elance - bad first impression

From everything I understand about Elance, most of the writers are wonderful. There are a couple of 'bad eggs' in there though.

Did you get a chance to really check his feedback? I would suggest checking far back in the feedback history and also looking at the 'repeat client' stats - this gives you an idea of how many people return to a particular writer. (I personally don't use Elance, so I am not sure if it would actually be labeled as 'repeat client'

My only other suggestion would be to possibly post something in the 'warriors for hire' section, there are a lot of great people here (as I am sure you know) who can more than deliver for you.

Based on your post alone, it does not sound like you were overbearing or unclear on what you wanted. I think sometimes people just get overwhelmed --not an excuse for bad business practices but it happens.

I had used Elance many times in 2007 in order to find editors for my articles and ebooks, and this was a very frustrating experience.

If you want excellent articles written by real professionals you should purchase them from Constant Content.

Just had an experience exactly like this. Writer gets offended(after I ask her to change a couple of things) and "regrets" bidding for my job (claims it was too low - and I was paying more than $15 per article), and asks for cancellation. From the start, this writer was problematic, taking days to respond to messages.....I guess I should have seen it coming.

So when writer asks to cancel, I Dispute it. But after getting response from writer that she really doesn't want to continue anymore, I ask Elance to step in and cancel.

Elance at first responded real fast, and said they will look into it, but now, no further response from either Elance or the writer.

Been dragging on for days now, I still have my money tied up in there, and can't even cancel it now (once you dispute a job, it cannot be canceled by yourself anymore).

I search up on Elance scams - And I get plenty. I was surprised to see Elance rated so low compared to their competitors. Now I can see why they have such poor ratings.

I wonder what is the best thing to do now? Stonewall situation. Should I just wait and wait until someone from Elance comes round? They are probably too lazy to look at Dispute cases.

Any advice, anyone?

Advice? Well...my advice is to hire a writer from here on WF. But then I'm slightly prejudiced.

Amanda, Zabrina, Beverly. All good. And I'm not bad either.

Sorry to hear that, Skeeter. That's definitely a hassle that you don't need

I definitely don't think you were being unreasonable. In fact, I think you were almost *too* nice. You gave your writer specific instructions on what he was supposed to do - and he, apparently, ignored them. Then, you tried to point him in the right direction *again* after he screwed up the first time. His behavior isn't just unprofessional; it's downright rude.

Unfortunately, this isn't the first time I've heard stories like this (and it looks like Dellco has a similar tale to tell). It may be possible to find a "diamond in the rough" on elance (or odesk, or something similar), but there are far too many stories about writers on there needing their hands held the entire time. Remember, in addition to giving you much better content than you could create yourself, a professional writer should also save you time - so that you can focus on other things, instead of writing. Sadly, this guy did neither.

Most people offering articles for $5 are not going to want to deal with special instructions. Honestly, I would try the Warrior for Hire section. I know that when I want content for my own websites but I don't have time to write it because I have a lot of client orders, I go straight there. You can easily see their quality through their testimonials and you can look at their post history to get an idea of what kind of person they are. You can see if they are here for quick and easy money or they actually have good work ethic and a knowledge of the writing business.

I agree with many of the others here. Forget Elance as most of the time you will be paying close to double that of what you can get right here on WF. I finally used the warrior for hire and this particular writer has good customer service as well as a 3-5 day turnaround time for 17 articles. Not too bad ^.^ I guess I'll have to wait and see how the quality is though but from the reviews the quality is very good.

so have you got all money back?

how does arbitration system works on elance?

Sometimes writers don't like being told what to do. If you have a writer who kicks up a fuss like that, he/she isn't being professional and you should simply not use them in the future and move on.

The OP DID place a batch order; the first two articles were done to ensure that the writer knew what they were doing. Clearly they didn't, and the OP protected themselves by stipulating a 2 article review process.

Smart move.

Imagine if the project had simply gone forward! 50 articles down the drain and weeks of arbitration.....

Elance is a GREAT platform and one of the best rated sites of its kind. Some people have bad luck sometimes, but you'll find that anywhere. You do need to read ALL of a contractors feedback, look at the types of jobs they have completed and so on. I almost guarantee you that if you examine this person's profile more carefully you'll find plenty of reason NOT to hire them.

As other posters have said, you'll get what you pay for. If you're on Elance paying less than $20 an article, you're going to get garbage or amateur work at best. New providers looking to build a good profile quickly may offer articles as low as $15.

I've been doing this for a long time and I still make mistakes. I launched a massive hiring campaign for writers in November, including on Elance. I found one writer who could meet all my expectations, had great feedback and showed excellent samples. I asked her to proceed with a test job of 20 articles, submitted in 5 article batches over 10 days. She submitted the first 5 and I immediately cancelled the project: it was crap. I mean, total crap. The work was not the caliber of work shown in her samples, nor was it the caliber of work that warranted the good feedback that was on her account...

...except of course for the fact that some people pay for crap and don't even know that it's crap; hence her good feedback. And she probably either paid for her samples, or it just so happened that she had 5 REALLY good articles and the rest of her work sucked.

Anyway, the point is that this is NOT an Elance problem- this is a WRITER problem in general. Too many people think they can just sit on their @$$ at home and write for money because it's easy and they THINK they have skills. Honestly, they're an embarrassment to the industry.

Requiring those two initial articles was the best thing you could have done, so I'm going to guess that although you seem miffed by this interaction, you know what you're doing. So my suggestion would simply be better vetting of your writers. After all, when you find a great writer, you'll be using them again and again, correct? That means it's worth the time to really dig in and invest the time to choose wisely.

Elance is fine- just try again. They're definitely the best of all the freelance sites. Keep your initial article test requirements at quantity 2, and stipulate in your project description that if the provider does not meet the expectations in the first test articles that the project will be cancelled.

That way, Elance will have no choice but to quickly rule in your favor. Remember, all your terms need to be clearly spelled out in the project description, the PMB or in DOCUMENTS THAT YOU UPLOAD TO THE PMB.

Never refer your writer away from Elance to explain requirements.

Also, all you have to do is pick up the phone and call Elance. They ALWAYS answer the phone during business hours and their customer service is surprisingly good. I never waited to contact them via email and wait for the dispute process to play out- there are pre-set delays in place to allow all parties time to...uh...idfk, think about it or whatever. If you pick up the phone and explain the situation you can often get very fast results. It's worked for me numerous times with both clients and providers.

1-877-435-2623

Hi... I can relate to that.

Quality has gone south due to pressures from outsourcing locations where cost cutting takes preeminence over quality.

Look at that, the guy did not even seem interested in the lost business Why, because he had others with lower standards than you waiting in the wings.

Don't let your bad experience with a writer force you to form a bad impression of Elance in general.

Unfortunately, there is tons of competition right now and perhaps your writer misrepresented himself as able to complete the job.

What process did you use to choose a writer? Did you review portfolios and ask for samples of his writing? Did the writer have experience on Elance (or in general) that you could verify?

It's like that everywhere ... not just Elance. There are good and bad writers, designers, programmers, etc.

There's some great writers right here on Warrior Forum. I just hired one and he is amazing. I won't tell you who because his thread is already so successful that he's pretty busy and I want to keep sending my stuff to him.

What I do with writers is test them beforehand. I send them 2 articles to write and pay for those. If they don't get the job done the way I want it done, that's all they get.