South Korea to force e-commerce marketplaces to pay vendors faster South Korea's government will shrink the period in which e-commerce marketplace platforms must settle up – from 60 days to 40 – to ensure that small sellers aren't caught in a cash crunch. The nation's finance ministry announced the change on Wednesday, along with a requirement for platforms to manage funds from incoming …
The worst I have seen (not in IT) is something like "75 days from end of month, 2.5% discount"
So that's you getting paid two and half months after the end of the month you invoiced them. 'End of the month'- so if they order a box of your product (which will be delivered within a couple of days) on the 2nd of the month and you invoice them at the same time, then they will pay you about 100 days after they've had the goods (and possibly two months after they've sold them to the consumer)
And if they pay you before that long distant 75 days, then they are going not pay you 2.5% of the invoice because they paid you in a slightly less than ridiculous length of time after getting your product which they may have already sold and gotten paid for.
Supermarkets in Britain were paying some suppliers twice a year. Until the practise got banned, 20 years ago. So farmers might have some invoices paid after 7 months. And that’s before accounts departments making spurious queries to push invoices into the next payment run. You’d hope that last didn’t happen, but I’ve done credit control in a past life, so I’m either deeply cynical - or as I’d put it… a realist.
Many years ago we were told by a senior manager at Tesco that they had a list of several different ways to delay an invoice payment.
GEC were the same at one point - small suppliers were rarely paid at all. My then boss had a simple solution, he skipped going to court and merely sent them a registered letter stating that their inability to pay the invoice must mean they were insolvent and he'd be advertising and petitioning for a winding up order within 48 hours - a motorcycle courier arrived with a cheque the next day and we never had too any problems with them again! Of course they could have defended the whole thing anyway but it would have cost them a lot of money to provide the necessary evidence.
The place I used to work changed to paying within 90 days of receiving the invoice. Typically they'd issue the payment on about day 80. For some reason, a lot of our suppliers either started refusing our POs or started charging a whole lot more.
Recently had a parts order cancelled with Rooms To Go, after they only ordered the parts from their vendor 60 days after taking payment from me, then discovered 60 days later that the vendor hadn't ordered any from the manufacturer, so it would be another 90 days (so 7 months total). They claimed the refund could "take up to 21 business days to process and 1-2 billing cycles to show on the corresponding statement". For a PayPal payment. No, I'm not waiting 3 months to get my refund for the parts you failed to get shipped to me over the last 4 months!
So WHY are Qoo10 not paying? Bankruptcy? Someone's taken the money and run? And is the Korean Government going after Qoo100? They're bailing out the businesses with short term loans, but that sort of assumes, that the payments are going to restart ASAP. Which isn't the impression I get from the article...
Of course there's something going on...
TMON, WeMakePrice, Qoo10 executives charged with fraud and embezzlement
https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2024/08/02/ND67BFS445FVDFJEZHQBYFQLTM/
TMON, WeMakePrice file for court receivership amid liquidity troubles
https://www.kedglobal.com/e-commerce/newsView/ked202407290012
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