TL;DR
The 12 questions that decide whether your booking goes well — split across four buckets: identity (who they are and whether you can verify it), fit (do they actually serve your community / texture / tradition), practical (price, payment, cancellation, timing), and recourse (what happens if it goes wrong). Three minutes per bucket on the phone or DM saves hours of regret. Skip any one bucket and you’re trusting strangers with no fallback.
Most bad vendor experiences trace back to questions you didn’t ask before paying. Not always the vendor’s fault — sometimes you wanted speed, sometimes you trusted the Instagram aesthetic — but always preventable. This is the portable checklist that works whether you’re hiring a hair braider in Scarborough, a Filipino caterer in Mississauga, or a Tamil DJ for a Malton wedding.
Bucket 1 — Identity (3 questions)
- What’s the legal business name? Compare it against the website / Instagram. Mismatches happen for legitimate reasons (DBA names) but are also the most common scam tell.
- Where do you operate from? A real address — even if home-based — beats “mobile” with no city. Vague answers correlate with no-show rates.
- How long have you been doing this? Three years vetted is worth more than ten years on Instagram. Years that include reviews on a real platform are the best signal.
Bucket 2 — Fit (3 questions)
- What does your most recent work for someone like me look like? “Someone like me” means same hair texture, same wedding tradition, same dietary need. Generic portfolios mean generic results.
- What languages can you communicate in for the booking itself? Especially relevant if a parent or grandparent is the day-of contact. “I work with translators” is a yellow flag for time-sensitive work.
- Have you done [your specific tradition / texture / event size]? A Punjabi caterer who’s only done 100-person engagements probably can’t scale to 500. Make them say it.
Bucket 3 — Practical (3 questions)
- What’s the all-in price including taxes, travel, gratuity? A “starting at” quote means nothing. Pin them to a number you can write down.
- How do you take payment? Bank transfer to a registered business beats Interac to a personal account beats cash with no receipt. Each step down is a step closer to no recourse.
- What’s your cancellation policy? Both sides — what if you cancel, what if they cancel. A vendor with no policy isn’t answering because they don’t want you to know.
Bucket 4 — Recourse (3 questions)
- Can I see two recent reviews from clients in my community? Reviews on a third-party platform (Mojere, Google, Yelp) beat screenshots a vendor sends you. Easy to fake screenshots.
- Who do I call on the day if something goes wrong? One named person, one phone number. Not “the team”. Not “our DM”.
- What happens if you no-show or run late? Make them describe the make-good. Discount? Re-do? Refund? A vague answer here is the strongest predictor of a bad day.
The escape hatch — book on a platform with verified vendors
These 12 questions still matter on a platform like Mojere — they’re what good clients ask everywhere — but a verified-vendor system shrinks the “identity” bucket from your problem to the platform’s problem. We do the address, phone, and ID checks before a vendor goes live, and the public profile shows you which checks were run and when. That doesn’t make the vendor right for you — fit and practical questions still need answering — but at least you know they exist.
FAQ
What’s the single highest-leverage question?
“Show me your most recent work for someone like me, and the review they left.” It collapses identity + fit + recourse into one ask. If they can’t answer it in 24 hours, you have your answer.
Should I always demand a contract?
For anything over $200, yes — even a one-page email saying “Service X, on date Y, for $Z, deposit $W non-refundable past 7 days”. That email IS your contract; courts treat it as binding evidence. Verbal agreements over $200 are an unforced loss.
What if the vendor is a family friend?
Especially then. The hardest conversations to have post-disaster are with people inside your community. Get the price, the cancellation terms, and the day-of expectations in writing — call it “just for the relatives, you know how they are” if you need a tone excuse.
Where on Mojere do I find vendors who’ve been vetted this way?
Every vendor profile on Mojere shows the verification checks run on them — ID, phone, address, registry, social, language — with the date each was confirmed. Browse the Mojere directory →