What to do when customer pays for domain that cannot be renewed

[tkalfaoglu]

Often customers will pay way late for domains that they have, resulting in:

 

An invoice for the renewal of a domain has been paid but the renewal request submitted to the registrar failed.

Domain Name: blabla.com

Error: Domain not found

 

Checking the registrar, I see that the domain is listed as DELETED.

I also cannot re-register it until it expires for 70+ days, the only thing is to get it from redemption at a high price.

 

How do you handle such cases? Maybe domain invoices should have an expiration, or an automatic addition of the redemption price?

 

Regards, -turgut

Edited July 5, 2013 by tkalfaoglu

[brian!]

Checking the registrar, I see that the domain is listed as DELETED.

I also cannot re-register it until it expires for 70+ days, the only thing is to get it from redemption at a high price.

 

How do you handle such cases? Maybe domain invoices should have an expiration, or an automatic addition of the redemption price?

there is a feature request to add the option of setting a redemption price per tld - that would be a useful option to have.

https://requests.whmcs.com/responses/domain-redemption-fee-option

 

what you could do is set your overdue reminder emails to mention the cost of the redemption fee, or probably more easily, mention the cost of late fees (which you can set to cover redemption costs).

 

I can't recall ever letting a client's domain get deleted (except when they had ceased trading) - we tend to know before the expiry whether they're going to renew or not.

 

also, it could be dangerous to let a client's domain expiry and expect to be able to re-register it - depending on the tld, they'd likely be released on a first come first served basis and you may not necessarily be first in the queue.

 

if the client wants to pay to keep their domain, then redemption fees are what they must pay to do so - if they want to take the risk of losing it by waiting to re-register it, they can do so - though you should warn them of the risks.

[And then there was one les]

Definitely use the domain reminder emails for this, if the client knows they could lose the domain to sombody else they are less likely to be late but also it covers you incase they do lose the domain.

[DavidBee]

If the client paid well after the due date then simply say sorry not possible and refund.