Payment method and the leverage it gives you, ranked

Where I part company with post #13, and it is a narrow parting.

Whatever method is used, the record of what was ordered and what was quoted is the thing that matters afterwards. Screenshots of a cart are not a record.

The strongest argument against my own position on payment method, stated as well as I can state it, since nobody else has yet.

Adding a null result on payment method. I looked, carefully, and found nothing, and null results deserve posting precisely because they never are.

Adding the measurement that post #17 says would settle it.

Where a supplier issues a quote with an expiry, honouring it after the expiry is a courtesy rather than an entitlement, and several here have found it granted.

That is the honest state of it as of this week.

Payment method sits at the boundary between what this community can usefully discuss and what it cannot, and I think it falls on the discussable side, narrowly.

Bank transfer and finality: once a bank transfer is sent, it is final. The money is gone. There is no recourse with the bank if the supplier disappears. That is why supplier reputation matters if using transfers.

The answer changed when I changed how I was measuring, which was informative.

Marking my uncertainty on payment method explicitly. I am confident about the direction, much less confident about the size, and not confident at all that it generalises past the case in the first post.

If someone has run payment method properly I would rather read that than my own reconstruction of it. Posting mine only because the thread has gone quiet.

Picking up post #22: that is the part I would want checked first.

Recording the time from payment to dispatch is worth doing, because it is the part of the process most within the supplier's control.

On post #20 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.

A methods point on payment method rather than a substantive one: if the comparison is not like for like, the difference you are measuring is the difference in method.

Reading back through the payment method threads from last year, the same three questions come up every time and only one of them has ever been answered properly. That seems like a documentation gap rather than a knowledge gap.

Agreed, and I will stop repeating the version of this I had been repeating.

Adding the measurement that post #25 says would settle it.

Chargeback reality: if you pay by credit card and the supplier does not deliver, you can attempt a chargeback. Suppliers know this and many require non-chargeable payment (transfer, crypto) as protection against it.

Payment mechanics: most suppliers accept bank transfer, crypto, and some accept credit cards. Each has different risk and different fees. Understand before you commit to a payment method.

I read post #29 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.

Cryptocurrency for payment: offers less fraud protection than credit cards and is final like bank transfer. Advantage: no geographic restrictions and no intermediary can reverse it. Disadvantage: if you send to a wrong address, it is lost.

I checked the source rather than the summary, and they differ.