Please read our conditions for purchase on account

For the purpose of checking your creditworthiness, the following service provider transmits to us

Allgemeiner Debitoren- und Inkassodienst GmbH, Eduard-Pestel-Str. 7, 49080 Osnabrück, Germany

on our behalf with

CRIF Bürgel GmbH, Radlkoferstraße 2, 81373 Munich, Germany

the address and creditworthiness data stored about you, including data determined on the basis of mathematical-statistical procedures, insofar as we have credibly demonstrated our justified interest. In order to decide on the establishment, implementation or termination of the contractual relationship, we collect or use probability values, the calculation of which includes address data.

Up to here the legally required text, which everyone who wants to buy "on account" must agree to.
The following explanations are no longer part of this, please only read them if you are interested, otherwise you can ignore them.

A word of explanation

Service providers such as Schufa collect general data on creditworthiness. From this they calculate the trustworthiness of a buyer. This is expressed in school grades from 1 - 6.

This is how Schufa grades are determined

Paradoxically, Schufa & Co rate someone who has had a loan before and paid it off on time better than someone who has never had debts!
The reason is the database of these companies: When someone takes out a loan, the bank reports this to Schufa. It also registers whether the borrower pays his instalments on time or not.
People who have never had a loan are unknown to Schufa & Co. They can only make assumptions about the reliability, e.g. the neighbourhood of the customer.
Here is the scoring structure:

Grade 1-2: Once taken out a loan and paid it off on time.
Grade 2-3: No negative entries, but also no positive entries or possibly no personal data other than the address.
Grade 4: Once failed to pay a bill to the telecom or electricity provider for months and only reacted after several reminders.
Grade 5: I've ever had to deal with a debt collection procedure in my life.
Grade 6: Have had 2 or more debt collection proceedings. At this point at the latest, you can forget all planned telephone, rental or credit contracts.

Service providers like Schufa are generally unpopular. They are also often accused of making unfair judgements. For example, a student who has never paid a bill late, but is still a student and lives in Berlin Neukölln, can quickly receive a completely unjustified credit rating of 2.9.
The grades 1.0-2.9 are assigned by "general experience", i.e. age, place of residence, profession, etc..
But to get a credit rating of 3.0, something must have happened. And if the credit rating is 5 or higher, there has certainly already been a debt collection procedure.

Of course, we don't like the pigeonholing of people by computer algorithms either.
Unfortunately, we also had to make the experience that their judgement is correct in 90 % of the cases.
Customers with a credit rating of 5 or 6 have generally not paid, in other words, they have cheated us. Interestingly, credit ratings 3-4 are rather rare.
Even customers with a credit rating of 2.6 - 2.9 pay their bills conspicuously late in 80% of cases, or only after several labour-intensive and costly reminders. For this reason, we usually refuse to pay invoices to customers with a credit rating above 2.5 and refer them to our numerous other payment methods, such as payment in advance.

But we don't want to pigeonhole all our customers. And we also have customers who have an unjustified bad credit rating. As an example, we would like to mention someone (not a real customer) who was fired from his job due to chronic illness, who had problems at the beginning of his unemployment because he couldn't pay his electricity bill, but who now has everything under control again and pays every bill reliably and punctually from his disability pension. If he orders his calcium or vitamin D from us, which he needs because of his illness, this can of course be done on account, even if he has a bad credit rating. Of course, only if we know the person well as a regular customer and know that this is possible.

Normally, the decision as to whether a customer is trustworthy or not is made by software with a plug-in in the online shop. This determines in a fraction of a second what the creditworthiness of the buyer is, for which it makes a quick query at Schufa, Bürgel or similar, for which we as shop operators pay around 1 euro.
If the result is positive, the buyer doesn't notice anything, if it's negative, he gets a message with the hypocritical explanation: "For technical reasons, this payment method is not possible, please choose another one".
But then all the other customers who we really don't want to get kicked out are also kicked out. For example, regular customers who we know are reliable, even with a bad credit rating.

That's why we don't proceed the way 90% of all shops do, but decide the question "payment on account or not" only after the order has been placed.
This means that when the order arrives, we "press the button" ourselves and request the data from Bürgel via ADU. With a credit rating of up to 2.5, the order continues on its way. With a credit rating of 2.6-2.9, we decide ourselves, based on further indications, Google quick queries and gut instinct, whether to ship on account or ask the customer to use one of our numerous other payment methods.
You can significantly increase your chances of being approved if you provide your date of birth and telephone number when placing your order.
Credit ratings of 3 or more are immediately thrown out, even with manual work, apart from the exceptions mentioned above.

Because of the known dangers for traders, invoice purchases are automatically excluded in the following circumstances: If the delivery address differs from the invoice address and if the credit rating cannot be determined or the buyer's name does not match the address.

All our payment methods are managed by the payment service provider Mollie, except invoice payments. We would like to leave that in our hands.
We also don't want customers who pay an invoice 2 weeks late, for example because they are ill or just plain scatterbrained, to have a debt collection agency on their back straight away. This is what would happen if an external service provider took over the processing of the bill payment.
We like to define our relationship with our customers ourselves and not leave it to a computer or an anonymous company. And we have already had the case where a customer contacts us after the third reminder and states that he was demonstrably incapacitated in hospital for several weeks.

However, our great concern for good and understanding dealings with customers who have payment problems should not be confused with weakness.
If, after several reminders or unanswered emails, it becomes obvious that we are being defrauded, we take rigorous action against it, then also with the help of debt collection agencies. We generally do not write off invoices because of their low value and bureaucratic effort; every attempt at fraud is pursued on principle alone, so such a thing should not be expected.