Furious client does not want to pay

I really have to side with your (ex) customer. You can't expect to be able to put up a message like that on her account without things getting ugly. You are chasing a person for $60? What in the world are you thinking. Just remove her listing (DO NOT put anything derogatory like you did - that is horrendous.)

Just move on. Customers pay up front or they don't get the listing.

Also - you should stand by your product. If customers do not get value from it then offer and give refunds.

You are being absolutely unreasonable and petty. You say you do not care about the money, but your actions clearly indicate you do. Why else would you keep calling and emailing and putting up aggressive messages on her account.

You are being absolutely unprofessional. DO NOT share information about your customers with the public.

You are not going to last long if you keep behaving like that.

Walk away. Let's go. You have already spent way too much time and energy on this.

Having clients that don't pay is part of doing business. From shoplifting at the convenience story to websites that claim they didn't really use your code -- we have all been burned. We walk away, we let go.

We have all had clients who have "done us wrong" It was unfair. it was unjust. It was the terms of the agreement. And what do we do? We walk away. We let go.

We have all struggled with the truth in the phrase "the customer is always right" because in the end they are -- or will be! Your customer was not happy with the service. Who cares why. Who cares what she signed. She wasn;t happy -- and no one wants an unhappy customer. So we walk away and we let go.

We have all had to balance the benefit of collections with the cost to our reputation. Angry customers, clients (or employees) talk. And that talk is expensive. It is far more expensive than $60.00. This is why we walk away, and we let go.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Go for a really long run and get your bad energy out.

2. Take down everything you wrote online on her listing. Send an apology letter to the "ex-client" and forgive her outstanding bill. She was unsatisfied with the product-- refund her money. (Or in this case -- forget that she "owed you" any money.)

3. Focus on providing a quality product and service to the customers who are happy.

Walk away so that you hold your head high --

Whatever you do, never ever publish derogatory information about your customer's financial position or any billing dispute. At least in the U.S., this is an illegal debt collection practice and will likely get you sued.

Simply discontinue the service and walk away from the client. End of story.

@pula, its $60 let it go, you can do more damage to your brand and your product fighting over the $60 than you can salvage by being the bigger person.

Publishing the listing as not paid is a very bad move ... who is going to place advertising with you in the future if they risk that happening to them ... regardless of the back history and who was right or whatever ... if I was an advertiser and saw that, I would look elsewhere as my first reaction.

You need to protect your brand, ideally patch it up with your ex customer so they don't go away and bad mouth you to everyone else. From her point of view you given her a very public black mark and damaged her reputation, she may choose to return in kind.

$60 is even less than the minimum consulting fee with a lawyer.
And now that you indulged in pilloring, you kind of need one.

Lose the customer - she takes up too much of your time and will continue to be a hassle for years to come. You've spent much more than the $60 she pays you.

On the other hand, it wasn't the best move to cite financial reasons for not displaying the profile any longer. As others have said, this is quite damaging to your customer, and - perhaps more worrying - could scare away future customers from your site.

What I was wondering though... Why don't you have customers pay in advance, via credit-card? This would take away a lot of the billing and payment collection hassles...

Take the comment down as soon as you can. Do not ever post derogatory status or comments about any of your clients on your website. You are scaring away much more revenue than you could possibly collect from this one account. Potential new clients seeing this on your website will be afraid of the same thing happening to them if there is any dispute.

$60 isn't worth the time to write the post you just put here. Walk away.

One thing that I would advise is to either get a signed agreement/contract detailing payment methods, refund policies, discontinuation of service etc BEFORE publishing any listings. The only other option is to move to a prepay model (or at least offer it as a model).

As many people have said, $60 isn't much in the scheme of things. The unfortunate reality is that you will always have people who refuse to pay, but the important part is to learn from it, adapt the system to remove the loop holes, and move on.

One important thing to note, is that from a marketing point of view you may not only have caused damage to the ex-clients reputation, but also your own. Whether it be by people not wanting to deal with a company who airs their dirty laundry in public or by your ex-client talking about you to other potential clients advising them what you have done.

We tell her the listing will be taken offline and a message will be put online that she has not paid. A few days ago we actually did this.

I'm pretty sure the answer is to start a blog so we can follow along as you implement one inconceivably horrible idea after another. I would gladly pay you a $5 a month to follow this train-wreck off the cliff. (virtually)

I am not siding the customer. But as a professional ethics, whatever you are doing is totally wrong.

Every businessman always sets a margin percentage for this type of customers.We always have 1-2% of non-paying customers in my business.

Infact I will copy-paste the two business formualas from one of the posts above by Joseph Barisonzi :

1) Take down everything you wrote online on her listing. Send an apology letter to the "ex-client" and forgive her outstanding bill. She was unsatisfied with the product-- refund her money. * Yes... I say REFUND HER previous payments.....For a minute imagine yourself in a situation where somebody refunds you the money you really don't owe. *

2) Focus on providing a quality product and service to the customers who are happy. Putting a message like that on the company page will harm your existing and potential customers.

3) Just place a simple message as " Page not available" and as a courtesy to your ex-customer place a link to redirect the user to the ex-customer's website.

4) Get the feedback from all your customers atleast once a year. It will really improve your business. The customer will also have a feeling of being cared for ( rather than felt like a money vending machine)

And more practical and beneficial advice-

As per US law, she can sue you for ruining her business even if she has not paid you for 3 months. If she loses a $ 1 million customer because of your message, you will have to pay for her $ 1 million as well as the legal expenses.

Business should be done with a business mind, NOT with the gut feelings.

Firstly, you should have removed the listing the day it expired and she did not renew it (unless you enact a grace period policy). Secondly, it seems out of line to put a reason as to why the listing was not renewed. It's irrelevant. If you really did say "the business is having financial problems", that can be easily interpreted as slander since you're not really sure if that is true or not and it does not reflect well on her business. For all you know, she's just trying to get a free listing and you're letting her.

I agree with a lot of the previous posts with two extra points.

While what you said might not constitute a problem, it does open you up to potential legal ramifications.

Perhaps it is time to look over your sales/billing/collections procedure. I'm not saying it would have fixed this situation, but it could have helped identify the situation before it got out of control.

There's really no reason to sweat the little stuff. Let it go, fire the client, learn from the experience and move on to greener pastures.

I think you're both in the wrong here, and both of you could have handled things better.

First of all, there was no reason for the client to not give you an answer one ay or another when you asked about continuing the service. Nor should she have just ignored your calls. However, the simple solution to that would be for you to have taken it as a "no" and suspended her account until otherwise informed. It sounds like she may have felt pressured into agreeing to more time and that's why she finally told you yes, continue the service.

As others have already stated, making your billing issues with the client public is unprofessional and potentially even illegal. She has full rights to be furious with you over that. The better route would have been to simply take the profile offline as if it never existed in the first place. You also should have done this as soon as her year was up, unless (or until) you received payment from her. Send out expiration notices a month or two before asking for renewal if they don't wan their service interrupted.

That said, you are right (at least in the US) that verbal contracts are contracts, but really, for CYA reasons, you should get them all in writing. That way, there's no dispute (because there's always three sides to a story - Side A, Side B, and the truth). Also, in the future, find an automated collection agency like what NetTecture described, and write it into your contract that any money owed after a certain deadline will be sent to collections (this really shouldn't happen if you require payment before service is rendered, but if you still do it the other way around, this is highly recommended). For those that say $60 is too small an amount to deal with collections, it's still your income, and if more people do that, it adds up quickly. A lot of companies will send you to collections for less, especially if it's the "tack fees on top" model. You need to have the bite to back up your bark, or your pestering them for your money can be easily ignored until you give up. Now, for this particular incident, especially since you screwed up, too, drop the issue, but plan for clients like her in the future.

I also recommend reading 4 Hour Workweek, or at least his section on the 80/20 rule. Basically, she's the type of customer who you will likely spend 80% of your time and will only bring you 20% of your income. If a client starts piddlefarting around with payment, send them their reminders, send them to collections if they're past due, then wash your hands of them. Spend your time on the customers that make you money, instead of the ones that are costing you money.

In the future, collect the $60 up front. You can give them a 15 day grace period, after that, you pull their ad.

I don't know what kind of grief you can get into by posting she is delinquent, but it will probably cost you MORE money to get out of that grief.

I'd just take off the company's listing, and let them know if they want it re-instated that there would be at least a 3 month deposit required. The customer is not always right, and there are bad customers that you don't want (i.e. those that cause you to spend all this time on working with them for $60/year.)

I was late on my water bill a few years ago, and they finally shut it off after a couple months. I was pissed in that cold shower morning, but in hindsight, I understand. They then required me to also pay a deposit on future use, in case the problem happened again. Again I was pissed, but in hindsight, again makes sense.

Forget about the principle of the matter, and just handle it in a way that you don't get screwed twice. That's what I've learned the water company was doing. Give the person leeway in times of trouble, let them catchup, but if it starts to cause you problems... then begin to require up-front payments in advance of service.

If all else fails, you can write it off as a bad/uncollectable debt, and that offsets income, right? What is it costing you to put their listing out there? It's not actually costing you anything is it? The collections aspect is costing you more than providing the service probably. Write them off as a bad debt, and you don't have to pay taxes on it, and it actually reduces what you owe because you then don't have to pay taxes on a paying customer because of the offset.

Their not paying you can offset those that are. Don't think 'principle'. Think 'they're not paying me, how can I keep that from happening again, and can I offset that loss in other ways.' Minimize the damage, and rather than focus on this, focus on finding two customers to replace them.

An elephant in the room is probably 'turn the bad customer into a good one that will promote you to others.' If you can do that, great. This isn't sounding like a customer that will do that, though.

Greg

$60... we're talking about $60... I am curious how much effort/time has been put into this pursuit of $60 (that is so small that many wouldn't even think it worthy of typing the digits on the tax form to declare a capital loss).

$600...worth a couple hours. $6000 worth a couple hours lawyer's time... small claims

Being Right or Being Happy... be happy.

I'm not a lawyer so I do not intend this to be used as legal advice but despite the issue with the client, posting the message you did on their page is not just over the top ethically, but it possibly opens you to a liability for damages due to libel.

I actually had a similar situation a couple years ago where over maybe six months I was footing a $40/month hosting bill for a client server because they were defaulting on the bill and had yet to give me the content (long story).

Anyway, when I was gearing up for a legal battle with the client, it turns out that with contract law in New York State (that's where I'm based, although I imagine other states are similar) they enforce contracts based on a due-diligence approach, meaning that although a contract might say a client will be fully liable + a penalty if payment is late, if the company does not fully pursue that balance to a reasonable extent, the courts will lean towards the client by saying that the business didn't do enough in it's power to enforce the agreement.

Now going back to the website message -- it is one thing to pull the plug on a client server and leave it at that (which is what I did with my client). On the other hand, if you take their account and replace it with a vague message which to a reasonable person might make them think the client is not-legit - then that's essentially throwing a punch at your client after a KO, which most likely will not look good regardless of the clients nature.

In the future, it probably would be best to just pull a client site after a 5 day notice, and leave it at that. I never extend clients any credit what so ever but rather pull and launch ASA payment is cleared. This is probably the best route because if you ever have a serious contract dispute, you can point to the contract and if you have a track record of enforcing your deadlines, that helps greatly in your defense.

I can recommend this excellent talk by Mike Monteiro, Design Director, and co-founder of Mule Design Studio. It gives great advice on how to get paid.

tl;dr have a contract, have a lawyer.