Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

Customers Don't Pay on Time and Maybe Not at All

Working on the Sears project, we ended up spending six months on that project and Mobile Web became one of my core strengths. Now it’s something with which I’m very familiar. During my time, I would go to Nurun in the morning and work 9:00 to 5:00 on Sears and from 6:00 to 10:00 or 11:00 I’d work on PrintOnlineNow. Though we had 50 customers who signed up with their credit cards, when we tried to verify these credit cards and put them in to get billed, only 20 or 30 of them went through. Out of those sites we put up, out of the ones that were actually paid for, and after the first month the credit cards that were on file, half of them expired or were invalid or cancelled. This taught me that when you take payment, take six months at once. Don’t do things month by month because people just don’t pay on time. I never realized this; I thought people would pay their bills on time, but in reality they don’t. People don’t pay their bills on time, so if you’re going to do a monthly subscription, take at least six months or one year or it is really not worth your time to do the collection part of it. I’ve spent a whole day just calling everybody on the lists; I talked to 30 people in one sitting and my throat was completely rough from talking. I tried to get as many people as possible back on board with a valid credit card once again. We also had a bunch of issues with people’s websites; there was one particular case where the lady wanted to cancel because it was not exactly the same as the one in the image we’d shown her. And after talking to her and cross-referencing the payments, I realized that her site was up, but her credit card hadn’t been processed yet, so I told her basically we can’t do anything about your site. In fact we have to take it down because we haven’t actually charged you yet. We went back and forth nonstop before I realized this and it was just huge waste of time and we ended up fixing the site. Finally, I made it look the way she wanted and I got her back on board.