Why don’t you offer “0% deposit deals”? 💵

TL;DR

The short answer is that people who demand no payment upfront are not serious customers and are highly unlikely to see things through to the end, wasting our time, energy, money, and morale.

🔍We are selective in the customers we take on

I get it. The internet is a hotbed for scams. People should be cautious especially when it comes to money.

But if you are doubting each and every pixel on this website, asking a thousand questions - often questions we have already answered but you rephrase differently and pose as new questions again and again because you just don’t trust us, or showing any other mistrusting behavior, I’m sorry to tell you that we are not going to work with you.

Even if we agree to “0% deposit deals”, customers who insist on such deals do not proceed🙄

A gentleman protested: “if you are legitimate, why take such a huge chunk of 50% as deposit?”

So I made that percentage to 0%.

He appeared to be happy about this.

And then guess what, he was never heard from again.

But a worse kind of “0% deposit” customer is ….

Customers who insist on “0% deposit deals” often back out at the last minute😡

Here’s how a typical “0% deposit” deal went down (a real story of our recent experience with a prospect we'd call "Mr. Distrustful" here):

Mr. Distrustful was interested in our GMAT services.

The first question Mr. Distrustful asked included the word “scam”. Randomly tossing the word “scam” around is a red flag. Every incoming prospect is entitled to their reasonable suspicion. But having to say it out loud shows that the prospect is so mistrusting that they have to put this into concrete words. If this comes from a Chinese-speaking prospect, we would stop talking to them right then and there, and send them a score-raising program that they’d feel is 100% scam-free. We are exam-studying nerds by nature. The last thing we enjoy doing is trying to convert a non-believer.

But we just got this English site up and running. It wouldn’t hurt to do a few no-deposit deals for the first customers. So I offered:

“0 down payment, but the final payment will be at a 10% markup at the original cost”.

With some back and forth, Mr. Distrustful booked the test and got the money ready. But his replies started to become slow and intermittent, which was another red flag that he was uncommitted and was having second thoughts.

In the meantime, we made an appointment with our test taker and arranged our tech team to set the client’s computer up - all these cost money to us!

But then Mr. Distrustful stopped messaging us. His test day was nearing and we still hadn’t set up his computer yet. And lo and behold, then Mr. Distrustful pointed to some random typo - we accidentally typed “ProctorU” instead of “Examity” when instructing him to ready his computer for GMAT Online - and used that as an excuse to back out of taking the test before the test day!

"I'm rich so I don't pay." 🤔

Another breed of customers would like to emphasize their “long-term value” but interestingly are not willing to pay a cent as a deposit.

They claim to be some well-oiled organization looking for partnership so they could skip paying their first bill. This happened before, and recently happened again:

Give me a break. If you are as big as you say you are, why not prove it by paying the deposit, which must be peanuts to you?

We have ongoing long-term partnerships with immigration and overseas education agencies in China. The first thing they did before they engage us was send us money. No bullshit.

When we hire our top-notch test-takers, the first thing we do is send them money. Here, take our money, work for us. No “would you a take trial test for free” bullshit.

Requiring deposits filters out customers we don’t want to work with, leaving quality customers we’d LOVE to serve😍

Some people are more mistrusting than others. I fully respect that. But there are only 24 hours in a day. Glove handling such customers at the expense of serving quality customers is absolutely not acceptable.

By demanding a deposit we get to work with clients who are absolute pleasures to work with. The success stories section of this website is filled with such stories:

What kind of customer are you?