Elance and some more painful clients
This week, I decided to run an experiment. Even though in principal I am against all freelance sites, I joined ELance.com as service provider and tried to bid for a few project. There was a project to build a clone of youtube with adding a few new functionalities. I tried to bid for it and sure enough asked a few questions to client before giving a fair bid. The client declined my bid, because he was not interested in wasting his time in chatting to service providers. All he was interested was in a site that will give a tough competition to youtube and he wanted to get it done in less than 1000 USD, without spending any minute of his precious time to discuss about the project. Lol he is a perfect candidate to be ripped off by a freelancer who will take away his 1000$ and will send him a dummy script being used by hundreds for free.
Then there was another client who wanted 40 very high quality PR2+ in-coming links. He had one full page of requirement about the quality of links (essentially excluding all ways through which you can get links. If at all you get a link as per the criteria of the client, that link will be available at google.com main home page only). Anyway being in link business I knew immediately that it will take 2 linkers to spend 20 days in getting these links. I made a bid of 600 USD with 50% in advance. With this deal I would have ended up may be losing a few dollars, but in order to compete with other bids, I also have to bid in the same range of others. I got a response from buyer next day, asking that he will pay $4 per link and the max he WILL pay is 240 USD. With 240 USD, we cant even pay the expenses of one linker for the whole month. Anyway just for the fun of it, I asked any other requirement. Indeed there was. No money till the client receives all 40 confirmed links and the links have to be there on the page for at least 2 months before he pays a single penny. Lol what a nice proposition. You get a project in which if you do good job sure you will end up losing good money in terms of salary expenses, you pay the money as commission to elance for winning the project, you pay the money to elance for monthly fee, you bear the whims of this dumb buyer who doesn’t understand the value of quality work and if you do everything nicely after 3 months, you will be lucky enough to get a grand 240 USD. I had enough of it. Enuf experimentation, back to some work.
My overall observation of this whole episode is A) At freelance site, many of the clients really don’t care about the quality of the work B) The ultimate objective for these clients is get services done and not pay a penny for the services. Sure it is not possible in US, so they turn to freelance sites and try to screw third world programmers. C) Programmers on their part know very well the intent of these clients. However they generalize the definition of the client and they treat 100% clients in same way. As soon as a project comes they will bid on it @ 1 USD per hour just to get the project. D) Programmers underbid and once selected for the project either never finish the project or get the money and simply run away or keep on asking for more and more money. If at all they finish a job on freelance site, ultimately client ends up paying 3-4 times extra than what was bided before.
The ultimate conclusion for all the people is you get what you pay for. If you want to outsource your job, maximum you can save is 50%-60% Don’t try to save 99% Ultimately there is nothing like Free Lunch. Also ultimately it is your project. You recruited programmers to do a job for you, so you need to spend a bit time with them, monitor them and make sure you are getting what you paid for.
September 19th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Hi,
I am in the middle of a project (as a buyer) but i am starting to get warning signals and would appreciate any advice or thoughts.
I have had a good experience using providers in the past, and for certian work I now repeatedly use the same providers as we have built up a good relationship.
I selected a provider that has a 5.0 rating on elance with 100% positive feedback from over 10 projects they won. The price they quoted was in the mid range of my bids and the communication started off very positive.
The project was for a link building campaign (100 page rank 4+ permanent links on music theme related sites) for a new music site I am about to launch.
The payment was 50% down with a fixed budget - and the amount of links required was set. The Links had to follow a set of criteria i.e. no blackhat, hidden links, forum posts etc… basically genuine links.)
You mentioned above that you have experience with link building so i thought this was relevant…
Yesterday I was sent back his first list of links, they contained irrelevant links, claimed that he had requested links from sites etc - however 2 of the links where from sites i own and had linked them myself! Another was a search listing result page, another an alexa ranking page and 3/4 of them didn’t have any page rank at all…
Obviously trying to fool me into paying for links that had nothing to do with him, and I have paid a considerable deposit… Now I don’t know how to deal with it. It is not in escrow as I didn’t post a ’select’ project.
I want to get what i asked for, but am worried that he will realize i am on to him and just run off with my cash and do no more work. The project is supposed to be completed in 2 weeks, and he is only 5% through.
The work he has provided so far I could have done myself in a few hours, so my project is far from being too much work or unreasonable. And given his previous track record I thought it would have been safe?
What would you suggest as being the best way to approach this / communicate with my provider?
Thanks,
Dan.
September 20th, 2007 at 2:28 am
Dan,
Its one of the most common issue being faced by the buyers at elance. Sellers at elance typically prefer to get more projects than they can handle and ultimately a significant number of projects get delayed / never completed / completed inefficiently. Most of the time the buyer may demand some extra money from you as well to complete the project.
In your specific case, here is what I will do.
> Since 50% money already has been paid, the seller realizes that if it comes to that he may stop responding to you. Worse you can do is may be leave a bad feedback, but that he will recover with 4-5 good feedbacks.
> Put in the records straight with him. Show him in written email, that he is not following his commitments. Show him that links he said he has gotten are all fake. When you write to him, write him in a way that he should be professionally ashamed. Out of all link sent by him, give him explanation of each link and give your accept or reject for each link. Also show him a way out of the mesh he has created. Set up new deadline, target with strict warnings.
> From that point on keep on following daily progress with him. May be if you can, then provide him an email account at your server. That way you can really see how many emails he is sending. If you can’t do that ask him to do you a bcc in all the emails that he is sending. That’s what almost all the buyers ask us to do.
> Proper daily communication is the key. Because most of the time link building is really being done by very low tech staff and they really don’t know what they are doing unless someone at higher level in their company helps them out or client tells them in precise words what s/he needs.
> If none of that happens go on all out war against the provider. Leave a bad feedback (use that as last option), try to negotiate your way out before that. If you have used credit card to make the payment, you can always chargeback your credit card. if you paid via paypal, within 30 days you can get ur money back without any dispute. Even at paypal you can open up a dispute.