Hey
Recently I have been getting more and more people signing up for accounts, but never making the actual payment.
When i contact them, I don't get a response.
They provide full details with name, address, phone no. and everything else required, but when it comes to setting up the payment, no money is sent and they don't reply when asked if they need any help.
Has anyone else seen an increase in this? Anyone have any suggestions as to what is happening and why it is happening?

It is time consuming to try find out if there are any problems, plus I normally try contact them twice before I delete the order, and I wait roughly 1 week between each contact (A lot of people only check email once a week or even more so I give them as much time as I can).

John,

I've also seen a trend in these types of ghost orders. Although, I do not offer this type of incentive, I beleive this is attributed to many hosts offering immediate/instant setup or free trial periods. They use your resources and then take off before the trial expires, never hearing from them again. I actually had a friend who had about 2-3 of these in the last month. Maybe their testing the waters a bit to see if you bite??? I guess.. maybe I'm just rambling here...

All my accounts are setup manually and it is on the site so don't think anyone would go through the trouble of filling in the order form just in case it was auto.

I used to get maybe one every few months, but now I am getting them a lot more often.
At first I was wondering if my emails wasn't sending to the people but it wasn't that, gave it a test myself to check.

Happened to Scribehost this past spring. Eventually they...changed. They went from using false / ghost signup info and not making a payment to making payments with stolen credit cards.

Equally aggravating.

If people don't pay and don't contact you, just don't sign them up. Put a notice on your signup page stating that orders placed without payment being made - or alternate payment arrangements being arranged in advance (if you accept cashier's-check or other offline payment forms) will be deleted from the system.

And DEFINITELY don't offer instant setup / account creation.

John, my friend (and myself for that matter) also have similar postings in the signup that there is no instant activation but they still try nonetheless..

Lesli, I've had a few fraudulent orders the last two months from Vietnam and Korea.. Hate it! Just a waste of my time!!

I have had a few fraud orders, but luckily I haven't had too much trouble with that.
Lost roughly $50 from fraud orders but that isn't too much, still would rather it didn't happen. 2CheckOut should have actually caught it instead of giving me the green light on the orders.

There seems to be quite a few fraud orders from that part of the world Alex, mine weren't from there though.

lesli, I would rather it stays iwth them not making payment than using stolen credit cards so maybe I shouldn't complain

I get the same thing. Not as often as I used to, but still I get a few. Manual is the way to go, since I like to verify all my orders by hand.

If you make it more prominent on your site that you don't setup accounts automatically, for example on the order page, then it could stop some of the signups that don't pay.

Of course there could be another reason for the signups that don't pay that hasn't been mentioned yet.