It all leads me back to you

I have a blogshop doing pre-orders for shoes, and the way it works is that we require a RM100 deposit PER pair of shoes ordered..

Sometimes when customers order in large quantities, but only pay up the deposit for 1-2 pairs instead of for all, I allow it.
I know this is bad judgement and I should be more strict about this rule, but I understand that sometimes the timing of my batch is in the middle of the month where people haven't received their pay yet and so on..

but then i ended up with these 2 customers:

Customer A : 2nd time customer, ordered 5 pairs, paid RM60 deposit (instead of RM500 required), gone MIA and still owed me RM733.

Customer B : New customer, ordered 11 pairs, paid RM200 deposit (instead of RM1100), gone MIA and still owed me RM1651.

I emailed and texted them both, giving them 1 week to reply before I forfeit their deposit and sell off their shoes. I did say that we can work out an installment plan, or if they have any other ideas, to feel free to suggest them to me and maybe we can work something out.

And then I got a reply from Customer B who said "i'm no longer related to this. please contact anything to this new number 017-xxxxxxx.tq"

So I did, and forwarded the earlier text to the new number provided, and got no reply. surprise surprise.

Then i decided to do a search of Customer A on Google. And it turns out, she owns a shoe blogshop too! And she has been active on her site and her personal blog recently, which goes to show she's still around and very much capable of replying me.

So following advice from SMWDY, I emailed Customer A's blogshop's email address and acted blur saying
"hey babe, just wondering if youre the same XXX that ordered from my blog?
Cos i'm looking for a buyer of mine called XXX but I havent been able to locate her.."

And just like that, within an hour, I received a reply to my much earlier text saying
"hey there. XXX here. Sorry for the late reply. I've bank in the money RM733 just now. 5 pairs right? thank you."

ONE DOWN, ONE MORE TO GO!

So since Google has been awesome to me the first time around, I thought what the heck, lets give Google a go with Customer B too..

So I Googled the “new number” as provided by customer B.
And voila! I found an advert on mudah.my with the “new number” and an email address attached!
I facebook searched the email address and found only 1 listing for a girl’s FB profile. When I clicked on the profile, guess what I found?
She is also the owner of the exact same blogshop as Customer A!

So following more advice from SMWDY, I screen-shot every single step I took to find out all this and sent it all to Customer A, explaining what I had found and the proof I had and that I absolutely didn’t believe this was a coincidence.

And the second miracle of the day happened! Within half and hour the “new number” replied me to say she’ll bank in the money tomorrow.

That was yesterday and true enough, without any reminders/pushing on my side, she banked in the money early today. All RM1650 of it!
And she told me to send all 16 pairs to Customer A.

Just thought I’d share this so no other seller would fall for these tricks out of sympathy, and get burned like I did.


Editor's note : This post was done after much consideration from both author and myself. And thanks to Xash for her very level headed advise, I have decided the identity of the buyer will not be revealed to everyone. Here's the thing, she still runs a legitimate business and her only wrong doing here is as a BUYER and not a seller so I will not be revealing blog name.

The objective of this post is to reach out to those who may have experienced the same predicament as the author here. For those who feel that they may have been through the same experience esp involving very large amount of money and shoes, please write to me. Tell me the name of the buyer who placed the order, the email address, phone numbers and blog name. If any of the info matches then I will reveal my info to you. 

I think this is fair to all parties. ~ slapmewhydontyou@gmail.com ~