Check the Vendor Is Still Trading Before You Fall for Them

Wedding businesses close quietly. There is no announcement — the website stays up, paid for a year in advance, and the phone goes to a voicemail nobody empties. From the outside it looks exactly like a business that is simply slow to reply.

We check the links on this site regularly, and every sweep finds a few that have gone dark. Some have genuinely closed. One had its lapsed domain bought by somebody else and quietly turned into an online casino, still carrying the florist's name on every directory that listed it.

So before you fall for anyone, five minutes.

Look at the date on the work

Scroll to the most recent thing they posted. Not the prettiest — the most recent.

If the newest wedding on the site is from 2024, that is a business that has either stopped or stopped caring about the website, and you cannot tell which from here. Instagram is the better signal: a working vendor posts, because that is where their next booking comes from.

Call the number

Actually call it, in business hours. You are not asking anything — you are finding out whether a person answers, and how.

A real vendor answers or calls back within a day or two. A disconnected tone, a full mailbox, or a number that now belongs to somebody else tells you everything, and it takes ninety seconds.

Check the name against the county clerk

Most businesses here are registered. A quick search for the business name on the New York State entity database tells you whether it still exists on paper. An "inactive" status is not proof they have stopped — plenty of working people let a filing lapse — but it is worth a question.

Ask for a recent reference

Not a testimonial from the website. Ask for a couple they worked with in the last six months, and whether you can email them.

A busy vendor says yes immediately. Hesitation here is the most useful signal of the four, and it costs you one sentence in an email you were sending anyway.

If something feels off

It usually is. The most common version is not fraud, it is a person whose circumstances changed — an illness, a move, a business that stopped being worth it — and who has not got round to taking the website down.

That is nobody's fault, and it is still your wedding. Move on, and do not put down a deposit to be polite.

One thing we do at our end

Every listing here is checked against its own website on a schedule. When a site has gone, or has turned into something it should not be, the listing comes down until a person has looked at it. It is not perfect, and it is not a substitute for a phone call — but you should not be the one who finds out first.

Photo: [Gather Greene](https://hudsonvalleyhitched.com/vendor/gather-greene-coxsackie).