PPH, want another chance with James?
Answered
Hello PPH,
Regarding your email 12/01/15 00:30, stating you regret that I haven’t made my first sale on PeoplePerHour within my 3 month "free trial" period.
I too regret this, having spent at least 40 hours of my time, unpaid, making a nice profile, reading the rules, guidelines and tips on bidding etc, raking the potential work listings and reading MANY emails you send me, bidding for work, and reading the forum posts to find out why I have not received any work, etc, etc.
That is one entire week of my time spent, wasted, with no return whatsoever.
So please understand why I find it an absolute insult to my intelligence to have PPH tell me I should now pay PPH £6.95 a month to extend this "privilege" of wasting my time.
Also, my trial period was not 3 months, it was 2 and a half months, as you blocked my account from bidding because I did not have a picture in my profile!
As seems to often be the case: Stupid ideas, rolled out badly, affecting your clients time, stress levels, and view on your business.
And now another bright idea of yours is to take money from me when I've not made a penny from your site.
How about I call up one of my previous clients and say "You haven't given me any work recently, please pay this invoice of £40 so I can make some money".
Sound terrible? Of course it does, now look inwards to PPH wanting to charge me £6.95 per month to "make nothing" and "get no work" and "waste my time with no return"...
And then when I do get a job, and make money, you take a cut from that too?
No!
I will not, and I imagine neither would most people with any common sense or dignity whatsoever!
And those who do pay, you are ripping them off completely and at the same time shooting yourselves in the foot as you are much more likely losing far more potential decent sellers who just have no PPH work history, than you are making from a few £6.95 her and there!
Many sellers who are trying to use your services are struggling, and quite badly. While you just continue to make money from the many buyers, and sellers who are "ranked" high - which the buyers choose over users like myself with no previous work history. And send messages to the public domain/media that you care, you have a thriving business etc.
Yet instead of providing a good service to us who are trying to make headway on your site, you simply watch us struggle as buyers choose the higher ranked sellers, and then you slap us with a monthly bill after we've struggled for 3 months and earned nothing.
This is what you call good customer care? A thriving business?
Why on earth would anyone pay for something which is not only proven by themselves to be flawed and not working, but PPH also confirm it did not work within their communication to the customer?
I cannot make any sense of this approach, at all.
If you just let us continue for free, then bidders like myself would eventually get some work and have PPH history, and we become valuable sellers - making us both money!
And this is the better business model for any site with sellers/bidders. You earn if we do, and if you want to charge me to earn nothing, I will leave.
As it is, you're just pushing your customers away.
From the email you sent me:
"Continued use of the site past this period is only open to Sellers who successfully win at least 2 pieces of work with positive reviews from Buyers. This is so we maintain the highest level of quality that our site is renowened for."
I have never read such a cheap and dirty sentence trying to excuse wanting to charge a customer for something!
Please, really please, tell me why my paying you £6.95 per month has any bearing whatsoever on your site's quality!
You stated the actual issue is: "You do not have 2 pieces of work with positive reviews from buyers", yet even if I pay you the £6.95 I still have no previous history, and no positive reviews.
How does monetary payment resolve an empty work profile?
I could either: Continue for free; Or pay you £6.95 - What difference does this make to seller or buyer quality? Either way I am the same seller, same profile, same rank, same history, same person, same everything.
It simply stinks of a way to make money from me because you have not made anything from me through your high percentage cuts on work, had I obtained any.
Again you insult my intelligence, and show me your business is not run by people who care about customers or how to manage such things.
Perhaps you need to employ some more experienced heads of departments to start proof reading your new schemes and ripping out the nonsense ideas you put forward.
(Not to mention yet another spelling mistake in a template email of yours "renowened"... you know spell checkers are included in all major text editors, right?)
You get so much wrong, so often, and occasionally so so badly, yet you allow the very people who had these stupid ideas or bad communications to try to fix the problems.
Anyone who has such bad and unfriendly ideas when running a business should not be the ones to try to resolve it. The resolve should be from people who would not have made such a huge mistake in the first place.
Like blocking accounts due to no profile picture. What a farce that was, and anyone with ANY previous experience in making changes to customer/business relations etc would have seen the reasons that simply was not a viable thing to have done.
How much work did this make for your paid staff to resolve in support emails? Calculate the loss in resolving the issue, staff time wasted, and what good did it bring to PPH, it's users, or the site?
I could put a profile of any of the 7 billion people, an image from Google, etc. It brought nothing but a false sense of security to sellers. Pointless waste of your time and money, and our time and lack of being able to bid!
And anyone with any experience in rolling out new services could have told you that in passing on the way to make a coffee!!
Seriously, employ some better thinkers, or have more meetings with larger groups and discuss the pros and cons so the potential issues can be arrived at BEFORE you roll it out and need customers in your forum to tell you where you went wrong.
It's so bad, it really is...
The reason I have not obtained work from your website is nothing to do with me, my grammar, my abilities, or my methods of making proposals.
I am a highly skilled, experienced, and professional web designer and developer. I have my own business name, website, and previous clients.
I have no communication barriers, I speak English fluently, and write very professional and competitively priced proposals.
The one and only reason I have not obtained work from PPH is simply because buyers choose "ranked" sellers over those with no previous PPH selling history.
And I have had this confirmed by 4 or 5 buyers, who have replied to my proposals and messages and outright stated "Sorry, I want someone with previous PPH history".
I accept it is difficult to make headway without previous PPH history, this is the same as all other similar job sites.
However, to only give us 3 months chance, and then we have to make you money without us getting any return, is an outright con!
And I find it disgraceful that you state within public media that you care about your site users, when in fact quite obviously and specifically you only care about the ones making you money.
Of course you run a business and revenue and profit is essential, but you seem to concentrate your time and efforts on certificates, and rankings, and all things which only benefit those who are already established and get the work.
You know, those sellers were new and without previous PPH history too you know!
Think about this scenario:
What if PPH had no sellers without previous PPH history, because we cannot get work due to those sellers with ranking and certs, and then we leave because you want to charge us?
ALL the bids would then be from those with previous PPH history, and then it would be a price and certificate/rank war amongst sellers.
This would not be good.
All site users are valuable, even those without previous history, as they provide choice for buyers and statistics to you having a lot of sellers on your site to attract buyers.
Without allowing new sellers - without previous history, certs, or ranks - to be able to work their way through the ranks, for free, then your site and as a result business will not advance, because you will only be trading with the current highly ranked sellers, and will not obtain new sellers to work for the additional buyers you want to attract.
Things might be rosy now, profits coming in, and improvement plans in the pipeline, but some of the decisions PPH make seem to come from people without any business or customer care knowledge, or the ability to fore-see potential issues.
While some of these "niggles" may not cause big issues to you now, and only us lower ranked sellers are affected so why would you care, you are setting bad channels into motion, which with the way the internet and media is today, and with so much competition, you are poisoning your future!
If you want to only have valuable sellers on the site, and get rid of the bad ones, then you are poking in the wrong areas.
DAILY I see sellers copy/paste messages to many buyers in the message board, and messages from sellers who clearly have not bothered reading the requirements but message anyway trying to get the buyers attention. And often in broken English.
"highest level of quality that our site is renowened for"? I think you are looking at another site...
You have so much potential with this site, but you push out stupid ideas and systems which cause issues to the very people who you need to make your site work in the first place.
I have turned off all my notifications from you other than responses to this thread, and will not continue to use the services you provide.
I have already lost a great deal of time I put into this site, and it concerns me greatly that you deem it acceptable to want to charge me to continue to make nothing from you.
"Another chance" as you put in your email would have been to allow me to continue for free, as it costs you pennies every month to have my account and data in your database.
Good luck.
Regards,
James
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We have found 3 months to be a good time for a new seller to win their first job on PPH, it's similar to a probation period you would have in a job. This is in place to maintain quality of our community
The charged option is to give new sellers who miss this a longer period to try and win work from PPH which in turn should help you to build your profile
So just to clarify - either win the work,, prove that you're a quality seller, and are therefore allowed to stay on PPH. Or, you don't win the work, you fail to prove that you're a quality seller, but you can still stay on PPH if you pay, and it no longer matters that you are diluting the quality.
If you fail probation in a job, you can't normally bung the firm a backhander to persuade them to keep you on.
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Many good points raised here, with some interesting philosophy included. I have just been asked to pay a fee per month to continue. I did not get any sales, or even ask friends to endorse me. To be frank, I put up my profile, but did not push for work, or market my PPH freelance business.
I can see some folks are obviously irritated to say the least.
I can also understand reasons why I might do this myself if I was running PPH. I would not want many hundreds of "dead" inactive, non-updated profiles in my PPH.
What would happen? Buyers might contact these sellers inactive or not, and get no reply. How would that enhance PPH's reputation--having piles of unsuccessful or possibly “passed away”, freelancers all over the place.
Yes PPH could just send the sellers a final Dear John, but why immediately lose potential good sellers. I think paying this fee might confirm the seriousness of the seller, and possibly spur them on to greater things.
This appears to be a pretty nice free platform (minus PPH commission) for hard working freelancers to sell their high quality services. I am told many here are making a tidy living. I would not like lots of dead dross around taking up my bandwidth if it was my PPH.
Perhaps better ways of doing it could be broached, but quite frankly--I can’t think of any right now.
I like to try to see all the angles!
regards
James
p.s (No, I don’t work for PPH)…smiles
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've been on PPH for about 3 years and made in the 4 k region yet PPH have NO loyalty to sellers whatsoever. It's like talking to a wall. Any issues are just a waste of time as complaints are moved though the ranks of the "customer service ninjas". The organisational culture is lacking in terms of integrity. I've slowly stopped working via PPH and no longer recommend them to others. I tend to lose money using PPH - it takes them 48 (yes, 48?! hours) to transfer funds to banks and they take 15% of the first job and 3% of the rest, so quite a chunk, and it's got the point that if you aren't working for free for buyers you run the risk of getting bad feedback - so fair rates (which PPH also benefit from if they had any sense to realise) fall to the wayside. They clearly think this is good business sense but it is not a valid or smart long-term strategy. PPH pushes quantity over quality. I'd like to be able to say that 3 years of PPH has been a positive experience, but in terms of time the amount of time wasted - with clients, invoicing, info, trying to reach someone at PPH who listens, is more than any money made. I think PPH will slowly get overridden by very cheap sellers and low quality work and will fade out in a few more years. The loyalty should be with the sellers - but they just don't realise this.
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Hi James,
Thanks for your message and thanks for trying out PPH, Just to touch on a few points you made:
Please note all sellers need a picture when working on PPH that's part of our rules and also a way to have some transparency so everyone knows who you are dealing with in our marketplace. So, i'm sorry top hear you missed out on half a month but it is an essential part of using PPH.
We have found 3 months to be a good time for a new seller to win their first job on PPH, it's similar to a probation period you would have in a job. This is in place to maintain quality of our community
The charged option is to give new sellers who miss this a longer period to try and win work from PPH which in turn should help you to build your profile
If you are having trouble getting your first job the please take a look at our blog, we have some advice on winning your first job, increasing your CERT, negotiating with Byers and sellers sharing their stories: http://blog.peopleperhour.com/group/user-stories/
Many thanks,
Pilarx
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Can you please activate my account ASAP I have more then £1500 in my wallet. Why you guys working without any physical address or contact number. When I'm trying to contact you you always come up with lame excuses after one day. I have been working on this platform since last 6 month and I lost all my efforts and valuable clients due to this.
Looking forward to you guys I hope you come up with some solution.
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Pilar, you say
"Please note all sellers need a picture when working on PPH that's part of our rules and also a way to have some transparency so everyone knows who you are dealing with in our marketplace."
A picture does not provide proof of identity, or any evidence of skills of track record. What it does is disclose the seller's sex and race, which are entirely irrelevant to almost all the work available on PPH (and you are therefore enabling discrimination).
The photos are not verified in anyway, and I am pretty sure that at least one buyer (a timewaster I mentioned on another thread) has multiple accounts with stock images as pictures.
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@Pilar
Here's some really good food for thought for you/PPH.
Pilar wrote:
"The charged option is to give new sellers who miss this a longer period to try and win work from PPH which in turn should help you to build your profile"Giving sellers "another attempt to win work" does not carry a necessity to charge.
PPH "choose" to charge after 3 months.The probation period could be 6 months free, or the "paid extension" could have some free options, or even just a reasonable price might be an idea!
What about £2 per month?
Not only would you by far cover your costs for my usage of site resources, but you must surely earn decent profit from that?Instead you can try to charge me a huge lump (£6.95) to make "good money" and risk me leaving - a likely result for most sensible people.
And "sensible" people who would not pay this fee are arguably the very ones you want to keep here! They have thought, morals, standards, and that (generally) makes for a good worker producing quality work!Where "X" & "Y" are "payment frequencies", and X is < Y by far:
Does your £6.95 with X outweigh £2 with Y?I'd like to bet it would not!
It's often the case that businesses make much more profit from a lower price as it brings about a higher frequency of purchases/payments. For PPH this would mean more revenue, profit, and more sellers on the site increasing the business client base and more users trying to make you money from job percentage cuts.
Then the business grows from popularity, etc.
You are simply over charging, and people will not stand for it these days. We don't have the money to not be prudent.
Not when we literally get nothing in return, other than "another chance" with a system/service already proven to be useless to us so far.
You should recognise my not getting work was not necessarily a reflection on my abilities, just that competition is high and 3 months with only 15 bids is quite low and not really enough to be competitive.
Another 3 months might mean I get work, but the £6.95 makes no difference, it changes nothing at all, and my throwing money at PPH helps "me" in no way.But, instead of recognising I am struggling to get work and so "increase" my chances somehow, you instead block my account completely, introduce nothing whatsoever to resolve the reasons I got no work, and then want to charge me £6.95 to continue as well?
What terrible customer service, and a really poor business model.You can state "But it works for many people". Yes, sellers who already have feedback etc. And while I appreciate it can take time (and effort) to build up feedback, to want to charge me such a high price to do so is simply absurd!
Why would I pay money to something I have already tried and it didn't work, and you yourselves told me didn't work?
It's like a supermarket manager stating: "Sorry your cheese sandwich wasn't very nice madam, here's another one, exactly the same sandwich as the one you did not like. That'll be £3.50 please..."And lastly, but most importantly:
If I did pay PPH £6.95 each month, it'd be from money I've made "away" from PPH. So I'd be injecting revenue into PPH company, and getting nothing back.So you want money I make from elsewhere to inject into PPH? Ok, then let's talk "business".
I'll give you my £6.95 from away from PPH and inject revenue into your business, what will you do for my business?Can you guarantee some return on my investment? Or am I just throwing money at you?
Would PPH, as a business, throw money at another business without knowing if they will get a service or product back from it?
Of course not. -
I've just investigated how many bids I get for £6.95, and it's terrible.
£6.95 per month for 3 months for 150 proposals in total.
So I can log in every other day and place 3 bids, for £6.95 a month?
To give your buyers more choice of sellers, and give PPH some money and "total seller stats", but likely nothing for me?If I wanted to try again for one month only, I have to pay £9.95, and I only get 30 bids.
C'mon, are you in the real world here? A tenner for 30 bids?
Does anyone actually pay this? If they do, you should feel ashamed you take their money.So I pay £9.95 to receive 1 bid a day for 1 month for a poor system full of faults and errors, spammed to death by you with your promotional stuff, terrible terrible job descriptions with no information or any way to know if the buyer is serious or not (they don't reply to board messages).
And having already tried and realised I cannot compete with already established users?How can you not see how ridiculous and exorbitant this is? I'm not being funny, or nasty, it's ludicrous!
Your system is not worth this.
I'd possibly ("possibly") consider it if the buyers were higher quality, with at least being forced to write a decent description so I don't waste my paid-for bids on pointless things like "I need a website, thanks".
Sure, I could save my bids for the better ones, but they're "always" won by high ranking cert/feedback sellers.And what if there are no decent jobs I can use my "expensive" bids on for a week or two? Do I get a refund on bids I do not use in the month?
You rip sellers off so much, but buyers get to plod on their merry way writing poor job descriptions and expecting us sellers to jump through the hoops.
I won nothing in 3 months with 45 bids, so what sane person would pay £9.95 for 30 more bids?
In essence, this is a "gamble". And the odds are "very much" in PPH's favour!£9.95 to gamble if 30 proposals give me work or not, with no guarantees, and if I do win, you take even more from me through the job percentage cut?
Someone somewhere in PPH is running their Ferrari on Champagne...
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Still no reply. Wait, why would there be? I have been "answered" apparently/
You've taken the liberty of marking this as "Answered". What, because you have written some words?
PPH customer care really is atrocious.All you did in your "Answer" is re-iterate what I already knew. And re-quoted what was not only in the email you sent to me which I was contesting, but also what I actually stated in my first post where I called out the things which where in the email.
To simply "re-quote" the things I've questioned and to then call that response "the answer to the question" just shows how terrible PPH deal with it's "customers".
And you may not care about little ol' me leaving, a single digit, but I most likely represent a fair number of other sellers in the same position which you are forcing out.
Are you sure you are big enough and established enough to do this? -
i Asked to support and they answered this:
Hello Aldo
Thank you for your message.
Your account is now limited as you didn't reach our requirements and to further continue working on the site you should pay otherwise you won't be able to work on the site.
Please let me know if I can help you with anything else.
Thanks
Suresh
That is ridiculous!!!!!
This is the end of my relation with PPH
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@Pilar
- Please note all sellers need a picture when working on PPH that's part of our rules and also a way to have some transparency so everyone knows who you are dealing with in our marketplace. So, i'm sorry top hear you missed out on half a month but it is an essential part of using PPH.
What a joke - I'm not a seller, I'm a buyer...Please explain to me how some seller using a sexy model image they snagged off of the internet = transparency? You screw james out of two weeks because he didn't submit to a silly rule abused by most? Do you actually think buyers make a purchase decision on an avatar image?
PPH's biggest problem is paranoia and running a close second is control issues. PPH get's in it's own way with goofy rules and the comment above is a fantastic example.
I'll give you another...sending me a review request for support only to see that I can no longer review since the ticket was closed....IN LESS THAN 24 HOURS.
PPH seems to go out of their way to piss off buyers...baffling!
I'm about where Aldo is...PPH has become too much of a barrier to doing business. Your attempts to milk every nickle from sellers creates way to much overhead for everyone...buyers included.
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