It's the bad-mouthing that concerns me.
My distributor says it's very likely the insurance company will pay, but it's not 100%. Sales have been absolutely terrible, and if I give the guy a replacement unit, and insurance doesn't pay, I've lost a good chunk of last month's profit. $400 is a good chunk of last month's profit. That's how bad it is.
This guy knew enough to go right to his credit card company after our first phone conversation and discuss a chargeback. I don't think most customers know what a chargeback is. He says he's a merchant, too, so if that's true he knows that a successful chargeback can raise my cost of processing credit cards. It's another way of threatening me.
I'm leaning towards getting him to submit the required letter for the insurance company, in which he has to give the date of order, date of shipment, tracking number, date of delivery, and state that the postman said that the package was delivered. I would write it for him, which I've done before, so I can include phrases such as "under threat of perjury". I would also tell him that I need a police report, so that he would be in all sorts of violations of the law if he's lying.
With demand having fallen drastically after the Obama bubble burst a couple of months ago, sales have been terrible. Traditional advertising sources haven't been working. There's a site call Slickguns.com where people post deals they find on gun stuff. Retailers can advertise deals on there, but only if they're really deals. So I've been creating coupon codes specifically for Slickguns, and reducing prices to the point where I'm making $10 on an EOTech, and under $100 on a $1500 ACOG. Some money is better than none.
The people who use Slickguns, though, will jump to a different retailer for $2. They're not the type of customer most retailers want.
For example, my distributor had a really, really busy day on 11/29. I had a whole bunch of EOTech orders, including one order for a $580 EOTech EXPS2-0 and two orders for $360 EOTech 512's. The distributor put the EXPS2-0 in one of the 512 boxes, and vice versa. The guy who got the 512 instead of the EXPS2-0 he paid for called immediately, of course, and I sent him another EXPS2-0 and set up a UPS pickup for the 512. I contacted the two guys who bought 512's, one of whom got the EXPS2-0, to see which one got the $580 sight. One guy said he got a 512. The other guy never replied to my email or to my phone calls. He got a real deal, and he's not giving it up.
