3:- ignore until customer starts to make too much fuss
Yes. Having spent nearly a year watching this clown's shenanigans, and going through the mill myself, it appears that response comes promptly when the customer posts their experience of being shafted,
publicly. Then, within moments (in a fair number of cases), the sleeping beast awakes and responds.
You can have made all manner of fuss to his deaf ears until that point but miraculously, the moment your complaint is public, he's fawning and dribbling and making all manner of pathetic and incredible excuses, blaming everyone and everything else and spouting "poor me".
5:- hope to get away with it again
And he will. Over and over and over again.
It can only last for so long
As long as dissatisfied customers shut up and feel grateful at finally being responded to after being taken for mugs, it will continue ad-infinitum.
The way to stop it is not to feel as if he's doing us a favour when he finally covers his own backside and actually deems it necessary to deliver what he is dishonestly advertising as being in stock and fobbing us off with vouchers (as a "good-will gesture") to spend with him at a later date.
This isn't a favour. This isn't good customer service. This is damage limitation and an attempt to currie favour and elicit further business.
Don't fall for it. You have been treated inexcusably and when you finally get the goods for which you have paid some time ago and have had to fight to receive, don't be conned into thinking that he as actually done you a favour. He hasn't even managed to meet his contractual obligation.
Advertise goods - take payment - provide goods within a reasonable period of time. It's not brain surgery.
Pretend to be a respectable stockist and advertise goods that you don't actually stock. Pass on the order to the genuine retailer and take a cut for doing nothing much. Ignore all contact in the hope that the goods will eventually arrive. That's neither honest nor ethical business and as long as we allow him to get away with it, he will. The pattern will continue and you will not be the last to post here nor have his review removed from TrustPilot (go see for yourself).
Paul..