Very few retail businesses work in this way anymore with unknown consumers, especially with online orders. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If you run a business, would you ship items out to a customer without payment first? This means you have sent out a package with no guarantee of payment. The customer gets the product you sent out on faith then you go to charge the credit card and the payment gets rejected and your product is in the consumer's hands. This makes no business sense and you'd be filing for bankruptcy real fast.
Corporate accounts are different since you have an account team able to verify information and often have the consumer sign contractual terms of payment so in the case of nonpayment, you have fast and easy legal recourse. Still, you are taking a risk, but one with much lower % of a problem and usually higher returns of profit per individual consumer.[/quote]
He's right though. From a legal and accounting standpoint, there's a reason you state terms like FOB shipping point and FOB destination. That's when legal ownership is recorded on the books and when you should be charged. In the business world, even 1 day is a long time since most businesses run cash sweeps to money markets to make fractions on the dollar. But it adds up and if a vendor was consistently charging you prematurely, that could be a problem.
I think its probably just NE downgrading their level of service with UPS. I've also recently noticed their tracking detail is DHL-like lately and showing "Shipped with tracking number" but actually sitting at "Origin Scan" overnight or over a weekend. Probably a disconnect between their billing and shipping system or the introduction of a holding area for "origin scan" shipments that trigger billing without actually being delivered to the carrier.