Three Payment Conditions That Prevent a Vanishing Supplier
You paid a development fee.
Then the replies got slower. Then they stopped. Then the phone number stopped working.
You are not naive. There is a business model built on exactly this, and it is profitable precisely because small buyers cannot afford to chase it.
Why it happens
There are two kinds of supplier who will take a sample fee and go quiet.
The first is a real factory that has taken on too much and is hiding. Bad, but recoverable.
The second does not intend to deliver. The development fee is the revenue. They take many small fees, ship nothing, and rely on the fact that no buyer will spend thousands on lawyers over a sample.
The dangerous part is that both look identical for the first two weeks.
Three conditions that make it impossible
You do not need to detect the second kind. You need to make the model unprofitable for them. Three requirements do that, and a legitimate supplier will agree to all three without drama.
One: define what the fee buys, in writing.
Not a sample. A deliverable. How many pieces, how many revision rounds, whether shipping is included, and what happens if you cancel after the first round.
A supplier who will not write this down is telling you the fee is not tied to an outcome.
Two: pay through a channel that can be disputed.
A bank transfer to an overseas account is final. There is no appeal.
Trade assurance platforms, PayPal, or a credit card give you a mechanism: if nothing arrives, there is a process that does not require a lawyer.
A supplier who insists on wire transfer only, for a small development order, is asking for the one channel that offers you nothing.
Three: photographs at every stage.
Not at the end. During. When the chart is made. When the panel comes off the machine. When it is linked.
Photos are cheap to take and impossible to produce retroactively if the work never happened.
What a legitimate supplier sounds like
Not defensive.
They will tell you the fee covers a specific piece of work, that part of it is credited against a bulk order, and that they are fine with a dispute-capable payment channel.
They may push back on the discount you asked for. They will not push back on the mechanism.
What we do
Our quotes state what the development fee buys: number of pieces, revision rounds, and whether shipping is separate.
We accept dispute-capable payment channels, and we photograph the stages without being asked.
If a project stops being viable, we say so and stop invoicing. Going quiet is not one of our options.
Related: You Have Been Let Down Once · Sampling Fee, Plate Fee, Mould Fee · Request a Quote