Do not transfer your elance account

[Alexandr M]

Even if all your clients are satisfied and you got all 5 ratings - be careful. You may have few jobs without reviews that will put you in a very unfair position compared to native odesk freelancers. Your job success score will decrease and you will have no way to improve it.

If you are odesk freelancer you can simply unfreeze feedback and politely ask client to modify it. But if you work on elance - you are trapped. You can not unfreeze it because contract was made on elance, and elance will not allow client to modify it because 60 days period has expired.

So I would recommend that you do not try to move or merge your account if you have such jobs. Better create new one and keep your JS score in good condition

[Ronald T]

Good advice! My Elance clients rarely provided any kind of reviews so I just told Elance to close my account. Of course, I manually transferred any useful information from Elance to oDesk first.

[Alexandr M]

Feedbacks are not that important on elance, thats why somethimes you and clients ignore them, especially if you are doing repeated jobs. But once you move your account, you got a problem. 

I contacted elance support about this issue and they just can not do anything, its against thir rules.

Upwork on the other hand is ok with that and encourage freelancers to contact clients and ask for feedback even after 60 days. On Upwork decreasing job success score makes sense - if you have good communication with client its no problem to ask them visit site and put those stars for you.

And my clients would really like to help me with that issue, but unfortunately they can't. They have no upwork account, and elance does not have such option as unfreezing feedback.

[Tim H]

I am noticing this as well.... I have an 86% "Job Success" rating after transferring my profile... as Upwork claims I have no long term clients, which is not correct.

Furthermore, as a member of Elance for over 7 years I am dismayed at some of the hourly wages paid on Odesk (and now Upwork)... $1.88/hr. average I'm seeing for some providers... is this a joke? Who works for $1.88/hr.???

[Jean S]

You should meet the people who worked for $0.50 before the new minimum of $3.00 was introduced.

[Stephen B]

Don't get your hopes up about "unfreezing feedback". Many freelancers are stuck with loads of old open contracts because yhey can't contact the clients to ask them to close them. If you think it's easy to chase up old clients from closed contracts and ask them to go back and alter feedback, then go ahead and try, but I think you'll find it's a long uphill climb.

[Tim H]

@Stephen, you are absolutely correct. Some clients just wouldn't take the time to click the "complete" button on a project... years ago. It didn't seem important to them, as there was no repercussions on their end.

[Tim H]

/mindblown

Elance/Upwork banks twice that for every hour I work!

[Jennifer M]

I'm probably gonna have like a 5% success rate. lol  I have a customer who sends me at least 1 gig a week on average. It's usually 2. Sometimes 3. We've been working together for at least 6 months, so he basically just says "this is what I want, ok thxbai." I do it, he pays. It's awesome. But, he never leaves feedback. Oy vey I'm actually a bit nervous about the transfer. We shall see what happens!

[Mariska P]

sounds like i was doing pretty well with my 1.11!!! lol... thank goodness I won't have to work for that again!