Why dont you have your customers on automatic payment plans? I find most if not all of my customers on on automatic payment systems via PAYPAL and other services. Manual payment processing is too dodgy or risky if you are doing business online. I find when my customers fail a payment, and do not make it in a 7 day grace period we eliminate their account, If i were you, and they have no paid, I would suspend any of the work that you have done for them and take it off of the internet, in effect, payment for services were not rendered, so you are in a position to take all of their content offline, that is usually inspiration for them to pay. Otherwise, I would send them a letter through registered mail with an invoice, if they do not pay it, its not a customer worth having. If a customer is too much work or does not pay their bills, move onto greener pastures, it is not worth stressing over or going out of your way to get the payment if they are a deadbeat client.

You said yourself that he refuses to pay, therefore, guess what? You're not going to get paid no matter what letter you send him. I would take the client to small claims court and see if that doesn't move him to pay.

Thanks for jumping in, GoodFTA and OCBookkeeper. Does anyone else have suggestions for dealing with clients who are slow to pay, or refuse to pay at all? Message Edited by NicoleD on 10-13-2009 12:27 PM

Honestly, if he is not paying for the work, take of the work down that you did, if you posted things online take it down, if you dont get paid, he does not get product, it sounds like your business is doing well, and this is a rare occurance, I would probibly jusr write it off, unless he owes you more then 5k I have found in business if you do allot of it, you will always have customers paying, not paying, filing disputes etc, its the circle of life, its best to just grow from these experiences, try and indentify trends in the people who do not pay, or do other shady things and then try your best to spot these trends going forward.

To be precise, you have to be rude and thats all. It happens to me all the time. What i do is to send just half of the work and then ask them to send the money and unless i got the money, i never handover the rest of the work. This is as simple as that. regard shimul seo company

Small claims court can do wonders. I once took an individual to court who had left the country without paying my bill. Of course I won a judgement because he failed to show up. One day I got a frantic call from an escrow company because Mr. Deadbeat was trying to close escrow in the sale of his house here in CA. The title company was insisting that he pay my judgement before they would issue title insurance for the new buyer. I got a check for the full amount that very day. Dr. Lorrie Klein

Small claims court is your best option. We have had clients in the past who will not pay once some work is done even though most of our clients now pay upfront. You would be surprised how many people pay once they receive a letter to their home from a law firm. I would consult with a lawyer because anything you do can be used agaisnt you in court such as taking down the work done as someone else was saying. If you take the work down then the judge might not grant you any of the money as you would have taken down all of the work. I am not a lawyer though so best thing to do is find someone who is in any business situation dealing with more than a couple thousand.

Nice story Skin-care, I had same kind of situation to, it is nice when they come to you with the money. but not always.Anyways, any online service I provide I try to have a backup plan in case I dont get paid. There is always a way to do that. If the customer is not repeat one then you running a risk. Trust is a broad term when it comes to online services.

Aftermath I want to write a follow up to my original thread-starter. What we decided to do is not take the person to small claims court. The fee was only a small $35. What we decided instead was to write a negative review of the company. We informed them that we would do so and gave them several days to make good. They ignored us. So, we wrote the negative review. How This Tactic Can Backfire on You My COO warned me this might backfire, and I went into with full knowledge that the company could retaliate in kind. And, that's what they did; they responded with a negative review of their own: 'One of Our Staff contracted this Company for a Wikipedia Article, on the first date of discussion through chat, the company ask questions that will help them decide if they can write the wikipedia article. they did not write the article, but now they want an upfront payment tagged as Consultation Fee of $35. they charge only to discuss if they can write your article. the company do not want to pay this type of internet con. anyway, the staff that made the commitment has accepted to pay them $35 on his personal account. BEWARE of this company about upfront payment without service. your mere enquiry is a consultation and so must be charged, once you chat with anyone through Yahoo messenger. They go writing review about our company Paymenex for none payment of $35 bill. The Bill is not legitmate and so the company cannot pay.' Reputation Management Since I like to turn lemons into lemonade, I thought I'd help enrich the Business.Gov community on principles of online reputation management. as you know, in today's Internet-ocracy, one negative review can severely cripple a business. There are many stories out there of businesses being put out of business due to enough negative reviews. And we know from Internet searchers habits that more and more people are reading reviews of your company, before purchasing anything online. So, I wrote a rebuttal: 'I want to respond to the negative reviewer from Paymenex. The customer is always right (even when they're wrong :) We clearly explained to this customer, in more than one document, that there was a consultation fee charged, regardless of whether the article could be published. We tried on numerous occasions to collect this debt; the customer ignored our requests. When they finally DID respond, the reason they gave for non-payment WAS NOT that they felt the bill was illegitimate, but that they 'couldn't pay via PayPal' without a PayPal account. So, we set up an entiredly new payment gatemway on PayPal, and resent the invoice. They confirmed receipt and informed us they would get payment to us soon. (This was weeks ago to date). No payment was made. We have used PayPal as our payment system since the beginning. And I know for a fact that one DOES NOT NEED A PAYPAL ACCOUNT in order to make a PayPal invoice payment. So now we felt cheated, ignored and overlooked. So, we wrote a negative review of Paymenex. We informed Paymenex that we would write a negative review of the business, if they didn't make good on the debt. We informed them of this several DAYS PRIOR TO WRITING THE REVIEW, to give them time to make good. Still no payment was made. So, we proceeded to write a negative review. They retaliated by posting the negative review of our business you see below this one. Nevertheless, in the interests of fairness, we are changing the Initial Consultation policy. Effective today: If we determine that the article cannot be included into Wikipeda, we will not charge a consultation fee. If we decide to take on the writing project, we will add the consultation fee into the total project fee. Eric Bryant, Director, Gnosis Arts Multimedia' Then, I had my PR Manager go in and write a follow up rebuttal: 'I would offer a rebuttal to that, as I do know that the fee for ascertaining whether or not a Wikipedia article can be done is a valid one. Wikipedia does not have an editorial board per se, but their Administrative committee acts as one stringently. In order to assess whether a client's Wikipedia post will be negatively viewed and flagged, or received well, thus staying up (which is the goal) there must be a thorough search of reliable secondary sources, a client intake to understand the biographical material , and an overview of the business. A fee of $35.00 in the Greater Metro New York area is actually quite low. None of us likes to be told that as yet, we must do more work to be posted on a certain venue, but in a realistic business sense, this can hardly be called a 'scam', except by the wildest stretch of the imagination. Best wishes.' In Summary Reputation Management Online is very very important in today's e-commerce driven economy. It pays to pay attention to it. There are some pretty neat monitoring tools out there now that will scour the Web for mentions of your business name or brand and see what others are saying about you on Twitter, blogs, forums, etc. Here are a couple we use: 1. SocialMention[dot]Com 2. Spy - appspot[dot]spy[dot].com These web apps can help you find out what people are saying about your business so you can respond accordingly. And don't forget about Twitter Search (search[dot]twitter[dot]com; people may be talking about your business right now, but you won't know unless you look.