What can I do about a client who promised that would pay me after a few lessons but didn't pay?

What can I do about a client who promised that would pay me after the lesson, took a few lessons, kept delaying the payment and now has disappeared without paying? They also don’t reply to my emails, Shall I be stricter with my payment policy? The client is not local.

While the teaching aspect of online tutoring is somewhat similar to that of traditional tutoring, apart from the technological aspects, tutoring online poses many challenges which can often catch inexperienced online tutors off-guard. Collecting payments, for example, is typically more challenging for online tutors, especially for those working non-locally and internationally. Setting up one’s terms and conditions is also more difficult when working online. For example, being too strict with your payment policy may result in not getting any students, while being too lax with one’s payment policy may result in clients taking advantage and in the not-so-unusual problem you described above. So where is the soft spot where one’s policy is strict enough that clients don’t mess around with you but still lax enough to allow you to maximize inquiry to client conversion?

As a general rule, from my experience, I would suggest that you collect payments in advance. If a potential client is not even willing to pay one single lesson in advance, he is probably not going to be a good client and may give you more problems on the long run. If you are afraid that asking for advance payments may lower your conversion rate and give you less clients, you could start by offering a discounted first, trial lesson. That has worked very well for me for many years and does wonders at deterring time wasters who just want to get away with one of more free lessons.

A second and rather important point is about being rather critical with the selection of your potential clients.

If a potential client starts complaining about your hourly rates from the very beginning, that’s usually a sign that he or she can potentially be a difficult and unreliable client. An inquiry from a country where local tutoring rates are lower or much lower than yours will most likely do not convert into a paying and regular client(though there can be some rare exceptions to it); giving a lesson without collecting the payment in advance would likely result in an unpaid lesson where the student disappears with no intention of paying.

Only in some rare occasions I do allow my clients to pay after one or more lesson, and that only applies to long term clients who have proven to be reliable over months or years. As a side note those few clients may appreciate my (or your) relaxed payment policy and sometimes leave an extra bonus on top of the regular payment.

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Problems with online tutoring, client not paying after service, client delaying payments, how to protect your online tutoring business, problematic clients, unreliable clients, how to select clients.