I have a customer that signed about a month ago, he asked me if he could pay with check and I said .. Ok

Well, almost every day he sends me a message with all kinds of problems, he can't access his site, other times he types his domain but he gets a different site, mail doesn't work .. etc etc ..

Every time I check on his account and all is well .. meanwhile I haven't seen a dime from him, and starting to believe that he's doing this to get free hosting for a while (why would you whant to do all this for 9 bucks ??)

what do I do, kick him out ? and take the chance he goes out and gives a bad review, or just hold one there ? .. I don't care about the monthly fee, I just care having to reply to e-mails almost every day apologising for problems I don't see happening .. :(

being a "customer" and not a "provider" i say this: tell him until you receive payment, you can't help him and that he is in jepordy of losing his account. you have been more then polite in waiting for more then a month for a check! blar even!

I agree with Annette. Since he hasn't paid you a dime you shouldn't worry about cancelling his account. Just inform him that he would be better off changing to another hosts since he is experiencing so many technical difficulties (that you cannot reproduce).

I do not open accounts for clients until I receive payment. And, my policy is that clients must pay for 3 months at a time and to continue to have their account they must pay the next 3 month installement before the current 3 months is up (usually 2 weeks prior). If the client cannot get payment to me in a timely manner then it says a lot about the kind of headaches I'm going to encounter with this client. It may sound strict, but it discourages deadbeat customers which are more work then they are worth.

It's not fair that other clients suffer because one client is monopolizing tech support.

[Edited by tabernack on 10-22-2000 at 09:13 PM]

We do the same thing as tabernack does.

Simply do not setup accounts until you receive the payment. :)

Hmmm Interesting,

I think I'll take off the auto setup for "paid by check" option for my company too :)

Thanks for the insight.

Exactly. I let my customers pay by check. On the order form, if they pay by check, I have clear rules that it MUST be prepaid for a year and will not be set up until payment has been received.

Cleard is another matter, but if it does bounce, then so does the customer. I would rather have a bad check presented then a good client and no funds. At least if he presents a bad check, I have legal recourses. - I really hate getting into that, but since I make them prepay for a year, it is not just a check for 8 bucks.

Oh well, just another day in the life....

Boy this gets touchy. Well, I'd agree with everyone else, although you have to back out of this one gracefully. You'd think he'd leave on his own if there were so many "problems", you know?

Tell him the owner of the company made a new policy and that effective 11/2000, all accounts must be pre-paid for one year if payment is by check. That gives him one week to get a payment to you, and hopefully he'll just move on. Or you could eat this for two weeks (11/07/2000). Would that be graceful enough?

Thank you all for your help, I just got another message from the guy, he now wants another account, I'm done with politeness, I'm just cancelling the damm account and tell him to take a hike.

Afcorse I will enforce our 30 day money back garantee and retun him the 0.00 dollars he paid to setup the account ;-)

PS - I've been so busy I didn't even realize that .. I am a GURU now .. kool

Congrats on the Guru status! :)

thanks .. 75 more to goodhood :) (with posts as short as this one it won't be long) .. hehe ;)

more like 375 to go when the new rule sets in.

Or even more.... Matt's thrashing out some final details before it goes live in the next few days.

Enjoy them while you can *evil grin*

hey !!! come on ... :( ok .. few days hum ?? very well, I need 70+ posts before that happens ;-)

Ohhh... Only 63 :)

62 right now !!!, I never wrote so many posts in my live ... Ok, who else needs an opinion on a website ???? I have a ton of comments to make .. 1 post at a time ;)

Darn, I'm too generous!

To cut the very long story short:

You moaning about $9? How about $2.50?

Over 80% of our clients don't pay and we still serve them.
Can't blame them seeing that we don't send out payment requests.

well thats dumb whats your website addie ill sign up.

Maybe I should of kept my mouth shut!

Yeah, Maybe you should.

But what is your addie?.

and how do u make money if u let so many off without paying?.

don't you think it's about time you sent out invoices if only via email?.

You'll notice that the order form says "credit card payments only"

When a client submits the order form, they get redirected to a credit card payment screen. This is were they usually stop and don't realize that we have already received their order and will process it asap.

We will slowly but surely, next week, start sending out invoices via email for transactions dating back from June 2000.

In future, we will send out invoices the same week and allow 30 days for payment.

How do we make our money? To cut the answer down from 101 to 1: Web hosting is a very profitable business.

Before I give you the addie:

The page design sucks but is been re-designed. We got someone to re-do it, but are still waiting for final templates (since August, I think).

The addie? Check signature line.

Okay, I first want to get back to the first post of this thread.

There is one thing I can't tolerate:

Often you'll find people that pay by credit card and threaten to dispute their credit card tranaction if your servers go down and also charge you if the hard drive crashes.

Don't take crap! Refund them everything (even if they've been with you for half a year and paid for a year), turn off their domain immediately, (and if you are feeling generous) send them an email and tell them that their domain will be deleted within 12 hours. Astonished lost farts!

Reason for doing this: to avoid chargebacks.

Originally posted by Dylan
The addie? Check signature line.

Erm... What signature? :rolleyes:

Hehe .. I'm not maning about 9 bucks .. I could care less .. it's the stupid requests for Customer Assistance that bother me ;-)

Originally posted by Mage
Erm... What signature? :rolleyes:

Dylan, on your next post *before* you hit submit, check the box 'Show Signature' at the bottom (directly above 'Preview Reply'). You'll only have to do this once.

Oh sorry!

I was referring to the snippit below the post.

profile, mail, www and so on...

Ummm, ok http://www.hostyard.com ???? Nothing there, page can not be displayed? Server down?!?!?!

Yeah Dylan, there's some problem there.

Thanx, Apache problem fixed.

Still no sig, maybe he cant afford one :)

Sig? Let's see.

Must be a bug.