Professional Services

How does this work? The buyer posts a project requiring services, and
sellers bid to do the work. Theoretically, the low bidder gets the
project. It’s pretty straightforward, but it has a few wrinkles that make
it work well.
Professional Services
Although eBay features the name Elance for this marketplace, it
uses the words “professional services” in the home page link leading
to Elance.
Professional Services
First, this marketplace does not accommodate all professional services.
Your service needs to be on the list before you can make this work for
you. Second, this is really advertising and marketing for your skilled
services, and as such it doesn’t come free or even at a nominal cost. It
will cost you real money to participate. Third, Elance doesn’t guarantee
your success. The low bidder isn’t necessarily the winner.
Who Can Play This Game?
Occasionally eBay adds or subtracts a category, but at the time this
book went to press your skilled services had to fall into one of the following
categories to enable you to participate:
1. Accounting and Finance
2. Administrative Support
3. Business Strategy
4. Graphic Design & Multimedia
5. Legal
6. Personal
7. Software and technology
CHAPTER 28 ELANCE 463
8. Training & Development
9. Web Design and Development
10. Writing & Translation
In Four Months
In the four months since I last reviewed the Elance offering of services
in 2003, the category of Engineering and Design disappeared
and the Personal category appeared.
To give you an idea of the depth of the categories, Administrative Support
provides the following services:
• Data entry
• Event planning
• Presentations
• Printing
• Transcription
• Travel planning
• Word processing
You don’t have to sift through these categories. You can use the Elance
search to find Elance services too.
Appendage
eBay has appended to Elance a small listing of services categories
(auctions) available on eBay itself. And one can use the regular
eBay search to find services auctions on eBay. There are no category
restrictions on such auctions. See Chapter 20 for more discussion
about marketing services on eBay.