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up vote 2 down vote favorite

So here's the situation... looking for advice:

  • 2 years ago, I signed up as a reseller for a hosted service and sold it to a customer
  • A couple months ago, service started having problems, confirmed issue w/ vendor's system, contacted vendor support
  • Vendor support unable to resolve problem, finally said "don't know what it is, nothing we can do" on support call
  • Customer calling/screaming every day until we finally lost the account

I requested to cancel the account with the vendor, and they were quick to point out that we have an Early Termination Charge that's pretty close to the full value of the remaining 3-yr contract.

I of course, replied questioning the ETF given the situation, and received no reply. Today we had an automated draft of the ETF charge, so I, uh, assume it's now canceled.

Now it seems I have an unresponsive vendor, and what I interpret to be a very unfair charge. Bank says there's nothing they can do about it and that the vendor would have to refund the charge.

Do I have any options here?

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How was your payment set up with this vendor? If it's on a credit card, you can do a chargeback and dispute it with the card company. If they had direct access to EFT from your bank account, you're probably looking at a legal battle to pursue it (i.e. time to get a lawyer). – Carson McComas May 6 '11 at 14:16
I believe it's set up EFT, in "pending" state today. – routeNpingme May 6 '11 at 14:18

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

You can sue them for the amount of lost business they cost you if you think there is a good argument that their poor service cost the client. Other than that just walk away - not worth the time.

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up vote 0 down vote

How much were you charged? How much time and money is it going to cost to get it back? Sometimes it's better just to write these things off even if they were unfair in principle.

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