was just ripped off...what you can do to avoid being ripped off yourself

Just learned something new regarding Paypal I think Warriors who provide services should be aware of. It may end up protecting you from outright thievery of your services.

About a month ago I was contracted by a fellow Warrior (who has since then been banned) to provide him for page one rankings for a couple of highly contested keywords. Client asked me how long it would take to get to page one on Google for both keywords and I told him to count on three months. As luck would have it we grabbed him the rankings within a couple weeks of starting.

So the client enthusiastically gave us a glowing testimonial regarding how we were the greatest thing to happen since sliced bread. All's well at this point.

One week after receiving the clients testimonial I receive a phone call from the client who stated he was dismayed that he was not getting that much extra traffic from the rankings which were at #7 and #8. I told him that was because he needed to be in the top 3 to expect to get a boost in traffic. When he asked if I would guarantee him a top 3 position I told him it would cost extra as we priced the quote to include getting him to page one not in the top 3 positions.

The next day he filed a dispute with paypal asking for his money back. Ok I thought, I'll let the folks at Paypal deal with him.

Which brings me to the lesson portion of this post.

When I went to respond to the dispute the only thing Paypal wanted from me was the tracking information for the shipment. But given the fact that we provided a service we did not have tracking information to give them. Which equated in the customer getting his full money back.

Where I messed up was I had the client send me the payment direct to my paypal account instead of me creating a money request for the funds and sending it to him that way. If I had done that I would of been able to indicate that the payment was for a service rather than a product. Then if there was a dispute Paypal could of acted accordingly. But given the fact that the client sent the money direct as a payment for a product he was able to get all his money back because I did not have a tracking number.

Moral of the story?

If you're collecting large sums of money via paypal from clients for services rendered you need to do so via a payment request instead of having the customer send it to you directly.

I'm pretty sure the guy I was dealing with knew this and used it as an opportunity to rip us off.

Now I know it, and now you do too.