Elance is an online service where freelancers can post their services and others can bid. It's easy to think of eLance as a kind of eBay for services. That is, a marketplace where sellers and buyers meet and sell their services for a fee. Their services make it easy for businesses to outsource their projects. For instance, businesses can also post jobs on the eLanceWeb site, and receive bids from freelancers or service provider. So this can help businesses save money through eLance since they can find freelancers all over the world to do their projects for less than expected. Some of the services that they provide include "bill payment, insurance purchasing, tax report filing and other services" (Brad Alan Kleindl pg376). So eLance can be seen as a good place to help people market their services, meet other people to work with, and get the job done.
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EBay
Kip portrait / Elance experimentOne of the benefits about using eLance is that it offers buyers the ability to reach an international pool of freelancers that will bid to work on projects. In addition, you can find the job that you want, bid on it, get the job, and get paid for it through the site all without having any personal contact with the client.
Since freelancers have to pay a 10% of the cost of the project to eLance and probably other fees, it may discourage them in doing business transactions through eLance. Moreover, eLance fear that the buyer and sellers might be tempted to do business outside eLance once they build a relationship. So to prevent this from happening, eLance implemented some procedures to prevent freelancers and their clients to execute business outside of eLance web site. "They planned a billing and payment system that allowed buyers and sellers in different...