What Should I do?

MapStickyNote

New Member
Jurisdiction
US Federal Law
First and foremost thank you to anyone who decides to give some of their time to think about this and share their opinion. I appreciate it and I will be repping you.

Long story short, in the month of April I noticed a pro-athlete went on a popular sports podcast and at the end of the episode dropped his new website for his online store. It turned out they hadn't purchased the domain yet - so I bought it and then contacted his management and explained I didn't want to be a dick and take advantage of them and offered to sell it for $1500 to them. He said it was too much and instead offered me a swath of signed memorabilia. I said sure I'll do that then passed him on a bunch of e-commerce advice for the store. He then said you know what you're talking about and asked how much it would be to setup a shopify store for them. I said $2500 and he said he'd get back to me after he spoke to the athlete.

A week passed and he was getting incredible traffic from the sports podcast and I couldn't stand it being wasted so I went ahead and built a store in 2 days and then let him know its there and can be put online any time. He contacted me the next day out of the blue and said the athlete wants to use my site and asked if I could have it live that day in time for another podcast. I said sure and got it done. That day he messaged and said the pro athlete is very grateful and said he'd be paying me on top of sending signed memorabilia.

The next few days kept me busy trying to manage the store as I never have before but I got it done. It included updating more products for them etc.

A month have passed now and I finally asked about the 2500. A little over a week ago he got back to me and said he had talked to the pro-athlete and he agreed on the $2500 and said he was grateful and now its just a case of finding how to get it to me. I sent him Western Union details and PayPal information. I asked a few days later if there's in any update and he said "will fill you in shortly". I have not heard from him in a week. He is not responding to any of my Twitter DM's and finally after a week of silence on friday I DM'd him and said I'd frozen sales until I'm paid. I left the site online but just disabled sales for now but that doesn't help me as they've already made ~45K and sales have slowed down to just a few a day.

My question is - what can I do here? I still own the domain. I created the shopify but I transferred it over to him and set his email as admin account leaving me a staff account. I do host the main website externally though and just use the Shopify Buy Button.

Can I in theory add my own product on the website since he's not responding and have it linked to my personal shopify and get paid that way since in theory I own the website? His manager is the type of guy who likely wouldn't even know its on the website and I could probably get away with putting it up there for 3 or 4 days and making back what I was supposed to be paid.

Many thanks to anyone who could advice. (I am located in Canada and they are in the United States)
 
do you have any of this in writing, hopefully in contract form? Kind of sounds like you tried to play him and in the end got played....."so I bought it and then contacted his management and explained I didn't want to be a dick "
 
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