I am not a designer and I never pretend to be. The projects I have worked on over the years has had a designer involved at some level so the pain of trying to make a user interface pleasant to look at was never a concern of mine. I have a few personal projects I have been working on lately and needed some design work. A bit of searching around the web led me to 99Designs. 99Designs is a web site which will put designers in touch with people who need services. The folks looking for design work create "Contests" with a fixed price for designers to submit an initial design, hoping to get the work.
I created a contest for a web site design for a small utility application I have been creating. The contest started about February 21, 2009 and after only a few days had some entries. The cost of the contest was $45 dollars to setup and I put a fixed amount of $400 dollars as what I thought was a fair price. I received a total of about 25 entries over the life of the contest, which was 7 days. Overall the process of viewing the contest entries was good but, the quality of the entries varied a lot and were less than top-notch design work. It was about what I expected for the amount I was willing to pay.
I found what I determined to be the winning design and informed the designer. Over the next couple weeks the designer was very gracious and work with me on several iteration of the pages he agreed to create. Once he was done it came time to pay him and this is where the issues started. I do a fair amount of transactions using Paypal, love them or hate them, they work. I planned on paying this designer via Paypal, except Paypal does not transfer money to Egypt. After talking with the designer I found out Western Union is the accepted way to send money from the U.S. to Egypt. A quick trip to the Western Union web site revealed they do send money to Egypt but the fee for the transaction was $42 to send $400, what the heck? The $42 fee did not include credit card fees for "withdrawing cash", but not much I could do at this point.
The story gets a bit more interesting when I submitted the request to transfer money to my new designer friend, when I received a message from Western Union who could not complete my request. I then needed to call Western Union to give them additional information about the transfer. A call, and fairly long hold time, put me in touch with a very nice customer service woman who assured me she would take care of this right away and I would be on my way. Well, I was on my way alright. I was told by the customer service representative that Western Union refused to send money to this person and suggests highly that I do not do business with him or attempt to send funds to them. She told me to read between the lines, whatever that meant. I was completely baffled by this response and thought I had triggered some terrorist alarm or something. How could this be? Western Union is in the business of sending my money where I say and how can they determine not to send it.
This left me with little choice other than to tell the designer what had happened and my apparent lack of ability to pay him for his work. It goes without saying he was not very happy and accused me of trying to back out of doing business with him. I couldn’t blame him for being upset.
I then contacted the good folks at 99Designs who assured me they have dealt with sending funds all over the world and could do this for me for the contest cost plus 10%, which equates to about the same as Western Union. After some manual intervention by the 99Designs team I was able to send 99Designs the necessary funds to complete the agreement I had with the designer. The designer later uploaded the artwork and it is now in the hands of 99Designs to forward the funds.
In hindsight I should had found out where this designer lived and possibly taken his location into consideration. I probably should have created a guaranteed contest instead of the type I created, this way 99Designs takes care of paying the designer and then accepts the design which is then delivered to me. 99Designs’ Customer Service was top-notch and salvaged what I thought was a project gone wrong.
I hope my experience saves a fellow developer the hassle of dealing directly with foreign designers.
Technorati Tags: 99Designs,Web Design
My wife used to work for a bank, wiring money all over the place. Probably their most strict requirement was not to wire money to a country on the OFAC list. OFAC = Office of Foreign Asset Control, and the list makes for some interesting reading: http://www.treas.gov/…/sdn
My wife used to work for a bank, wiring money all over the place. Probably their most strict requirement was not to wire money to a country on the OFAC list. OFAC = Office of Foreign Asset Control, and the list makes for some interesting reading: http://www.treas.gov/…/sdn
@dan – interesting, I was not aware of this at all, never heard of OFAC. It’s interesting that Western Union even has Egypt as an option if wiring the money there is really even allowed.
I felt pretty dumb in this whole thing and Western Union made it a less than fun experience.
@dan – interesting, I was not aware of this at all, never heard of OFAC. It’s interesting that Western Union even has Egypt as an option if wiring the money there is really even allowed.
I felt pretty dumb in this whole thing and Western Union made it a less than fun experience.
Hi even my clients did face this problem even to india and so please try out xoom.com that is best option also 🙂 hope this works out with you
Hi even my clients did face this problem even to india and so please try out xoom.com that is best option also 🙂 hope this works out with you
Western Union is certainly a pain to deal with, but what it comes down to is that it’s the only way for some of our designers to get paid. I’m pretty proud of the fact that we have designers from places in the world where there aren’t a lot of job opportunities for graphic designers. Some of our best designers come from places that PayPal wouldn’t even consider!
The "high fraud risk" rankings generally are based on incidences of fraudsters, scammers and credit card fraud, which we don’t see a lot of in design contests. What would be the point of running with the money after they have already invested time into designing the thing that you want?
We are launching a "prepaid" contest type soon, which will mean clients no longer have to worry about payment as we will be handling it all. I’m confident your next contest will be much more straightforward!
– Lachlan, 99designs.com
Western Union is certainly a pain to deal with, but what it comes down to is that it’s the only way for some of our designers to get paid. I’m pretty proud of the fact that we have designers from places in the world where there aren’t a lot of job opportunities for graphic designers. Some of our best designers come from places that PayPal wouldn’t even consider!
The "high fraud risk" rankings generally are based on incidences of fraudsters, scammers and credit card fraud, which we don’t see a lot of in design contests. What would be the point of running with the money after they have already invested time into designing the thing that you want?
We are launching a "prepaid" contest type soon, which will mean clients no longer have to worry about payment as we will be handling it all. I’m confident your next contest will be much more straightforward!
– Lachlan, 99designs.com
@Lachlan I agree, there is little reason for someone to take off with money after all the work they put into a design and 99Designs obviously understands this.
Thank you for taking care of this during my initial contest. As you can see from my post that I was not blaming 99Designs for the troubles but just a life lession and I would do it different next time.
All in all everything came out very well, the designer is happy and I am happy.
@Lachlan I agree, there is little reason for someone to take off with money after all the work they put into a design and 99Designs obviously understands this.
Thank you for taking care of this during my initial contest. As you can see from my post that I was not blaming 99Designs for the troubles but just a life lession and I would do it different next time.
All in all everything came out very well, the designer is happy and I am happy.
i won a contest on 99designs…
and the contest was prepaid..
i converted my money to western union..
i would just like to ask i, 99designs would send me a message and give me a control number
so that i can claim my money in any western union outlets in my country? or how can i claim my price if i chose to convert it through western union?
i won a contest on 99designs…
and the contest was prepaid..
i converted my money to western union..
i would just like to ask i, 99designs would send me a message and give me a control number
so that i can claim my money in any western union outlets in my country? or how can i claim my price if i chose to convert it through western union?