Before we ship, we advise the customer the method of shipping that we are using and anticipated delivery time. We tell them that if they wish, they can have their parcel delivered faster however there is an additional cost charged by the carrier.
When we suggest delivery time, we will say something like "5-9 business days starting from the day after we ship."
Once every 2 months one of our customers will email us and say they havent received their parcel and 90% of the time, it is still within that 5-9 business day window (or 3-5 business days).
We will email them back and remind them when it was sent out and then we take the bold move to "guess" when it may arrive. We often get an email back from the people telling us it came on the very day we said it would and they were totally blown away with our prediction.
The fact is we usually send 3 emails to every customer before our instruments are shipped and we send another one, the day we ship out their instrument.
You will see in the comments in some of our feedback and we receive tons of emails from our customers recognizing that we communicate frequently with them and I feel that as long as we do that they are assured their merchandise has been sent and if there are problems it is out of our control, hence we have never been blamed for any late deliveries.
As an example, here is a snipit from an email I received this morning from a former customer looking to purchase another instrument from us:
"Just to let you know, I'm coming back because you responded to my emails quickly, got the violin over here quickly, and the instrument itself was
awsome."
Its all in the communication however I am sure that there are those scam artists that live off of receiving merchandise and never paying for it by claiming the item was never sent.
PayPal and eBay should evaluate the frequency some of these people are making similar claims. If an eBay member does this more than 2 times in 6 months I think eBay and PayPal should flag this guy and take a harder line with him the next time he makes a similar claim.
Malcolm