[volkatron]

Hello, I'm starting a website to translate german websites into english. I will just go to their site look at the text and then translate it and send them the translated text in a word file. But after I send it to them, how can I be sure they will pay, after they already have what they want (honesty doesn't always work unfortunately) but also I don't think they will want to pay for the work if they have not received the files.

Thanks very much

[kingy da killa]

well seeing as your gunna be business they will have to pay first.

if a client is to supect, send them half the translation. then receive full money. then send them the rest?

[volkatron]

kingy da killa, on 23 August 2011 - 08:02 AM, said:

well seeing as your gunna be business they will have to pay first.

if a client is to supect, send them half the translation. then receive full money. then send them the rest?

Thanks alot mate. Cheers

[rallport]

With something like this I'd personally be getting paid upfront - as there's bugger all to stop them running off after you've handed everything over

I'd apply exactly the same principal when handing over any website.

[j05hr]

Is there money to be made doing this? I know free translations make it up as they go along but aren't there more professional ones where you pay a small fee to do it?

[necrobyter]

I think you have to get payment up front, whatever method you use is going to cause problems...

If you really want to take payment afterwards you are going to have to convert the text to an image with a messy font and watermark the background making it hard to read.

You've probably seen systems like this in action when a form verifies the user is human by asking you to type some words.

The images are deliberately blurry, which means optical character recognition software won't work.

At the end of the day tho, they could still type out the text themselves.

That's the best you can do if you don't decide to take payment upfront.

[ollie.gooch]

Hi Volkatron,

If you used a payment gateway to handle your company's payments, you could perform a pre authorisation for the full amount of the work.

By doing this you would know that the supplied card has the funds you require available to pay for the work - If your work was something that could be turned around in roughly 5 working days (I say roughly because the pre authorisation maximum time varies for each issuer, but generally its 5) then you could collect those pre authorised funds.

This would mean that from your point of view you know the funds are available and from the customers point of view they wouldn't have any funds taken from their account until the work is complete.

This post has been edited by Renaissance-Design: 03 October 2011 - 10:06 AM