Help us find JOE69

[Mux213]

Donut,

Well when its about respectable businesses, businesses deal with many customers and their track record can give you a good feel about whether it is safe to do business with them.
The other way around is much harder. How to know if a customer will pay for their goods? There is no way to build up a trust relationship especially with overseas customers. Even if they have ordered large amounts twice with you and nicely paid, they may scam you on the third. Only with local customers you can build up an honest relationship, or with customers that besides your business dealings you build a separate relationship and become friends in other ways you might develop trust.

Our solution was simple, we demand payment up front. If people don't trust us as a supplier, then it already ends there. We simply can't afford to take that risk. Offcourse AEU86 is in the luxery position that both me and Art do not rely on our business to support ourselves and do this for fun and for the community. But at the same time that means we wish to run near 0 risk.

Jonny, this is exactly why I posted my whole rant. I don't know how and if recent events have influenced your business or if its just the season that is making business slow but over the past 4 years I've noticed some crazy events on the same lines.

Be it technotoy tuning, paradise racing or your shop just to name but a few, it takes but a single post by a disgruntled customer to drag such a shop down to a halt (or so it would seem if you read the reactions to such a post) while often the whole case is about nothing at all.

Even the most respectable business make mistakes, and often you have to wonder if the mistake is even theirs. Sometimes its even their own success that simply overwelms them and makes them react a little slower. But even worse, sometimes its simply some idiot that mad over nothing.

The bad thing however is it seems, it takes 100 satisfied customers to balance 1 disgruntled customers to balance your shops opinion in the minds of potential buyers. And in such a small community its hard to find that balance.

In the end that still means, my opinion about Joe is not yet made up. He could indeed be someone who is trying to screw things up, but I still feel strongly that he could still be someone just caught up in something that originally was not his own fault.
Knowing how easily you can get into trouble in this business once a deal falls apprt by causes not controlled by yourself (unexpected shipping costs/lost packages/bad customers/etc.), he could just have cascaded from one problem into the next and not have seen any way out but spiral down into more trouble.
And lets face it, the internet also has a mean habit of making things seem 10x worse then they are.