eLance Sucks
Sorry, Tim. eLance sucks. And here’s why.
- Enforcing exclusivity – The big mistake is that the folks at eLance assume that I won’t be simultaneously posting the job req. on other outsourcing sites. Why wouldn’t I? I’ll be increasing the number of respondents and selecting (I presume) from different resource pools. But eLance wants you to be with them entirely or not with them at all. How do I know? Because…
- The 20% rule – If you don’t award 20% of your issued projects to eLance respondents, they’ll shut off your account. That simple. They want to force you to use them for 1 out of every 5 bids. Now, that might not seem like exclusivity to you (after all, you can award 4 of them to other sites), but it really is because….
- eLance penalizes canceled projects – Let’s say you don’t want to continue forward on the project at all, or more likely, you found a better resource on another site or on your own. So, you have the chance to cancel the project. All good, right? No, because eLance counts all projects towards the 20% rule. So if you start 5 projects and then find a better place to find those 5 resources, guess what… you can no longer post on eLance because your account will be frozen. This is complete bunk. So, why am I not finding resources on eLance in the first place? Because…
- Poor Quality of responses – I find that I get few qualified responses on eLance, at least in comparison to the other sites I’ve been bidding on. The respondents tend to respond to everything on the site, which means that you have to really filter to find the person appropriate for you. It’s like the problem with Monster.com… too many people vying for too few jobs yields very poor results. But, if that weren’t all…
- High Average Bids — The bids I get on eLance are easily twice as high if not as much as ten times as high as the ones I get on GetaFreelancer.com. Why is that? I’m not sure, perhaps because eLance respondents are mostly in the US while in GAF they are overseas, perhaps? Or maybe because of the sort of resource pool on eLance? You’d think it would be the opposite given that there’s oversupply on eLance.
In any case, I’ve now been banished from eLance because I couldn’t find any resource on that site to meet my needs. I gave them a really good shot - I posted 10 projects there. But I simply was able to find better respondents somewhere else. Sure, if I was exclusive to eLance, I would have awarded them to someone on eLance, but that premise is false. I do what any responsible buyer would do and look to multiple sources for my resources. If eLance wants to take themselves out of the running by not allowing me to include them in my sourcing pool, that just makes things worse for them. I really can’t understand their business justification for that. At least give the benefit of the doubt to the person who is responsible for building their value in the first place — the buyer.
I have had my best luck with GetaFreelancer.com, and maybe Guru.com. Anyone else have any thoughts to share? Disagree with me? Have any better luck with some other sites I haven’t mentioned? Let me know and share! I need some outsourcers for website development, product prototyping, etc,and have not been fully happy with my experiences so far.
Filed under: outsourcing
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Try www.oDesk.com. It is free to post your job and there are 50,000 providers available in the network. oDesk offers both fixed price and time based work, with real-time visibility into your providers desktop to help ensure quality.
Hi Gary –
Welcome to my blog and thanks for the suggestion! I’ll give them a try today, and let you know how it goes.
Rex
I would like to offer you a different perspective. One reason that Elance has made those changes is in response to the provider community. Providers pay for their bids and were becoming disgruntled when the vast majority of Elance bids went unawarded. Any lead generation site that requires providers to pay and only has 1 out of every 10 jobs awarded is likely to receive negative feedback from its members.
GetAFreelancer does attract a number of offshore providers who are able to provide high volume, lower priced work. If price is one of your key requirements then this site certainly will meet your needs. As a US provider, I can neither afford or desire to write 100 articles for $10.00 but don’t disparage those who can.
None of the freelance sites is a perfect solution for providers or buyers. However, without denigrating a site and entire region of service providers, it’s important to understand what your needs are and choose the site that most closely matches those needs.
For a true reality check of US rates, review Writer’s Digest market rates for 2008. You will find that even high priced Elance providers (many published writers, former journalists and others with impressive credentials) are charging far below “market value” even for the U.S.
Hi Karen –
Welcome to the blog and thanks for your very thoughtful and well written comments! Kudos!
Are you saying that bidder are providers (provide my ignorance of terms), and that bidders on eLance have to pay to bid? If so, maybe that’s part of the problem too?
All I’m saying is why should I as a buyer (I thought buyers were providers?) be penalized for posting my job req on multiple sites. Do you believe that eLance is right in requiring exclusivity?
All I can say is that I would have loved to use eLance, but I simply found other places for my reqs. Price was only one consideration. Quality was really the bigger one. But now that I have found those requirements elsewhere, the 20% rule has blocked me from continuing to use the site. A pity!
I too have had to cancel projects on eLance due to the poor quality and limited number of bids. I had one project with very detailed requirements, etc., and where I had a single bid! How can I award a project with only one option? For this to count against me seems unfair.
I understand that the bidders pay, but I don’t understand why eLance would do something to limit the size of the market for their bidders. It seems to me this would just cause the providers to also go to the other channels as well looking for more stuff to bid on.
My first question to all the people who indicate that they are unsatisfactory responses on Elance or any other Site is -
What type of job are you posting?
To say that Elance has substandard providers without indicating what type of work you are looking to have done may be unfairly hurting provider in other categories where quality and overall performance is better.
I am a provider in the Engineering and Manufacturing Section of Elance. I work hard and I do my best to provide top quality services to all my Buyers.
Some times I spend almost as much time determining what the Buyer wants, needs, and expects as acutally doing the job.