I am getting ready to post some projects on eLance to get high quality *haha!* content for my web sites written by non native english speakers. I have never used elance, If you have please share your experiences or pitfalls to watch out for. thanks, WP
Rentacoder is much much better place..... RAC has LIFE and everytime i visit elance its give me a feel that only i am visiting this site
It's full of incompetant indians. I used it and found the best feature to be the "logout" link. Excellent.
You just have been unlucky, there are many good Indian companies there or atleast there were when i was working there. I have worked with elance for 3 years, i left them 'cause they just dont listen to sellers/service providers there. Once i won a bid for project worth around 10k, but the specifications were modified after i won the bid, and it was not a small change a lot of functionality was added, so i told the client that it would cost extra, he said he wont pay anything extra, he contacted elance, he got our account suspended with no fault of ours. We had 5k in our elance account at that time, those suckers took all our money, we made numerous calls to them, even contacted the owner (who is Indian, one of the partners), but they just won't listen. We had around 60 completed projects, total earnings shown in our account for 60k with 5.0 positive ratings out of 5.0, you just cannot ask for a better profile than that one. But still elance took side of the buyer. Really sucked, That was it from our end. We did not work with elance after that. But since you are a buyer here you should be okay, check the feedbacks, check total earnings of the company, ask for references and then assign the project. I have left elance for good, its been more than 2 years now.
The site is 98% indian workers. 97% of the providers are either incompetant or are unable to understand yoru instructions. Believe me, if I were to show you what I asked for and what I got on one project, you would see what I mean. It's no good for me. I head-hunt from DP now and have had some outstanding work I am lookings backwards at forwarding a great but dim busyness relations withh you and your wife. P.S - I also see my arse because most of the indian companies put USA location in their profiles, open a PO Box and work from India. Blatant bo**ocks.
I agree with you here. There are a lot of fraud companies in India, but there are more good companies than them, this perception that Indian companies are lousy or incompetent is not good. Take any big company(IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle), most of their work is done from India or by Indians.
I've got nothing against Indians!!! I DO have a problem when they offer services to people from the UK and US or Europe and can't speak a word of English. Tell me that's ok! You end up locked into an agreement with someone who can't understand what the hell you want. Absolute nightmare. My experiences of Elance have been ALL bad.
Well, yea there are some guys who just complete their graduation or did some course from some institute and jump to elance or RAC to make some quick money, they don't have business etiquettes, the dont speak good english, but as i said earlier i know many companies who have good employees, they are professional is their work area, its just the matter of choosing the good company, ofcourse they would charge thrice the amount than the lousy noobies, but it still would be cheaper than getting it done in US or UK or Europe.
I agree with that! There is a debate about outsourcing work to India here in the UK at the moment, it's costing a fair few jobs. I think that is all healthy competition. I headed to Elance hoping to save a few quid myself , lol
Yea competition is always good, but the trend i've seen so far, salaries did not drop in US due to work outsourced to India or any other country. It still costs the same. I know a few of my clients who get a basic 10 page static website done from me @ $500, and they charge their clients more than 5k. One project i did was sold for 15k, i was paid $800.
There is a reputation/review system on elance, you can read a bidders reputation and past reviews. I haven't used elance yet but I would assume you can reject people based on not having enough reviews or good enough reviews.
SumitBahl there is a trust/ignorance ineffeciency going on that allws that sort of arbitrage. I certainly would never outsource coding work on unique projects as there is no way for me to enforce my intellectual property rights. I am much less concerned about this with html or graphics work.
Ofcourse you can, reputation/feedback is the main criteria of the buyers to select a winner there. Its not like one with the lowest bid wins, i have seen many cases where the one with the highest bid won, just cause he has done 50+ projects and has 5.0 feedback. But its getting very expensivve for sellers there, if i remeber correctly they were charging $2 per bid apart from the memebership of $1200 per year, and that too for only one categor (You are only allowed to bid in one category) out of 10-12 categories the've.
To be frank nobody gives a damn about copyrights or patents in India. If you've a some unique idea to be developed, select an Indian company who have their employee/associate/partner in US or your country, sign a legal document with them which hold validity in your country to be safe. Plus the companies who've their contact person in US/UK are of good repute (generally).
Thats a good suggestion thank you. SumitBahl do you have suggestion for an alternative to elance ? I am looking for content writers not coders.
If I were you I would use DP. Expensive but if you pay top dollar on here, you get top dollar. That's what I've learnt about DP.
DP is certainly a hot market atm, and prices here are not that steep compared to some other marketplaces on Internet.