New system aimed primarily at matching newer sellers with buyers
So now it seems I have to wait two hours before I can bid for a job. This is extremely unfair. Not only do experienced creatives/designers have to compete with an unfair playing field, ie people offered to do a job for £10 when it is clearly worth £100, we are now not allowed to bid for jobs as soon as they appear on PPH. What kind of system is this?!
Awful. Unfair. Unprofessional. Discriminatory.
Regards
C. Howe
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I've absolutely no compunction about walking away from an offer either, Gillian. If people want professional work they pay for it. Imagine if we said to an architect: "I'd like you to design my house from scratch. Five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a steam room, a gym, yadda yadda. Oh, and I'm offering £200."
There is always the option of doing £200's WORTH of work - and you spell it out. For that money I can give you this and this. That's all. Otherwise my fee is £XX to cover all your requirements to the professional standard you have asked for.
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Unfortunately, spelling out what £200 will buy will be a waste of time if the buyer originally thought they could get what they wanted for a fraction of the UK professional cost.
Best to ignore buyers that offer a seriously poor budget. If if you can get them to pay more, they are likely to be far more demanding than buyers willing to pay a professional rate.
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About a week ago I was invited by an Indian guy to bid on his project which equated to 10,000 words for £20. I declined, flagged it as too cheap, and made a comment at the bottom. The job was awarded to one of his fellow countrymen and he sent me a message saying I was a con man for charging more and that I was trying to rip people off :( Jobs like this didn't exist on PPH even a year ago, and there seems to be less jobs being posted than ever so it looks as if the buyers are deserting the site as well and don't get me started on the "endorse and improve your cert" malarky. Rant over, for the time being anyway.....
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Numerous times I have flagged a job as having a low budget and in the box I have clearly explained what the buyer is asking for and how much they are willing to pay. Im talking jobs like manually scrape 10,000 websites for business info for £10. I've never once seen one of these jobs removed.
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I do not know if any of you have tried other freelance sites, but low budget buyers and sellers are a common problem. My suspicion about why they have become such a plague on PPH recently are the incentives for introducing new freelancers.
@Rebecca, PPH do not remove jobs just for being low budget, but they apparently do remove jobs from people trying to get their homework done. I have seen some other types of jobs removed too.
@consultopia, because some buyers are cheap idiots. It is the same sort of person who posts a job on the lines of "I want an ecommerce site with all the features of Amazon for £500". Incidentally, what happens to a British solicitor's license if they move abroad?
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The low-budget dropdown is another pointless addition by PPH - I have never seen it do any good.
The main problem is that if you live in India or Pakistan, your costs are low and the local market in those countries has plenty of labour available at low cost. Consequently it is viable for them to compete at very low price points. Naturally, in most cases these providers don't offer a comparable service to a skilled UK provider, but they set the bar low on price.
There used to be a barrier on PPH that overseas providers have to overcome - transfer costs to get money from PPH to the seller account. There used to be a substantial fee for transfers overseas, but the adoption of skrill has removed that barrier.
I think the adoption of skrill ( by understandable demand from overseas sellers ) is the major reason of the upsurge in low-cost sellers and a subsequent drop in job budgets and an increase in buyer dissatisfaction.
We only have to pick up the phone and go to the customer services of many organisations and find ourselves talking to someone in India. It's simply because they have a cheaper cost-base.
Similarly last week I did call customer services at an insurance company for a problem with my policy. After fifteen minutes, the guy I spoke to with poor English skills just failed completely to update my payment details. I gave up and called back several hours later. I was back to the same call center, again in India, but the guy who dealt with me had very good English skills and sorted it out in five and a half minutes (I didn't have a stopwatch - our phones show the call duration on their display ) and gave a perfectly acceptable service.
Buyers on PPH are experiencing the same quality lottery.
It's a telling tale that initialy I spoke to someone from the UK on my second call to the insurance company, that was in the 'presales' support - as soon has he realised the nature of my call he passed me to customer service - in India.
It shows that the insurance company values it's pre-sales operation higher than customer services and is willing to pay a higher price for a higher quality service.
PPH have always stressed that buyers can expect lower costs when using the site and they see these low budget values and may do similarly when posting their own projects. I find that it's only the professional buyers operating inside the UK that provide budgets that are worth pursuing for any substantial work.
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@ Paul I agree completely, and the introduction of Skrill opened the floodgates. The worst part of it is is that many Asians simply don't comprehend the enormous difference between being able to speak English and write it. I did a job for a Belgian client who was using a proofing team in India. Without fail they rejected every piece I wrote and returned it with the message "please alter, this no making the good redding" How the hell do you get the message across to a foreign client that it's his people at fault not me without sounding like a pretentious ass?
I am finding it harder and harder to make a living through PPH that's why I'm hoping Cashfish lives up to its promises. Re your earlier comment okay it's not the greatest name in the world buy hey if I can make a decent living again it can be called anything it likes, it still a major improvement on Deskdonkie :)
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A number of people have thought about starting upstart rivals to address the flaws of PPH, but I think it's a tough task because PPH was early into the market and built a substantial client and freelancer base.
There are at least two major things that act as a barrier to new entrants:
1) Getting enough buyers interested to post jobs and getting enough freelancers interested in offering their services to service the work. It's a chicken and egg situation.
2) Having resources to handle customer service requirements - particularly payment issues and client-freelancer disputes. PPH is much more than a website.
Whatever we think about PPH, Xenios worked hard to build the user-base of PPH and it's a hard act to follow.
I know of two pretenders to the PPH throne that have crumbled - unable to build a user-base.
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I agree with what you say and it's not going to be easy for anyone to break into the market but good on them for giving it a go. I like the fact they are predominantly focussing on hourlies and while there will be a wanted board it is a fixed price so there's no bidding involved and also the fact that by taking my regular clients with me and only paying the monthly membership of £10 I can do the same amount of work but get paid more. I wish them every success and if it doesn't work at least they tried :)
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If you are a freelancer with regular private clients and you have a good relationship with them, why take them anywhere? Beats me. Why is everybody is so anxious to take the 'free' out of 'freelancer these days and only operate through third parties, has being on pph brainwashed people into thinking that it's dangerous to operate independently?
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Taking regular clients you work with within the parameters of a site is common practice, private clients are completely different. In a perfect world we would all have private, trustworthy clients but that just isn't the case. Having been on the receiving end of scam that cost me both £800 and my paypal account due to receiving regular payments from him you will forgive me for erring on the side of caution :) Yes, he was an established client I had worked with for almost a year and I swore I would never put myself at risk of that again.
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Well, I've had a lot of private clients and generally I get them to stump up some cash up-front, and top-ups on intervals.
The 'safety' of PPH is an illusion. While an escrow payment looks safe, there have been several cases of buyer payment reversals, either through some form of fraud, or a buyer telling their bank they are unhappy.
Even if the buyer is trustworthy, we are all trusting that PPH will be here tomorrow, because if it isn't our escrow deposits will be gone too.
I think PPH is particularly invaluable when dealing with clients that don't know you. It provides a history for the client to view, with feedback and (ugh) cert rtings and the assurance that money paid is safely with PPH, not someone who may not actually follow through.
So as a seller, I don't see that PPH is really any safer than working with private clients.
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I have a selection of both private and PPH clients. I don't completely rely on PPH, but it has come in handy for extra money when it's gone quiet on the private scene. However, jobs are becoming increasingly difficult to come by on here that offer a sensible budget. The only good thing that's come out of everything so far is talking to you guys and the sense that I'm not on my own in all of this.
Gill
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That's my main reason for working with PPH - the escrow. I've had a look for escrow companies in the UK and haven't yet been able to find one that would suit. The Bar Council has their own, and there are umbrella services that exist for freelancers like us, but again, it's finding one that is absolutely reliable. I also like the ability to check back on new clients if they have a history on PPH.
Then there's the marketing side. While I do keep a weather eye out for clients elsewhere, it suits me to have work listed that I can bid for. Means I use my time to make money rather than spending unpaid time prospecting, and I'm happy to pay a fee to PPH for providing the service, although the fee scale is unfair to those who don't bill very much.
Now, if my bank were to provide escrow services I'd be very happy. That would give new clients the reassurance that their upfront cash is being well looked after (plus I know they won't run off cackling with the money).
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@ Suzanne
There are plenty of reputable factoring companies who will check out your prospective new client very quickly, and if they take on the risk you're safe because if it goes belly up it will be the factoring company's loss not yours, and up to them to pursue the debt. A darn sight safer than pph's escrow, which apparently is verified not when the client lodges it as you would expect, but when the time comes for pph to pay it to you. So you can never be 100 per cent certain that the money you think you have in escrow, is genuine, and if it isn't pph has no great incentive to chase it because it's no skin off their nose, they have lost nothing. If you've never read about a freelancer doing work on pph and never getting paid for it then you haven't googled very far.
Have you ever worked out how much unpaid time you spend submitting bids, is that not the sme as prospecting?
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Unsubscribe my email address from your mailing list forever immediately since I have determined that you are obviously spam. Why do you fuck your sellers. I still had 69 proposal credits with you. So, since you are making it impossible for me to use the proposal credits you gave me, fuck you.
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@suzanne, payment services, including escrow services, in the UK are now FCA regulated so they should be reliable. Do check them on the FCA register (its on their website) before using them.
A few misconceptions need to be corrected about the impact of Asian freelancers. Scapegoats may be convenient, but facts will serve you better:
1) There are plenty of cheap British freelancers: http://www.peopleperhour.com/freelance?maxHourlyRate=7&countryName=United+Kingdom&sort=latest&filter=all and we have had British people in the thread admit to working for as little as £2 an hour.
2) Skrill is not a cost effective option for overseas transfers. Although their headline fee is low, the real costs are not. They do all international transfers (except in countries where they have a local payment option) in euros, so if you have dollars or sterling you immediately lose 3% for their conversion charge and (unless the receiving account is a euro one) you still have to pay another conversion charge at the receiving end. Anyone with regular work (even small jobs) would be better off either using Paypal or collecting enough money to make a transfer directly from PPH economical.
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Graeme,
PPH does not operate a 'true' escrow service. I don't believe the funds held in 'escrow' are ring-fenced from the PPH financial mix.
Many of those 'cheap' freelancers haven't worked at all on PPH and some 'freelancers' based in the UK are fronting overseas operations despite having a supposed UK base.
I think that before skrill, overseas freelancers in India and Pakistan, etc relied upon bank transfer and I think PPH charges £20 to do that, let alone any other transfer costs, so skrill is an important enabler for overseas sellers.
The 'facts' don't actually prove anything and I'll still believe that overseas competition is highly influential in driving project values down and damaging the reputation of the site from a UK perspective.
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"Scapegoats may be convenient, but facts will serve you better"
well done Graeme _ really good to finally see someone on this massive thread asking disgruntled freelancers to stop pointing their fingers towards others _ i've actually reported and had removed from this thread a few of the more unsavoury and openly racist comments
people need to reflect that whether we like it or not (and personally i don't) we live in a global economy and that this allows our markets to benefit MASSIVELY from sweat shop labour and other pro-Western benefits _ i strongly doubt that anyone of the finger pointers lives in a home that is entirely free of products purchased cheaply as a result _
in the mean time just a very few of the billions of people who liv e in those finger-pointed countries have managed to get themselves into a position where they can try and compete on a level stage _ and 90% of them have done this through diligence and hard work in extremely oppressive and unrewarding climates _
Great Good Luck to them _ it's high time people were open minded enough to see their actions as doing something to restoring a global balance -
Pie and Graeme - thanks very much for the helpful notes about factoring companies. I hadn't realised they were now regulated - or should be - so I'll check out the FCA website. Very grateful!
Pie - I spend less time on here writing bids than I do finding new clients. For a start, I only have to consider the job, have a look at a buyer's feedback, look at my current workload, think about the job and calculate a fee. I'm not having to phone, visit, network, write on spec, search for contact names or market myself. Currently that suits me very well, although I have had private clients in the past and will no doubt do so again, but right now I just want to be able to take on work, do it and settle up with nice clients. :-)
Big stuff going on in my neck of the British Isles at the moment, so the more time I have to devote to that the better! :-D
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You are correct about PPH escrow: they are not regulated by the FCA so its very unlikely that ring fencing etc. would be in place. Its better than nothing and usually works well.
Now, to rebut your rebuttal :)
Yes, but there are still plenty of genuine cheap freelancers in the UK (read a random selection of profiles - its pretty clear who is what), and most of the cheap freelancers from South Asia have never got any work either.
As for Skrill, although their advertised rate is very low, you need to pay an additional 4% on top of it (1% to transfer to the Skrill wallet, 3% for the mandatory conversion to euros). Because they use a small bank with few correspondent banks you are far more likely to to pay additional fees for transfers at the receiving end (typically another £10 or so if it happens). Unless your PPH earnings are miniscule you are better of accumulating £500+ (even if it takes a few months) and then transferring directly from PPH. The point at which you would be better off using Paypal is probably even lower.
Overseas competition is a factor in driving down prices, but I think there is more to it the key factor is changes in how PPH works - particularly CERT (which has been very good for some of those fronting low end teams) as it rewards earnings rather than quality. The incentives for signing up new freelancers have increased the supply too much - and its low end freelancers (who are likely to know lots of other low end freelancers, rather than good ones) who are most likely to respond to them.
There is also a problem with the quality of the buyers. I have recently started using another freelance site, and although the competition is stiff, the buyers are a lot more savvy. PPH is plagued with buyers who cannot specify what they want and have no idea what they want.
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