I guess this type of situation happens with many service professions.

There is a slightly different 3rd reason: I’ve found that many excellent providers will join a system (oDesk, RentACoder, eLance, etc.) and will charge ridiculously low rates BUT will do excellent work quickly at those rates. Their reason: To get good reviews and establish a reputation on the system so they can begin to increase their rates. I’ve been fortunate to find a few of these providers and take advantage of their intro rates. In fact, some of them keep me at their lower rates because they enjoy working with me and like the work I give them.

Sometimes though I don’t have the time to “test out” these providers and go for the more established reviewed providers which naturally are more expensive.

1. The providers are not as qualified as they should be and it takes them a very long time to do the job. Example: I am an accountant, anyone can do my job (really!) but they will be sorting through books, reading tutorials, looking up data on the internet and make erroneous entries. Whereas I will click a couple of times, enter some data, save, back up, and upload and voila! I am done for the month.

2. It is the hook and reel game. The hook you with dirt cheap prices and then reel in the money with triple charging (sometimes more) you, because they cannot live off of $4 per hour.

My advice, check out some VA firms, test one of your “trickier” projects with them and an offshore company. You will see very clearly the price difference, time difference and quality difference.

Best,

Heather Villa, MBA, MSM, CMA