Business Deal 101

Now some misunderstandings are natural, while others are done on purpose by scammers.

Someone might ask a professional designer to show them mock up designs with a deposit and then pretend not to like them and get the money back. That will give them ideas and they can hire someone cheaper and show them the screenshots and next thing is that they have a design just what you made with a little editions. Now even if you watermark the image, these people can still make a duplicate one, and own a psd. Now this is just one example, there are many. Maybe you have a store where you sell an intangible good, and once the advertisement is recieved, your advertiser does a chargeback. What can you do?

Well let me tell you one thing, most of the time with Paypal the dispute results doesn’t favor the seller, but there are ways you can make it turn in your favor. You need hard core evidence. How ? Well you need to make the deals that involves some third party. Therefore don’t ever use instant messengers because even if you save it no one will believe you because no one else can testify for you. I know MSN won’t come in and show their log for just one paypal case. It is good to talk to clients through instant messengers, but make sure you send a copy to their email address and say for instance:

You are going to pay me $600 to make a website. This will be 50% of the total payment and this will be paid before the work done, and only $300 is refundable. Do you agree in the email. If they say yes then you have record. If they say no then you better work things out.

Same with selling links and such online. I will use directory owners because i ran a directory before, and i have gotten many chargebacks but even as a seller i won all of them. How? I put a checkbox in my submission page, so when the user submit it requires them to fill the checkbox otherwise they can’t submit, and by checking that box they agree to the Terms of Service. Now if they want to read, they can otherwise it is their loss. So if you ever get into a case you can say well they clicked the box and agreed to the submission guidelines, or show screenshots of the email message and win the case.

Another good way is communicating through online forums, now these big webmaster forums like digitalpoint and other ones give you plenty of space to have a communication this way it goes to your pm box also it sends an email with the content, so you have two proofs.

Alot of people don’t fight the paypal dispute and just refund, if you really want these scammers to learn a lesson then fight the dispute because the worst they are going to do is take the money from you and refund him. You were going to do that anyways.

Now you might be wondering what inspired me to write this today

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=720081