Nightmare on Elance II: Revenge of the "Connects"

It's been an interesting week. Elance dropped a bomb when it announced its new membership structure, and the change hit many providers hard--particularly in the Writing & Translation category. After a flood of angry postings on the Water Cooler--and a few outside bloggers covering the story as well--Elance has made changes to its new structure. To its credit, the company appears to be making an effort to listen to its providers.

An Elance representative (Lorenzo, who replied to the last post on this blog) actually called me last night to discuss the changes. Much of what he said was an attempt to explain to me why Elance was making the changes in the first place--nothing I hadn't heard from Elance already, to be honest--but he did tell me he was also looking for feedback. The feedback I gave him was this: I needed more "connects" to make a membership worthwhile; the Premier program can't claim to be merit-based if we have to pay for it; and I'm not wild about paying monthly.

I was happy to hear that Elance was taking our feedback into account, and today they announced some changes to the changes. Here's my impression.

The "connects" situation is just a little more reasonable. In the first installment of this horrow show, it cost three "connects" to bid on a project between $500 and $1,000 in budget. Since I bid on a lot of those projects and would only get about 25 "connects" maximum, that left me with about eight bids in a month--not enough to make my subscription worthwhile.

With the changes, some memberships have slighty more "connects;" not enough to make a real difference, in my opinion. But a few other adjustments make the plan a bit more reasonable. This time around, the "under $250" project category is gone, and all projects budgeted at $500 and under are worth one "connect." This means I can bid on more projects using just one "connect," and it's possible to work it so that my "connects" each buy me a bid and I might not have to buy more.

In addition, "connects" are now spent in multiples of two, not three--two for $500-$1,000 projects and four for higher-budgeted jobs. Spending in packs of three was problematic, as "connects" were only sold in packs of ten--ensuring you'd always have a few left over and would have to buy more to use them. Now there's no disconnect between how I spend my bids and how I buy more.

These changes are not huge, but they do make conditions a little better--and they make me think perhaps continuing my Elance membership might be doable, if I'm careful.

Premier status is free--for now. Elance has promised to make its Premier status free until March so providers are given time to judge its value. Here are my thoughts on that.

For a long time, I worked on Elance under the Professional membership. A year ago, I splurged and bought a Select membership. I saw my value in the marketplace go up significantly; I was winning more projects and commanding higher fees. I realized that buyers were seeing the Select category as an indication of quality, even though it just meant providers spent more money for their membership.

I have a feeling the Premier membership will do the same, except to an even greater degree because Elance will market it to buyers as a merit-based award. That's fine, if it really is. But Elance is still planning to charge us for it in a few months; plus you have to pay them extra to verify your credentials--a waste of money for writers, in my opinion, as your portfolio and feedback should be "credentials" enough. I think that soon it will be difficult to win bids as the high quality option without a premier star, which will cost us an extra $240 per year on top of our original plans. I don't want to pay that much for it and I can foresee having more difficulty winning bids without it--something that makes me believe Elance isn't going to work so well for me in the future, after all.

You can get a refund. No, you can't. Yes, you can. In the early Water Cooler discussions, a lot of people asked about refunds. Initially, Elance responded back that your remaining membership fees (if you've already bought a full year's subscription) could be applied toward a new subscription. No mention was made of refunds. So a lot of writers believed no refunds were being offered, and people were upset.

Later, I saw a few Elance people saying refunds were available on the Water Cooler. Then I got my call from Lorenzo (the Elance employee) who assured me that refunds were, in fact, being offered. I'm not sure if this was simply bad communication on Elance's part or if they truly did intend to discourage people from asking for refunds by not mentioning them, but it's strange how they didn't stress right away that refunds were an option.

You can't use money previously spent on Elance to buy connect packs. No wait, yes you can. When I found out what was going down at Elance, I considered rolling over to a cheaper plan and using my remaining paid membership funds to buy extra "connects." None of the plans offered enough "connects," so I knew I'd have to do that anyway if I wanted to stay. I emailed customer service to make sure it was an option, and I was told it wasn't--I would have to buy extra "connects" on top of my membership fees, no matter what plan I chose.

I wasn't too keen on throwing more money at Elance that way--especially since I'd thought I'd already bought a year's worth of bids. That pretty much clinched it--I didn't want to stay on Elance at all after I heard that news. I decided to roll over to the free plan and ask for a refund.

Later--after posting my thoughts on the Water Cooler--I heard back from customer service that they had made a mistake; that in fact you could use remaining funds to buy extra connects. Confusing, to say the least--but it again made the new Elance a little more palatable.

Low quality bids: are they really that big of a problem? One thing I kept hearing, in my phone conversations and on the Water Cooler, is that low quality bids are a big problem on Elance. Buyers are getting dozens of bids from low quality providers and don't like sorting through them to find the quality workers. I'd offer one piece of advice to those buyers right away: look for the higher prices. Quality workers don't make $5-an-article offers. But at any rate it never sounded quite right to me, this idea that buyers were being inundated with junk bids.

I just took a look in my project history to see how many bids were accumulating on these projects. In my most recent of round of bidding, here's what I saw:

35 bids: one project
20-30 bids: seven projects (mostly in the low twenties)
10-20 bids: fourteen projects
Under 10 bids: eight projects

In my bid history, most of the projects were getting between ten and twenty bids. That seems like a reasonable number--hardly an inundation. These changes seem to have been made to filter out the "junk" bids primarily--but I'm just not seeing that in the marketplace. Hm...curiouser and curiouser.

I'm not sure what to do about Elance at this point. I suspect that even if I do decide to stick it out for a few more months, I'll probably want to leave as soon as the Premier program becomes expensive. I have several great repeat clients on Elance that I wouldn't want to lose, but I can probably keep working with them if i keep a free (Basic) plan and let them get in touch with me. The new changes-to-the-changes have made things slightly better, but regardless of what I do in the short term, this situation has made me think that maybe it's best to cut the strings in the long term.