Business Thievery or Why YOU Should Avoid FREE Trials

I have a neighbor who has a restaurant, so naturally he became a client, but his web site was hosted by an organization hosting similar ethnic restaurants. These folks did his site, for a lot more than Takeout Online charges I might add, and they were charging him 'healthy' hosting fees, also quite a bit more than we charge, but he was relatively comfortable with them and all I needed to do was to gain access so that I can integrate his site with Takeout Online, something that is typically a few minutes process, since it's just adding appropriate links.

What followed was a multi-months ordeal with his vendors first stating that they'd make the changes, they wanted to charge him money for those like it was a big deal, which of course I knew that it wasn't, and now I was irritated, because it looked like highway robbery and they refused to change the site as I asked them to, something the restaurant owner agreed with me on and told them verbally and in written form. The vendors accused me of trying to steal their client and other bologna that my 4yr old wouldn't use. Eventually I had to threaten them that if they don't comply with making these few changes - I'll simply recommend that the client changes hosts, because it was ridiculous beyond belief.

Eventually someone in their organization seemed to show some sign of brain power and made the changes, not precisely what I asked for, but close enough and that was that. Obviously nobody was trying to steal the business from these people, although my neighbor was also getting sick of the whole debacle and would've changed companies in a heartbeat if I told him to do so. But, as I said, that wasn't my intent and that's not how we do business.

Unfortunately, that doesn't preclude others from being as ethical. Another client of mine, amazingly of the same ethnic background, was getting online orders daily and even though he was a little bit of a slow pay - we still had a good relationship. All of a sudden, after 2 years of business together, I noticed that his orders simply stopped. I looked at his web site, the site that was in very poor shape with missing content, links broken etc., which we completely revamped for him and added online ordering... and noticed that the Order button has been changed to go to another place, an ordering service from another company. At first, I thought it was someone hacking and started investigating the company doing this. It turns out they have a single restaurant, this one on their site and noticed that they're part of a hosting company (or they are the hosting company). And they moved the whole site to them, conveniently taking credit as if they've done the site themselves, and obviously my FTP information no longer worked, since the host has been changed.

I went to talk to the owner to see what's going on, because now it was clear that it had to be done with his blessing. He was busy, but I made a point to stick around and talk to the man. He said that yes indeed he made this change, not that he wants to sever his relationship with us, but these people offered him 'free everything' to try it and he went for it. He then stated that he only received a few orders and he'll likely dump them, but asked me for a couple of weeks to wait.

The moral of this story of course, as much as I'd prefer not to lose him - this is a perfect example of him cutting his own throat. It's not a case where it's expensive for him to use our services - his prices are adjusted to include our fee, so it costs him nothing. If he doesn't return with a guarantee to me that he'll never pull a stunt like this again, I'll force him to hire someone and redo the web site, so he'll lose there. He'll lose his high search engine rankings due to us. It's likely he'll lose on some other issues as well.

Mostly I blame these thieves who don't have any ethics. I can understand if someone's unhappy with their providers and they're looking elsewhere - but this wasn't the case at all. They're nothing more than predators and don't deserve to be in business. The owner I blame for one thing - not calling me and giving me basic courtesy of asking about doing this temporary or permanent change. Certainly he can do whatever he wants, in fact our verbal agreement with all Takeout Online clients clearly indicates that a restaurant may stop using our services at any point, without any specific reason. But one would think that after 2 years of successful mutually beneficial business - there would be some common courtesy exercised. I guess not.

Restaurant owners don't know the technical aspects of these changes and they don't understand the implications of doing a '2-week free trial'. Even if this owner now decides to return to Takeout Online - he now has to go through potentially painful (read the post above) move of the domain; his existing customers have no idea what's going on, since yesterday they were ordering one way, today another and tomorrow - who knows, and he certainly lost major credibility points in my eyes, so whatever special arrangements I agreed to before to help him out will likely be out of the question going forward. It's just not worth it, in my opinion... but I could be slightly biased, since the business was stolen from my company.