Sellers worth and project costing miscalculated by PPH Cert Alarming !
There has been a recent wave of changes in the PPH platform mostly directed at the seller's expense from the exorbitant 20% fee, expensive connects, more connects charged for proposals, dispute resolution fee, clarification board becoming useless as none of the questions get through to even connects charges on projects you are being invited to personally I think the most damaging initiative that has come through is the Cert ranking which has done little to nothing for the sellers and has lost its purpose altogether because you would find sellers with a couple of projects with a 5 Cert ranking and those with years of work and hundreds of reviews also holding the same 5 cert.
All the above aside the MOST DAMAGING aspect of the Cert ranking is the unrealistic standard being set and information fed to buyers when they are about to post a new job. Attached is a screenshot for the Job page and if you look below a Cert slider has been given to aid buyers when they post a new job which helps them understand how much a certain skilled seller is worth for jobs on average and what budget should they post and it is very alarming to see that the slider informs them that sellers holding Level 5 Cert are available to deliver all design related works between $50 to $69 and the top-ranked sellers or EXPERTS at the PPH platform start from $70......
What kind of message does this send to the buyer that even the experts with years of experience and ranking/ reviews fall in the price range of $70 and PPH is ready to take the 20% cut from that budget then charge additional for the connects, then charge a currency conversion fee and then once more for withdrawals. I think this is the sole reason why over the last few months we have seen projects related to 3D/ 2D animation, video production, graphics, CGI/VFX and many more skills being posted within the ranges of $50-$100 and PPH also adding a banner a High Value on top of it because as per their research experts are available for $70 onwards and charge 3 connects for a bid. What this does is sets an unrealistic expectation for the buyers and makes it extremely difficult for sellers to communicate the right price to the buyers because they believe the system has already informed them what should be paid for this task.
I think the PPH team should certainly look into this feature as it is drastically reducing the opportunities for the sellers to work on a fair pricing with the buyers and should either do a more detailed research regarding pricing for each and every service being offered and put an actual reasonable price range or remove the pricing suggesting altogether.
Link to Job Page
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This is very alarming. Apart from the low values and the meaningless comparison between the Cert ranks, how can anybody suggest a guideline fixed price for a project without a real a person actually reading a description of the project to put a value on it? I had to look at that page twice to make sure it was talking about fixed prices and not an hourly rate.
The last two projects I completed on PPH took me one week and two hours respectively. They were both for the same buyer and what I thought was a decent rate. How can anybody use that to decide how much I, or anybody else charge per project? -
That is the point I am trying to make. The cert is providing inaccurate information to buyers that whatever they need done within the Design category irrespective of the length and complexity of the project the expert creatives cost for such projects are $75 and this is for a fixed price job. How can they possibly suggest a fixed cost to prospective buyers without understanding what their requirements are and the complete scope of the job?
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It's no wonder that the vast majority of jobs never get awarded. Apart from the vast amount of tyre-kicking by buyers, the totally unrealistic expectations of buyers posting jobs will put them off.
I've noticed the ever decreasing baseline job values, for example full ecommerce sites (often with bespoke requirements) expected for ~£200 and labeled High Value. Not realistic.
I'm now firmly of the opinion that PPH's primary source of revenue is from sellers buying additional credits, and not from commissions.
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This is actually happening across all categories of work and the value of jobs are at their lowest with such unreal budgets being posted due to the misleading CERT that it is practically impossible for an experienced designer to make a living off these jobs. On top of that, they classify a $50 dollar job a high ranking job and charge 3 connect for it.
I find it more surprising that a site like Fiverr that built itself on a 5 dollar service is able to offer its most experienced and expert seller a pro platform separate from the newcomers where they are able to offer their services at better rates or set custom rates for prospective buyers and Fiverr also helps promote their pro status but PPH, on the contrary, is pushing down its creatives and misguiding buyers into thinking the cheapest people are available at PPH for all sorts of projects.
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