E-SHOPS have reported an increase in the number of problematic online shoppers and say that protection from such customers is limited. Customers sometimes refuse to accept products they have ordered online when the courier delivers them, or order the same products from several eshops, but accept only the one that is delivered first, the Sme daily wrote in late October.
“These cases occur even when the internet shop has fulfilled the order and dispatched the goods to the customer without any errors,” Marián Zeleniak from ui42said as cited by Sme.
Most e-shops are not protected from such cases. If a customer chooses to pay via cash on delivery, the e-shop is not able to recover its costs for fulfilling and shipping the order to the customer.
According to the daily, eshops have the option to (1) establish sanctions for refusing to accept the delivered product, (2) require advance payments for expensive goods or goods with complicated logistics or (3) create black lists of problematic customers, whose orders they would either refuse to fulfil, or fulfil only if the customers pay in advance.
Cash on delivery remains the most common payment method in Slovakia for online transactions, with 60 percent of online purchases conducted in this way, the Hospodárske Noviny economic daily wrote in April.
