at the time. It seems if we wanted to charge in advance of dispatch then the monies would have to be held in a separate account (probably a "trust"/client account) until we were ready to dispatch. I think the bank's main concern was the risk to them if we billed large numbers of customers without having the goods to ship, and then going bust leaving them carrying the section s75 can.
B&Q are pretty big - undoubtedly they have more bargaining power than we did.0
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