High value job??
Come on PPH...this new "feature" is clearly designed to get us to buy more than our measly 15 free credits. It makes no sense.
Firstly, the jobs this new feature is applied to are not high value. One example is 3 x 3000 word articles for £180. Thats 3 days work..
Secondly, the jobs in question will have fewer people applying, meaning your buyers will get fewer to choose from, possibly lower quality and they may find the completed job is not to the standard they want. or they may just pull the job as the candidates are not good enough.
Thirdly, I may only be able to apply for and win 5 jobs in a month instead of 15. This means I will win fewer jobs and pay you less in fees and commission.
and lastly...other platforms offer many more credits (or a fairer system of paying to bid) and will gladly take all of the skilled workers that will leave PPH and head over there.
I have worked on PPH since you started - I was one of the first. That's nearly a decade of hard work for you and tens of thousands earned in that time. This (alongside many of the other recent changes) feels like you don't take that commercial relationship seriously.
Can you explain the benefit to the seller of this change? Considering we are your clients (as we pay your fees) we deserve an explanation of how this is going to improve our experience of your service.
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Official comment
Many thanks for your feedback. I will pass it on to our product team.
Please let me know if I can help you with anything else.
Please use this thread for future comments on this subject:
https://support.peopleperhour.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115009187868-high-value-job
older thread on the same topic and it is more helpful for PPH's team to have all the comments in the same place.
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I just popped into support to see if there was a thread on this, having had an invitation to the job you mention. Laughable. I'd be looking for almost double that for one guide as it is!
I have no idea what's going on at PPH of late, but very little of it seems to be a sound commercial decision for anyone concerned.
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I also wondered if there were any comments on the subject. I was wondering if you can also mark jobs as "low value" so we could filter them out, but perhaps there wouldn't be much left. Another nice feature would be to mark when the description is just an incoherent babble and a freelancer cannot possibly make a serious bid for the job,(yet somehow a bid will be there within 30 seconds of the job being posted).
The method you are using to attribute a job as high value is completely flawed, as Megan has pointed out. It does not factor in the length of time the job will take. The value of the job, as far as we are concerned, is defined by the rate of pay. Another factor that is not considered, but it is putting me off PPH altogether, is the time spent trawling through the site looking for suitable jobs and sending proposals for jobs that are not accepted. Surely there can be some method of streamlining the process for freelancers who have consistently demonstrated an ability to complete projects to a high standard.
Matching the jobs to a freelancer's skills and sending out an invitation is a complete joke now. Today I was invited to send a proposal for a job as a window cleaner, which is quite a long way from my speciality of computer programming. Presumably the word "windows" has triggered a match. -
Simon - that is another example of how the algorithms don't quite work. they forget that they are dealing with people who are desperately trying to sell their skills for a decent wage.
Hourlies are about the best thing on here. At least we set the terms, people search for specific skills and no proposal required. And every now and then mine come up to the top of the list for a while and I get some sales.
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I think it would be really useful to have a web chat with the owner to discuss a range of issues affecting Sellers:
- The 24% fee for Sellers (compared with a 10.86% fee for Buyers).
- The dearth of low-paying jobs that we spend time filtering for PPH.
- PPH's view of a high-paying job.
- The fact that the PPH ads on Youtube don't even mention writers!
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This 'high value' idea is just a petty attempt by PPH to get it's only asset, us sellers, to spend money on credits to prop up the business. I just had an invite to a 'high value' wordpress job with a budget of €130, which is a joke.
Take off 24% commission, exchange rate costs, and the cost of the theme which apparently I would be providing, and I might just earn enough for a cup of coffee.
So PPH will you please explain how this is a high value job with a chance of high profits (your words not mine!). Or is your business in trouble and this is a desperate attempt to raise extra money? It's not going to work you know.
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I'm actually seriously wondering if this is an "exit strategy". The last few weeks and months have seen drastic increases in fees to both sellers and buyers and now this change.
They must surely be bleeding us dry in an effort to boost profits for a sell off...
That's the only credible business reason.
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According to their algorithm £100 is a high value, because if you people remember what was written about the seller fees (when you hover the mouse over the PPH Service Fee in the calculator page) it says why 15% for the first £175 | €240 | $265 ? because according to their Algo it's the daily AVG earnings and it's where PPH makes profit, beyond that it's all yours, 3,5% is a small fee because bla bla bla registered company.
This Algorithm thinks we make £175 daily, so of course it will mark £100 as high value.
But wait a sec, now the Algo thinks we make £500 a day...
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There is something else wrong with that statement, Mohammed, which you don't notice until you look closely at your payments and read the small print. They have a minimum charge per invoice, so even if you earn your £175, your invoices still have a minimum commission charge of £2.50. This means, in practice, that any invoice for less than £71.40 will have a commission charge of more than 3.5%.For example, if you do a job for £20 you will pay 12.5% commission, because of the minimum charge per invoice. PPH allow jobs as low as £7, and that pays 33% commission.
Don't even get me started on VAT. I've written something about that yesterday on another post. There is no way that what PPH does is legal because they refuse to accept their position in the supply chain between the buyer and the seller. They should be charging VAT on everything the buyer pays them. Why should that even be an issue when many of the buyers are businesses? Alright, so the kid who wants his homework doing for £20 will have to pay VAT on it, if he is in the EU. As it is, I don't know who I'm allegedly working for. For cross border work around the EU the rules are very complicated and PPH don't address it at all.
We refer to PPH as being a "website" but that is just a tool, it isn't the type of business. They are as they say, a UK registered company, and they are actually an employment agency.
Megan, you may be right about the "exit strategy" but my take on it is simply that their business model works for them and they make money through a largely automated system, and they don't feel the need to keep their buyers and sellers happy. In the days before the internet an employment agency would be based in a specific area and if they alienated their customers, on either side of the contract, they would lose them and somebody else would pop up and replace them. Now, it is very difficult for another online agency to get started and compete. Would you register for an agency that had no projects to bid on? Would you post a project with an agency that had no freelancers? Another company can build a website and produce a marketing campaign, but they start with an empty database of buyers and sellers. -
Yes Simon, there are lot of hidden farces, there are also ones that won't ever notice, like the "Virtual FX" 2,5% fee they apply when your earnings are in multiple currencies, there is an imaginary FX made to calculate your earnings against your main account currency (while there is no physical money conversion)
example your default currency is EUR, you earned your first £200 ,
You will be charged £200 x 15% and not £175 x 15% + £25 x 3,5%
WHY ?
because you chose the main currency as EUR, and £200 converted to EUR gives €213 (today PPH conversion FX and fees) which is not €240, so you paid more and will pay more on the next invoice.
Fix, is to change your default currency temporarily for the first invoice, or use GBP as main currency for ever, you will pay less fees because €240 = £203 which is not £175, hahaha chicken and egg Brexit
You can imagine how much they are making with the new fee scheme £500 | €600 | $650
Their Algo makes an auto virtual FX and converts your earnings to the main currency to estimate fees, well in case earnings are in multiple currencies no problem but why apply this FX when earnings are in the same currency ?
Some people will convert again their money before withdrawal which means double conversion
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