Overcoming Doubts About a Large Order

[eoinfinnegan]

Some of you may remember me mention a large potential client before Christmas. It was a translation job of approx 500,000 words. I was quite unsure about it at the time and concerned about whether it could be a bad buyer. As you can imagine, there is approx 10 weeks of solid work involved in that so to lose out on that would be disastrous. At the same time, there wasn’t a lot of other jobs coming at the time and December is notoriously slow so I spent a long time weighing up the possibilities/probabilities.

They had sent me a document to do as a paid sample and they came back and said that they wanted to split the job between me and some others. I wasn’t sure what to make of that but it turns out that they were willing to give me half of the total - 250,000 words, approx 4-5 weeks of work. It was crunch time, I needed to decide what to do. I had already contacted CS asking about protection/how the situation could be handled but didn’t get any real specifics, nothing that gave me any great confidence. So I was on my own to make the decision.

I decided to start doing some research on the client from the little I knew about them. I had their Fiverr username, an idea about what the company was doing (it’s a startup mainly focused on an app), 2 staff member’s names and some time before I needed to give them an answer.
Within an hour of searching, I had discovered that the company had recently received funding of $2 million to develop the idea and app. Ok, that’s a good start! I discovered that the CEO had a similar and very successful business already established and that they would complement each other well with a lot of potential crossover for clients. Ok, these guys seem like serious people who know what they are doing, and they have money to burnnnnn.

In the end, we split the order into 4 parts, each with different delivery dates. As CS had mentioned that it is good for them to be able to see progression, as in - buyer got a delivery, was happy with it and then got more etc etc. I explained all this to the client and they were ok with it, or at least didn’t complain about it.
Throughout the orders, as I was delivering, they commented on their happiness with the work and accepted the deliveries without leaving reviews, which was odd but not a disaster.

One major issue I had was the impact it had on my other sales and regular clients. As a result of this order, I have had quite a few late orders which was something I never had before. I will be interested to see how it affects me. I also had two quite large, old custom offers place orders too so there were quite a number of late nights in the past month. Half of Christmas day was spent staring at the screen, New Years Eve was celebrated at home, alone, listening to the one firework some “rebel” had got his hands on in my village (fireworks are illegal in Ireland). Was it worth it? Hopefully. I’m planning a break away with the kids soon to make up for it, so will be great to have the extra few quid to do that!

I have now finished the entire order and think I will be going on holiday mode for a while, once I clear a couple of other orders. I hope all goes well with this because, as we all know, chargebacks can happen but I am reasonably confident that the client won’t do that. The payment for the first two parts have just cleared and my January figures are my highest month ever, just 11 days in.

In summary, large orders can happen here and you may be able to work out a bit more about a buyer than just their profile by being a little creative.

[writer99025]

Glad that it worked out well for you. I think it’s a legit company - from reading your posts - so you have nothing to fear.

[Anna]

Congratulations Eoin. Happy for you that you are finally done with this big projects. Enjoy your time off 😉

[mrproofreading]

I’m happy it worked out for you!

I wouldn’t be too put off about accepting larger orders in the future, though. I have completed 15,435 sales in total and, as far as I can remember, I have had just 5 chargebacks. Out of these 5, none were over $10 in value.

Perhaps I’m a bit lucky, but I don’t think chargebacks are very common at all.

[homeestates]

I tend to break larger orders down into small parts. I am a writer and I want people to be happy with my style so a sample of a few hundred words is the best way to kick start a 25,000 word book.