I am communicating with Dan offline now, but an interesting question was raised here that I want to address for everyone's knowledge. When shopping on our website (or any e-commerce site), merely putting an item in your cart does not hold that product indefinitely. It's not the same as a physical "cart" in a supermarket. Here's why - over the past 30 days alone 349 carts totaling $458,241.72 were abandoned on our website. "Abandoned carts" are when a customer places something in their cart but never completes the checkout. This is extremely prevalent in the world of eCommerce. Only about 25% of customers that place items in their cart on our website actually complete checkout. As such, we don't remove items from other marketplaces until checkout is actually complete.
Now to be fair to Dan, he was under the impression that he HAD actually made a payment based on a hold of funds his bank was showing him. We never had a transaction on our end. There's no money to refund. So we are sorting that out, and maybe we will discover something along the way that needs to be addressed.
Another big change we have made that is relevant to this conversation - we are in the process of making a dramatic change to our checkout process for Audiogon sales. Many of you may not be aware, but there was a significant security breach on Audiogon last month. When logging in, we were logged in to some of YOUR accounts. And we had users reporting that they were logging into ours. We can't claim to take our customers' privacy and security seriously if we don't respond to this. As such, we are turning off the built-in checkout for Audiogon and sending each and every customer a secure checkout link following the sale. This should also cut down on some of the rare stock-level issues like this. As a featured dealer on Audiogon, we are within the rules to publish our contact information within our listings etc. As such, we are openly encouraging everyone to shop with us directly for the freshest inventory, lowest pricing and most responsive sales support (and best privacy and security). Thanks again for your continued support. We are truly blessed to have the opportunity to serve such a wonderful community. I'm always happy to hear from anyone with suggestions about how we can serve you better.
Josh
