As the most customer-friendly supplier of certified translation around we’ve never demanded payment up-front and a central part of our appeal is the fact that we only ask for payment once the client is happy with their translation. On very large jobs we may ask for a deposit or partial payment, but on the whole we find this isn’t really necessary and have very few problems. We have however had a handful of customers who have disappeared into the ether once they have received their certified translation. All was going well, communication was great, no alarm bells were ringing and then, suddenly, radio silence… This is of course very frustrating, but the few times this happened we simply put it down to experience and got on with our work. We didn’t want to punish our good customers by removing one of the things they love most about us because of a small minority of bad apples. Aside from that, there wasn’t really much we could do. If you offer a service before demanding any payment you leave yourself open to being taken advantage of. Fortunately, these occasions were few and far between, so we didn’t let it get to us and thought it a small price to pay for being the popular certified translation group we are. More recently however, we started to think that since we had an example certified translation on the website we might as well use those translations we had worked on but for which had not received payment for something, and so from then on we decided to upload them to the website. We figured that since they had not been paid for they remained our property. So, there they are. Well, at the moment there are just a couple up there but there a few more to be dug out and uploaded, and any future cases will also be added. Apart from being a useful resource for potential clients who would like to get an idea of what our certified translations look like. They also serve as kind of wall of shame, and we like that part! Future non-payers may well get a link to this blog post as a final warning before their (our) documents go live. :D To see those we have up so far, head to the “example” page on the website.