Constant Content

There should be a minimum offer price that the authors can set and only they can see. This can easily protect one from silly offers some customers make. For instance, an author would put 100 dollars for an article, and he would put 70 dollars as minimum offer price (this, customer can't see). Now, a customer that offers 78 dollars for the article can actually extend the offer, while a cutomer that asks it for 30 dollars won't be able to offer at all. This will easily protect us authors from ridiculous offers that actually seem to aim at us personally. I got offered 20 dollars for a 110 dollar article for full rights recently. Protect us authors from disgusting offers.

Those lowball offers can feel quite offensive, but I try not to take them personally. A lot of people in this world want a bargain, and they love to "dicker and deal" . I'd like to know if there's a way for us to counteroffer. I just refused a low offer myself, but would have been willing to reach a compromise with the customer if we could have communicated directly.

I agree with Melissa. It seems wrong to have no negotiating power. It would be in everyone's interest as when we just refuse CC loses out on commission as well.

I was just about to suggest this.

I think, at the very least, they shouldn't be allowed to offer less than $7 on anything. CC made it so that we couldn't set our usage rate less than $7, and now I'm getting $3 offers on full rights articles!

Not only that, but they keep coming... all from the same person, all the same price, no matter how many times I refuse... and there's no way for me to message them and just tell them to stop trying until they can offer more.

I had another three offers last week from the same customer that has low-balled me in the past. This time an all time low of $3 each for full rights. Needless to say I declined the gracious offer.
On the other hand, I had a low offer made by another customer a while back. When I declined it, he contacted me to ask why. We then negotiated and I got a decent price - albeit not what I originally asked, but still a decent price. He/She was at least appreciative of the effort involved in writing good articles.
Some kind of negotiation method would be great, even if it's just the ability for the author to contact the customer who has made an offer and indicate that a deal can be reached if their offer isn't too far off the mark.

What people seem to be talking about is what eBay calls "reserve price." It's very common practice in auctions. But I'm not sure whether CC management see CC as, or want it to become, an auction site. I think the idea is for customers to buy articles at the listed price. If customers become widely aware that dickering is encouraged on CC, we could all end up wasting a lot of time being nickelled and dimed to death. Plus dickering with a customer adds to the total amount of time we spend on an article and reduces our hourly rate of return. If I write an article in two hours and then spend seven hours bargaining with a customer so he can pay me LESS than my listed price, I've not only lost money on the listed price but increased time spent worked on the article from two hours to nine hours. That's not good business for people who need to make money off CC articles.

Michael

There are times that articles go through for pennies as part of a package or as part of a rewrite. However this one "customer" is not getting the hint that $3 offers are no good. He should be educated or banned, unless CC really wants to make $1.05 an article. That would not even pay for the Editor's time though, so better to cut off this annoying pseudo-client.

I just wrote to Support and linked to this thread so hopefully someone will pop by and let us know the official CC pov. I know this issue has come up before, so it's definitely on their radar.

In my opinion, being able to set reserve prices would be the best solution. For example, I might set a visible price of $45 but a reserve price of $35. If a customer makes an offer of $35+, it automatically goes through. If they make a lower offer, it's automatically refused and I never even know about it. Saves everyone time, including customers (they wouldn't need to wait for us to respond to offers).

Okay, but I don't want customers to be TOLD about the reserve price system. If they're told about it, it will just encourage them to waste our time dickering with us instead of paying the listed price right off the bat. Lots of customers who would be happy to pay the listed price will start dickering if someone puts the idea into their heads.

Michael

Good point, Michael. I don't see why the customers would need to be told about it - they don't know how the system works now, so nothing would change from their perspectives (except shorter wait times). And wouldn't a reserve price mean LESS dickering since authors wouldn't have to bother responding to offers?

In other news, I just heard back from Eric at Support - they ARE on top of this issue and have contacted the customer directly.

Alternately you can simply turn off the feature that allows customers to make an offer. In other words, don't check the box to allow offers at the bottom of the Submit Article screen.

I'd be against setting a "reserve" price for several reasons. As several have pointed out in this thread it would waste writer's valuable time dickering about price. It would probably attract the kinds of buyers who frequent those .01 or less per word "freelance" websites. It also feels a bit unprofessional in my humble opinion.

Now, if there were a counter-offer feature I'd be happy.

I'm not keen on a reserve price system either. I didn't join CC to auction my content. I am quite happy to have the ability to swap messages with a customer who wants to make an offer. I'm well capable of being diplomatic and letting a customer know where the line is on a particular article. That line does move for different articles though, so some flexibility would still be welcome.

In terms of customers making offers: would it be possible to have a subroutine when they hit the submit button on their offer page that checks whether they're offering less than, say 70% of the article price for the rights chosen? That would immediately stop the really pointless lowball offers and would keep the flexibility of the offer system. Customers would understand that they could get up to 30% off and it would mean that authors know all offers received are within a negotiable range of the original asking price. Ludicrous offers would no longer be possible.

Some form of text/comment field submitted along with a rejection would also allow us authors to give some indication, diplomatically of course, of how far off the offer was from being acceptable.