Top Reasons Not to do Business on Elance
Posted by: jennifermarsh on: May 18, 2009
Elance is quickly becoming the place for the worst outsourcing experience between both buyer and writer. Elance is no longer a lucrative place for professionals, but it’s rather a place where scammers congregate to steal money from each other. Elance is not the place to write content anymore. ePubster has made my article writing experience much more fulfilling. I can submit content like any other ezine article submission site, but I can also write for clients without the hassle of bidding and spending money on connects only to find out that buyer just wants to scam writers into giving “free samples” and never awarding the job.
- Elance is a host for numerous scammers. As a long time Elance bidder, the amount of jobs that are actually awarded is probably around 15%. To dig into that percentage even more, many buyers will post jobs and ask for free samples. It’s well known that these buyers who ask for free samples are really just asking for samples so they can accumulate the 10 articles they need for free and take off, never awarding the job. Elance has become the number one place for these freelance writer scammers.
- There is really no dispute resolution that doesn’t result in a poor rating. Let’s say a buyer decides to take your writing and never pay. Sure, he has the money in escrow, but the buyer just disappears. You file a dispute with Elance. The problem is that while you deserve to be paid, the buyer can come back and ruin your rating. I had premier provider, so I was required to keep a 90% rating. Disputing a non-payment could mean that I lose my rating and ultimately sales. Elance allows buyers to rate you poorly if they refuse to pay you.
- Top writers are nothing but article farmers. If you’re an honest writer just looking for some jobs, get ready to compete against article farmers who resell their wins to very cheap overseas providers. Go through the top Writing and Translation professions – jamos, jkwelch22, ladywordsmith, flour69 – these are all article farmers who bid low against you just to farm out their work to others. Elance’s “professionals” claim to be individuals who write, but actually they sell a bunch of PLR articles to buyers. This is one of the prime reasons why buyers are leaving Elance. They claim that the quality is not there, but what they don’t realize is that the person who bid on their project has actually farmed it out to some offshore person for $1 an article.
These are just a few reasons why I never want to deal with Elance again. Elance is the single worst experience any writer can have on the Internet.
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September 2, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Well, I did not know that jkwelch was a farmer. I have written 150+ articles for her over the past 3 weeks and have not been paid. She advertised the job as an “hourly” job and then when she started sending work to me, it was stated that she would pay me by the article. Although the milestones are set up on a weekly basis ($500 at the end of each week which equals 100 articles per week) she has been irregular in how many she sends me as well as the deadlines. For example, today she sent me 25 and said that they were due tomorrow. When she sent me the first batch of articles it stated that she pays on the 1st and 15th of each month. (I got the job on the 14th.) Well, yesterday was the first and no money…And if that was how she paid then why the heck did she set up $500 per week milestones with 100 articles promised? Sometimes I get 25 in a week, sometimes 50, and sometimes 100. Today, she sent me a new job: links to a website where I am supposed to copy and rewrite some articles there. I think not.