I have created a website for a title company here localy in my city. They are an established business for couple years and i have met up with them in their office to discuss the project. I have finished it and delivered the website to them. It has been hosted on my server and live for 2 months and i'm still waiting payment. I have talked to them several times and they keep saying they are going to pay but still have not paid. I finally decided to take down the website since i'm hosting it. After i did that they called me and said they are going to pay the next day. I have not heard from them ever since. They will not answer phone calls or emails. I can drive to their office i guess but what can i do to make them pay? They owe me $1000 for the website. It is 100% complete and delivered on time. We are both in United States, same city, couple miles away. How can i scare them to collect my money? Take them to court? but if i do that it will probably cost more to do that than the whole website. What should i do?
Keep the site down until they pay you. If they don't pay after a while, put up back up with a new site and funnel any traffic there we getting to affiliate programs Either that or turn it into a porn site, that might get their attention. If they haven't paid by now, they aren't going to. You can take them to small claims if you have anything to backup your claim (even emails will work), but it's probably not worth the trouble.
put a site on saying you don't get paided I guess they will hurry to pay you because of bad publicity
Just give them some bad publicity (as stated above) this way they'll feel more pressured into paying since they don't want any bad PR if they're a reputable company. Do they rely on a web presence, and are they promoting their website at all yet?
Yes they have been promoting their site. I mailed them a letter today with an invoice and told them i will take legal actions next if they dont pay. I dont have any contracts but i do have about 30 plus email conversations about the website development and also about how they were going to pay me.
Warned them 3x and if they still ignore all your messages, emails and invoices then that's the time to take the right action.
You need to be really careful with your actions here. if my experiance in 3rd party collections tells me anything your first course of action is to take them to small claims court for the amount and get a judgement against them, take what evidence you have, if its up and running take screenshots of the functional site, take any drafts you have made, individual files, the email coversation etc and be prepared to defend your situation incase they show up to dispute it. Chances are they wont show and after a quick review the judgement will be in your name. At that point you hit a brick wall, IIRC according to the FDCPA it is against the law as someone who is trying to collect or co-erse a debt to publically display the judgement, or that they owe you any money it can actually lead to a ministry complaint and could actually land you some hefty fines or the absolution of the debt. its 3rd party disclosure as well as slander. At this point you only have a few choices and unfortunetly due to the amount that you are owed your choices are further limited. Due to the high cost of legal action in your country you cant go that route, even doing something as simple as a lien or anything at all would be more then your 1000$ is worth. Your only options are to a) Give up on the money, tell everyone you can word of mouth about it and the situation, and just move on b) collect the money according to the FDCA, call and speak to them daily about the money you are owed, send letters demanding payment, etc c) find a small collections firm and contract it out, they will put it in someones queue and they will do all the work for you, you can expect to lose somewhere from 10-40% of what you are owed, but oneday down the line you might just have a call going 'hey! you get 600$" I am available for PM if you need any other assistance. cheers
google bomb their company name basically theres a few things you can do its called online reputations, make theres very bad and they will pay feel free to name and shame here
I create a contract for all projects that exceed $500.00. Also, the more information you can collect from your client, the better in situations like this. Tell them you have a 90 day same as cash policy, create a form for them to provide there driver license # or SSN in order for them to apply. This will make it easier down the road if your run into a simular problem.
Well, at least you should learn from this and next time require some down payment (at least 50%) before starting any new project. And the balance should be paid after site approval BEFORE the site goes live. No exception, excuses etc. We never have any collection problem because we are very strict in our payment terms and are very ready to turn away customers if they are going to be difficult for payments. We don't work for a charity
Just ignore him if he donot pay Only deal with people having good itraders and take atleast 50% advance Donot deal with many people instead work for small number of people who are honest Regards Alex
why didn't charge them before you delever the code to them? At least, you should charge 30% before you delever them your code.
Make a community portal, fix their website to say that they wouldn't pay, and drive loads of local traffic to it.
Just sent a letter to them and ask for the payment. If they refuse to pay,you threat them to take legal action against them