What If A Distributor Is Not Paying Up?

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Whenever you work with a business, there is always the danger of being messed around with. Small businesses have to be wary of the tricks that large businesses can play on them, as they have a large legal team and the latter does not. But entrepreneurs need to be careful of working with small businesses that have a little more experience than they do and can take advantage of their ideas. But we’re going to explore something that is all too common when a distributor i.e. a wholesaler is not meeting their financial obligations to you. They might be selling your products or services, they might have exclusive rights to do so, so you expect adequate and timely remuneration.

What are you to them?

In the most basic business sense, you are a supplier. You are probably among a whole range of suppliers, as wholesalers working with hundreds of brands and companies for all different sorts of reasons. However, the chances of you being at the bottom of the list in terms of importance might be starkly true. It’s a reality that small businesses that are trying to get their products to sell, working with lots of brands, might not receive the due care and attention from wholesalers that large brands do. Don’t kid yourself that if you are working with Amazon, that your concerns will be heard before Coca-Colas or Apple’s. So, prepare your mind to chase them up, constantly!

Keeping a record of correspondence

When you begin to communicate about why your payment is late, you need to track everything. This will be helpful later on so you can avoid a sticky situation in court if it comes to that. You need to log all your phone calls. It’s a good idea to minute your conversations with the distributor so you have a record of what was said. You can’t record them without their knowledge as it’s against the law in most countries and states. Record all your emails, print them off, and store them in a file as well as keeping them locked in your cloud. 

Call someone in

If you really do not want to go to court over payment but you want something to be done, then use collection agency software. You simply put in your request and the details of your case and they will do the chasing for you. They will continually go after those that are supposed to be doing the payment. This might be finding who the payment officer is from LinkedIn, visiting their website for information about the head office, and making a formal complaint. They do all the running around, finding the right people and chasing them up.

Working with any distributor that isn’t punctual and upfront can be infuriating at worst and disheartening at best. Just know that you do have options and if you have patience and the sound mind to record everything down as soon as you suspect late payment, you should have the law and morality on your side.