Do Not Use Elance As A Buyer Or Provider Or Contractor

I am sharing a true bad experience from Elance. Not only me but also a lots of users got a lots of problem in Elance.com.

I was working in Elance.com as a freelancer or contractor. Everything was good and my rating was average 4.90 at level 7 among 45 reviews. Around 3 months ago i was going to place my proposal on a project and saw that
"

Your ability to view job details and submit proposals has been suspended.​

"


I faced the problems:
1. I bring my profile in a good position and that time they suspended my account without any reason.
2. I did not able to withdraw my balance.
3. They did not send me any email regarding this, why they suspend my account?
4. They did not send me any kind of notification regarding this.

So i thought what should be the possibility to get suspended. I found one reason below:

"I was a worker of vworker.com or rentacoder.com. All of you may know that vWorker merged with freelancer.com or freelancer.com acquired vWorker. So all workers from vWorker transferred to freelancer.com. I had a permanent buyer in vWorker, as freelancer.com is more spamming so i told my buyer to come in Elance.com not freelancer.com. He made a project as it was running in vWorker and gave the payment in Elance. After that they suspended my account."

Now Readers please tell me, is it my fault to bring a buyer in Elance.com?

I told my buyer to call them, he did a call and after that they created a ticket that my id is not verified that is the reason. Their system has a lots of problems, i was a small business member in Elance.com and my membership validity had around more 16 days. So i need to wait more 16 days then need to become individual and then have to verify my ID. After 16 days i changed my membership to individual and applied for ID verification. But the main problem is that they use third party to do verification process. So i had to wait another 7 days.

At last i got my Elance profile by verifying my ID and ready to place proposal in projects.

My story has not finished yet, telling you more shocking story.

1 month later, that buyer had given me another project in Elance.com as i see that my profile is okay. The strange thing is that after completing this project Elance.com again suspended my account without any reason. They did not tell me why they did it and did not allow me to withdraw my payment.

Even i don't know till now what is the reason.

They only do this with me cause i am a Freelancer or Contractor. My fault was that i bring a buyer from Freelancer.com to Elance.com.
My buyer profile is almost okay, they did not do anything to my buyer profile. They only suspended my profile.

Elance always treat to Contractor as:

1. Like an insect.
2. Always hateful.
3. Don't care to Contractor.
4. They only need their buyer not Contractor.

Another shocking story about their Dispute process. I had project running about $50. After completing my project the buyer did not give my payment and filed a dispute. I was always responding to Elance.com for this dispute process but buyer did not responding. I was always ready for call conference but buyer did not. They also offer a third party for arbitration process that that fee is $199.

So is not it ridiculous to give a fee $199 for a $50 project?

I gave all of my evidence that i completed this project but at last they refunded the money to buyer.

SO actually what did i get? They always give all the things to buyer. All the buyer are human and All the contractors are insect. They even do not have an option to rate buyer.

So my request please don't use Elance.com for your projects try other sites like oDesk.com or Freelancer.com.

 

On the topic of bullshitting services... Don't use knoj.com either - They're a pyramid scheme.

 

Very good to know, I won't be using them at all.

 

You failed, move on. Elance is good.

 

Try ODesk. Or get direct clients using Craigslist.

 

I am sorry that you faced a problem with them. But, I think to malign them, you must sort your own ways. I have been using Elance as a contractor as well as buyer for 2 years now and not even ONCE in this period have I faced any problem. On the contrary, I would never ever recommend Freelancer.com (a spam) for both clients and contractors.

 

Dear All,

These days Elance sucks. Without giving any prior notification they are suspending account. I would recommend people to use oDesk or other business networking site. Leave these people with there policies. They have irritated too much to the people.

Thanks,

 

Try the warrior forum, warriors for hire. Never had any problems there.

 

I don't know what went wrong with you, Faria18000 and others, but believe me, Elance is BEST freelance website. As far dispute, I had those issues too but I always got paid back after I proved that the work was done. Yes, on one occasion it was Arbitration thing came up but I could not attend the conference hence I lost the money but in 2 and half years career on Elance, I NEVER had any problem, even when I had to withdraw $2000 at a time. If they were bad, they would have suspended the account right at that time to snatch money. I also brought many buyers and contractors and I earned 10 credits every time. I am sure if the survey is conducted, 99.99% people would say they LOVE Elance. It is sad this happened to you but you need to tell people what really went wrong that they suspended your account. Thank you!

 

I recently had web site work done by a guy on freelancer, and I have to say he knew X Cart inside and out, and solved a problem in a matter of a couple of hours, that godaddy had given up on after THREE WEEKS of head scratching.

He only charged me $30. The first person I got on freelancer could not solve the problem so she cancelled the job and I gave it to the next guy.

I personally would not use rentavworker since my sister owns that company, and she is the reason I needed to hire website work.
She gave me the X Cart program, domain and hosting on her server as a Christmas gift in 2010, and then when she got mad at me in Dec 2013 (3 yrs later) she kicked me off the server (gave me 6 days to move my sites) and to this day 02-15-14 has still not transferred the license key to my name, so that I can get Tech Support from X Cart directly.

I am sure many of the people for hire on there (rent a v worker) are probably good, even great, but she, the CEO, is unprofessional and vindictive. Not only would I be scared to let her have access to my sites, but I would be worried to be one of the workers on there! lol
She will consider this as me slandering her, but it is not slander if it is the truth. I have been trying since mid Dec to get her to transfer the license key. At this point I am going to change from X Cart to a different cart and she can KEEP the useless key that is registered to MY domain only, at least I can warn other people before they fall into one of her sneaky traps. It's all GOOD until you make her mad, then it's no holds barred!
By the way, I am NOT affiliated with any type of SEO, vworker, freelance, etc
I am not anybody's competitor in this field, just a person with a small retail website that was just down for a month because I trusted the wrong person.

 

Wow, that's awful. If Elance wants to suspend an account they need to mail you the warning or the reason why they are doing that. Digital Point does that and by me, that is needed.

I guess Elance actually had a reason why they suspended you. They didn't do that because they don't love you. They take profit from every transaction you make so there is absolutely no reason to suspend you without a reason.

About project of $50, it's totally your fault. You can't trust people online. First ask for money then do your work. I had over 500 clients in 10 years and I only trust few of them and they trust me (at least I think they trust me).

I don't know what to tell you. Freelancer.com is nothing better. Everybody is talking bad about them. However, till now I haven't heard a single bad rumour about Odesk or Elance. They always played fair if you are playing fair and sticking to their guidelines.

 

The only thing I know is that Elance (at least at one time) was more expensive than other sites. I think one drawback to sites like these is they seriously frown on giving out personal emails and contact information. I hope if you were entitled money for work done you get it. Other than that, I would suggest discussing with someone the site's terms of servicce to make sure you've done nothing wrong.

 

Had many bad experiences with these types of platforms. That is why ekast.co was created - to help minimize issues by improving quality assurance. Mainly, the big problem with these sites is any cowboy can sign up. There is no onus of responsibility by the platform itself.

 

Today Elance Also suspended my profile for no reason. I have maintained the rating of 4.7 and done more than 60 jobs. Now don't understand what should i do now :-(

 

I only opened a single Gig at elance. And it went well actually.