Those motorcycle shops who pay for their order by credit card aren't affected by this situation and probably aren't even aware that anything here has changed.

    To replace trade credit accounts we introduced "Pro forma" invoices. Pro forma invoices are invoices that are sent to ewe for full payment before we will ship your completed order. The options for payment are by cheque or credit card only. Ewe are also given the option of signing an authorisation for us to keep your credit card details on file in our database so that when ewe order we can process your order more quickly when it is ready for despatch.
If an invoice is not paid by the "pay by" date then we reserve the right to sell the item to the next customer who orders that product without further notice. Fail to pay for your order three times and we will only accept orders with credit cards or pre-payment.

    Pro forma works very well for us and for most motorcycle shops too. However there are some shops who won't do business unless they can pay by direct deposit and so have stopped purchasing from us altogether - most of these motorcycle shops have been our customers for anything up to 13 years and always paid by cheque, even if very late, but will no longer pay by cheque anymore and so they then limit their ability to sell desirable products to their customers. These are the same customers who come directly to us because they can't buy what they want from the dealer who sold them the $10,000 to $45,000 bike and then ask us why they can't buy from this or that shop. Most of these customers never go back to a motorcycle shop again to buy their sheepskin seating products and just buy them directly from us - good for us but what about your chance to get a piece of the pie? Many of these same shops were apart of our direct deposit experiment and they are also the reason we no longer offer direct deposit or trade credit ..... see below for more about this.

We do not offer direct deposit facilities anymore either and here is why :
    We experimented with direct deposit payments for a short while and found it to be an absolute disaster. We selected about a dozen motorcycle shops who wanted to pay by direct deposit and faxed them our account number with explicit instructions to fax us with their payment details when they had transferred money to our account. Most shops didn't fax us any confirmation of their payments - two shops did send us confirmation every time without fail - two out of twelve is not good.
We couldn't even follow the trail by the name of the depositing accounts either. They often were not in the name of the shop making the payment. Of the twelve shops one of these paid us by four different accounts, only one of which included the shop name, and often did not advise us of their payment. It cost us more than we made on the sales to track down this mess and sort it out.

    The HeadSheep was talking with the head of the accounts department of a very big Australian company one day, just sorting out a problem with an account we had, and asked the manager about their experience with direct deposit payments and guess what! their experience was pretty much the same as ours except it was on a huge scale and costs the company many large amounts of dollars to deal with. This cost is passed onto the consumer [that's ewe and me buddy!]. When asked what they thought about direct deposit payments the manager said very clearly that they would rather just stop the whole thing but it was just too late to do so and the company had no choice but to continue and to pass the costs along. That was just one company who had enormous resources and they were regretting getting involved with the whole thing.

    Unlike most of the shops we used in our trial, we don't have full time bookkeepers here to log onto our bank account daily and see who has paid what and to figure out who it might have been who put money in our account. We still have not worked out where one payment came from, the nearest we can figure is that someone has paid us twice [but we are only guessing].

To summarise:
We are very easy to get along with but we want our money
There is absolutely no valid reason why your business can't purchase and resell our products

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