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Comment by rdudek | Hacker News Reader

This must not be a US thing. I don't know of any business that ships a product prior to receiving payment.

In the US, if anyone ships you something, you haven't already agreed to pay for it, and it's not illegal in some way or clearly a shipping error... it's yours to keep, legally the same as if they'd explicitly gifted it to you.

This is an intentional feature of the law in order to prevent 'delayed billing' scams of exactly this kind.

Book/CD clubs used to work that way. They shipped you the 'book of the month' and then you'd either return it or pay for it.

Not exactly. They would always send a postcard or something similar beforehand allowing you to opt-out.

These were more like auto-renewing subscription dark patterns if I remember it correctly. You'd get a bunch of books or cd's for $1, but based on the fine print you were really signing up for a subscription where they'd send you one a month from then on at full price. They also of course made it tricky to cancel like any good (read: bad) subscription service does.

Common for business to have an account and net-30 terms meaning that every 30 days you pay off whatever you owe them. Such terms are never offered to consumers only businesses as far as I can tell (but if you pay be credit card you get what amounts to the same thing). Note that the account is setup before you can order, though I have no idea how they verify that it is a real account.

Overly picky nit, Net 30 terms means you have 30 days after being invoiced to pay, it does not mean you get a bill every 30 days. If you order 10 different things on 10 different days, those invoices will be due on 10 different days.

It's entirely up to the company offering credit to determine what kind of due diligence they want to perform before giving another company terms.

If you're some random bozo I've never heard of asking me for quotes for 15K of toner im not going to send you anything unless you wire me money before delivery, more likely I just wont reply at all. (Used to get at least a dozen of these a week)

If you're an account I've been trying to sell into for months, and you finally agree to my meeting, me and the sales manager aren't gonna let the controller fuck this up for us, you can have pretty much whatever terms you ask for.

Such terms are never offered to consumers only businesses as far as I can tell

It happens, but not as often as it used to. For example, in luxury retailing, if you're well-known by the store staff and have a long history with it, it happens. But it's always in the midst of a very high-touch situation.

It also happens with deliveries. Like if you have a regular wine delivery or something like that, and you're an unusually valuable customer, a business will happily send you a bill rather than keep a card on file.

The US probably doesn't have it due to the prevalence of credit cards: those essentially let you order something without actually paying for it as well.

It's not uncommon for stores in The Netherlands to accept delayed payment. Basically, you're able to pay up to 14 days after arrival, without any interest charged.

From the sellers side they're getting paid though with only some risk (and less risk than doing COD and about the same risk as a check or debit transaction).

B2C? no.

B2B? fairly common.

In the US it's called C.O.D. - Collect on Delivery [0]

[0]https://www.ups.com/us/en/shipping/services/value-added/cod....

No it isn't. They still collect payment before actually giving you the package. They just do it at your door.

This scam is apparently about paying after something had been delivered, which most sellers won't offer, and even then only to companies, so it must involve the seller getting scammed too.

> They still collect payment before actually giving you the package.

Yes, but the package is still _shipped_ before payment.

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