🐈
» Forums » Clients » Re: Dispute
Page options
27e52cb1
Community Member

Dispute

Hi! A freelancer, Ashfaque **Edited for Community Guidelines**, has performed poorly, charged in excess of his original quote, and broken my public site, after weeks of poor communication. I asked him to remove his buggy work, and demanded a refund. Please advise how I can pursue this. Obviously, he is refusing. 

22 REPLIES 22
petra_r
Community Member


@Oli S wrote:

Hi! A freelancer, xxxxxxxxx, has performed poorly, charged in excess of his original quote, and broken my public site, after weeks of poor communication. I asked him to remove his buggy work, and demanded a refund. Please advise how I can pursue this. Obviously, he is refusing. 


Hourly or fixed price contract? Sounds more like hourly...

 

If it is an hourly contract, all you could dispute are hours logged with very poor activity, time not spent working on your project, manual time or hours without work memos, not the quality of the work, as you pay for the time worked, not the work product. There is also a 30 day limit from invoice date.

 

Have you given the freelancer a chance to rectify the issue? Did you hire someone with a good history (and at a realistic rate?)

 

27e52cb1
Community Member

Hiya! Thanks for this - I wrote a lengthy reply and hit "submit", but got a red box saying the thread was no longer available 😕

 

Anyway, the short version - they had great feedback, a lower hourly rate, blew out the quoted hours to make it worth their time I suspect, which I accepted given their positive reviews. Budget blew out beyond their top end, and it was still not even half done (as in, barely started), over 30 hours of logged time (this project was a simple module hack to one module in squarespace - 4 hours of work, this much I know), and my live site was broken - they didnt even use the test page i created. It took days for them to correct my live site back to normal - a total embarassment. I have requested a refund with them. I'd love to be made aware of any Upwork channels to go through. many thanks. 

Oli:

The important thing is that you stop working with this freelancer.

 

Clearly he is not capable of provding you with the work that you need done.

 

In the future, you would benefit from reviewing the work of a new freelancer sooner and more frequently. It would have been better if you had stopped working with this freelancer after only an hour or two.

 

You can save money by hiring multiple freelancers and evaluating their initial work, and then ending the contracts with everybody but the very best.

Thanks for this! I do appreciate the insights. It doesnt however change that i've been theived of nearly $400USD. An astronomical amount for what was (not) done. If i'm away in between, its a bit worrying that as the fake work is debited from my account, that I cant go back and have it refunded .All the convos are documented. I've pursued a refund with my credit card company, regardless. 

rverang
Community Member


@Oli S wrote:

I've pursued a refund with my credit card company, regardless. 


You could be in violation of Upwork TOS if you do that.

petra_r
Community Member


@Renante V wrote:

@Oli S wrote:

I've pursued a refund with my credit card company, regardless. 


You could be in violation of Upwork TOS if you do that.


 No, not "could"... a chargeback *IS* a ToS violation, his account would be suspended and the debt likely passed to a debt collection agency.

 

 

Thanks for this! I do appreciate the insights. It doesnt however change that i've been theived of nearly $400USD. An astronomical amount for what was (not) done. If i'm away in between, its a bit worrying that as the fake work is debited from my account, that I cant go back and have it refunded .All the convos are documented. I've pursued a refund with my credit card company, regardless. 

petra_r
Community Member

Oli, lesson in "you get what you pay for..."


At any rate, look at the work diary. If the freelancer used the tracker, worked on your project and has a work memo and reasonable activity levels, you will not win a dispute. Anything beyond 30 days can't be disputed at all.

 

Frankly unless we are talking about a huge amount of money (and 30 hours at a low rate ain't that) I'd be tempted to advise you let it go and close the contract with honest feedback.

 

Next time pay an expert a decent rate, your chances of getting a working product quickly are way higher and you might find it works out cheaper as well.

 

 

Speaking NOT about Oli or the original poster's situation, but speaking generally:

 

In situations like this, it often seems as though the client is more concerned about the "principle" of the thing than he is concerned about his own business interests.

 

This means that the client is concerned about the soul of the freelancer, or about the freelancer's karma. The client wants to "set things right" and make sure that the freelancer is not paid unfairly.

 

This is commendable, I suppose, that a client would want to balance the karma of a stranger. But other clients take a more "mercenary" approach and decide that they don't really care about the freelancer. They just want to move on and get their work done, and they decide that it isn't worth their time or effort to try to get a refund from a freelancer whose work was so poor that the freelancer doesn't deserve further attention or consideration.

This is a good rundown. However having gone through shady ropes before, and given the clarity of the poor performance and poor practice this time around, it's been a little harder to just let money fly out the window willy-nilly. 

27e52cb1
Community Member

Hiya - thanks for this - totally get it. In the past i've paid 4x the rate using your approach, freelancers with good feedback, etc. The experience has been as follows:

Person 1 - gets booted off upwork for a fake account

Person 2 - same as above - using a fake name and image

Person 3 - disappears, lies about having started work, etc.

 

This chap seemed to be from an area with lower labour prices, but the feedback was quite incredible. I didnt have much reason to doubt their performance or trustworthiness. 

 

Again, I appreciate the comments, it just seems to be a tough thing to crack. Talent-scouts that appear in the inbox when I pay for the premium listing are thereafter non-responsive. It's all-together not a great look.

Oli:

Everything you have done in the past which gets bad freelancers suspended or kicked off the platform or marks them with accurate, poor feedback is a benefit to the Upwork community as a whole

 

I appreciate your efforts to so, and I hope nothing I say dissuades you or others from doing so.

 

I have hired over 70 freelancers, so I have some experience as a client, but I work mostly as a freelancer.

 

By damaging Upwork's reputation, bad freelancers actually do more harm to other freelancers than they do to clients. So when clients try to make Upwork better, it is something I'm grateful for.

Well Oli:  You do seem to have a knack for finding scums on the platform.  Is it becasue of your desire to find lowest cost freelancer?  If I take the $amount and hours you were billed it comes out to be less that $15/hr.

 

That is low.

 

I work in the similar space so I know what a reasonable rate might be.  It would be around $25-$50/hr.  If you need specialized unique custom coding it would be even higher.  I have lost jobs to people whose hourly rates were $80-$100/hr (and their profile does not even mention Weebly experience).

 

Anyone colud claim to be expert in drage and drop builders like Wix, Weebly, or squarespace.  Thus all designers could claim to be expert on these platforms.  Squarespace people in general have higher rate.  Reason? Wix and Weebly offer free website building.  Makes it easy to play around with the platform.  Squarespace does not offer that  (I wish I had started on Squarespace, but I didn't want to pay money).  As a result people who want to have a squarespace experience has to cough up money to build their own site.

 

Of course if you pay a good programmer, they don't need to know a particular platform.  As long as they can get in to tweak the code or insert their own codes they can do the magic.  Next time,  ask the freelancer if they have their own website and is it based on Squarespace (portfolio will not tell you anything.  Scammers can put a thumbnail and a link to whatever site they want to show).

Hi Prashant! Thanks for the comment. All my other hires have been in the pricing bracket second from the top (I noted this prior). This one was an exception, I figured it was a simple task, and the reviews seemed quite glowing, and his hourly estimate was inflated by a factor of about 4, thus bringing my expected payment to him in line with a freelancer charging $30-$40 per hour. I was ok with this since he seemed quick off the mark. Now I realise the negative ones are actually hidden (as is mine - the details of it aren’t available - there’s a sea of empty review closures which I assume have also been cloaked). When I worked in design as a student, irrespective of the significantly low rate I was charging, I completed work on time, communicated, and certainly didn’t run away from an ill-completed project where I’d ruined a clients live site.

 

Thanks for the thorough reply, I do appreciate it.


@Oli S wrote:

When I worked in design as a student, irrespective of the significantly low rate I was charging, I completed work on time, communicated, and certainly didn’t run away from an ill-completed project where I’d ruined a clients live site.

 

Thanks for the thorough reply, I do appreciate it.


 Well Oli, different people have different value system and work ethics.

True - hence me pushing for a simple refund when distrust was generated through shonky work that missed the accepted brief by a country mile, and left my public facing site broken for days while a promised immediate fix wasnt enacted and other questions ignored. 

tta192
Community Member

If the initial estimate was 4h, you should have asked for clarifications after ~6 or 8h of work. Even if you were ok with paying 30h, a checkpoint at 8 or 10h would have allowed you to at least make sure they were still heading in the right direction. 

 

27e52cb1
Community Member

Initial estimate of his was 25-30 hours. It was me who knows that in practice it's about a 4 hour job, but i accepted the blowout quote for various reasons all listed earlier - what I didnt accept was ending up still being debited when i returned from a short trip, and the total deducted being 25% over even his top-end estimate, while the brief was missed by such an obvious amount, and my live-site left broken for a period of days. There's a strange and curious amount of protectionism going on in here, where if you bought an object that fell apart, you'd be well-placed to seek a refund.

Hi Oli,

The reason people keep emphasizing that you check progress along the way is that, in Upwork hourly contracts, you are paying for a freelancer's time. So if you dispute, Upwork ONLY judges the quality of the time spent on your project (via activity levels, memos, etc.). It will NOT make a decision on the quality of the work completed.

In the Work Diary for this project, do you see signs of poor quality work TIME, such as consistent low activity levels, incomplete memos, and/or irrelevant screenshots? If so, you will win the dispute. Hope that helps!
petra_r
Community Member


@Oli S wrote:

I was ok with this since he seemed quick off the mark. Now I realise the negative ones are actually hidden (as is mine - the details of it aren’t available - there’s a sea of empty review closures which I assume have also been cloaked).


 That isn't how it works. Unless it specifically says "This feedback has been removed" it's not "cloaked".

 

The "No feedback given" remark means just that: Contracts closed without any feedback.

 

Your feedback to the freelancer will become visible on his pürofile when the freelancer leaves feedback to you or 14 days have passed, whichever comes sooner.

 

tta192
Community Member

Your freelancer was not inflating the numbers to make up for the low rate; people tend to underestimate the time they'll need to complete a project. More so when you hear 30 instead of 4. That's off by an order of magnitude, so you really have to determine the cause. Most likely they just don't know how to do the job, so that estimate means nothing, you can't rely on it.

re: "Most likely they just don't know how to do the job..."


That's why the same project can sometimes cost a lot more with lower-cost freelancers.

 

A freelancer charging $80/hour can cost less than a freelancer charging $8/hour, when you obtain the same deliverable.

 

When I have hired freelancers, I have personally worked with freelancers representing a very wide range of rates. I have been extremely pleased with some work done by freelancers who are very affordable. But sometimes the work from freelancers with low rates has simply been unusable. I understand that beforehand.

 

I have worked with lower-cost, medium-cost, and higher-cost freelancers for a variety of creative work, including design, illustration, and writing.

 

When I need something done right, and done right the first time... such as for more technical work, I hire more experienced freelancers with significantly higher rate.

Latest Articles
Learning Paths