Charging Fees Listed on Website

[Merchant]

We have customers who sometimes apply for our services but either lie on their application or cancel on us before we even complete their review. Taking our time, efforts and resources into consideration, we want to charge an application fee.

Is it necessary to have the customer sign off on anything agreeing to this, or can we simply keep this policy published on our website and tell them over the phone?

We anticipate that by having the customer sign off on such an agreement would deter all potential applicants from applying.

[Wozcreative]

What type of service are you offering? What are they applying for?

[nealrm]

unless you collect the fee upfront, your ability to collect is about zilch. Those that lied, you will not be able to find and those that canceled may choose not to pay. That would leave you in a position of having to take them to court to collect an insignificant amount. Even if you win it would be more hassle than it is worth. To collect a fee upfront, that would have to sign (or click) off on the charges.

[huggytree]

id figure out another way to qualify them than charging to sign up.....

[Jim Gillum]

You might try charging a deposit...before you do any work at all...:)

[Harold Mansfield]

id figure out another way to qualify them than charging to sign up.....

I agree. Seems like you either aren't qualifying people properly, or are targeting too broad and are getting window shoppers and time wasters.
If you are already having problems attracting the right people, further alienating them with an application fee will only make matters worse.

That is of course unless you are selling real estate, or loaning money. Those are the only industries I ever see get away with an application fee. And even then, it's still a suspect practice to me depending on the situation. If you think about it, you are asking me to pay you money to fill out paperwork that determines if I qualify to pay you more money.

[Pronity]

It would help to know what you're charging for. Rental application? Website consultation? We may be able to help you once you give us this information.

[DeniseTaylor]

Hi

I'm wondering if an autoresponder would help you. If the people who are lying are spamming you, an autoresponder might help.

Here's how it would work:

The person has to enter his email address and other information.

Then, after submit that, they are sent an email where they have to verify their identity. After that, they are automatically emailed the form for the application. A spammer won't go through all those hoops.

Once they've done that, there has a place where the application is sent. Only someone serious would do all this and you could explain that the process is set up to eliminate spam. People would understand that.

----

Make sure you have contact info available so if someone doesn't want to go through all of those hoops, they can call you right away to get started. Making the process too labor intensive could blow off good, legit clients, so you don't want that.

-----

Anyway, you could experiment and if it doesn't work, you could tweak it or go to Plan B.

Hope that helps!