Contractor Offers Help Toolset Clients get Custom Work from Peers

   Amir

Announcements

October 3, 2018
10

Toolset support handles around 1,000 tickets every month. If you’ve ever used our support, you probably know that we’re doing our absolute very best to resolve problems and come up with creative solutions. However, sometimes you may need work which is beyond our support. To answer this need, we’re proud to introduce Contractor Offers.

The idea is to allow Toolset contractors to make offers for all sorts of work. This could include troubleshooting your code, helping come up with content architecture, implementing custom shortcodes, writing PHP code that fires on hooks and many more offers.

To make this possible, contractors now have a new “offers” section, where they can write such offers. An offer includes a heading, description and price. You can think of it like a dedicated Fiverr, for Toolset.

We will show these offers, only to clients who are interested, inside the support search.

When you search the support forum, you will see a new section for offers.

You can choose to permanently hide that section if you are not interested in seeing any offers.

Are these offers intended to get load off Toolset support team?

Definitely not. Toolset support team was and remains responsible for anything related to support. If you run into a problem, need our help using Toolset or want our advice on how to do something, you don’t need to pay anyone. This is entirely our responsibility and we’re getting better and better at it.

What kind of offers do I expect to see?

We hope that contractors will create offers for the kind of work that is entirely outside of the scope for support, but other clients still need. We will not permit to SPAM our support search with irrelevant offers. We will not allow offers for “expedited support”, etc. Support is our responsibility.

What is Toolset team hoping to achieve with these offers?

Happier clients. We wish we had the capacity to also do custom work for clients and many clients have offered to pay us for this. Our support team can handle support and not a lot more. We hope that these offers will allow to bring together the supply and the demand.

How to get started?

If you are already a Toolset contractor, you will see a new Offers section. Go ahead and create your offers. Ask us if you’re not sure about anything.

Feedback?

please tell us what you think, what you’re hoping to get and if you have any suggestions. Lease your comments and we’ll get back to you.

 

Comments 10 Responses

  1. Why not do this the other way, where people looking to get something done can leave a message and then contractors can secretly bid on the work by filling in a form that is then passed to the requesting party!

    • I second this idea of potential clients submitting the sort of help/project they need a contractor to bid on.

    • That’s fine as well, but I’m really curious about what kind of work contractors can do (and want to advertise). We’ll know soon enough. Today there’s already a search in our contractors system where clients can look for contractors and send the same message to several. We created this ‘offers’ system, so that contractors can offer work and clients will see.

  2. My vote goes for approaching this the other way round too. It’s better that users say what they want then contractors know what to offer (and maybe what they can do isn’t what people want so they know what to do too!)

  4. Hi, I’m happy you are improving the contractor profile, it would be interesting you create a list of tipical forum request that Support doesn’t cover, so that Contractors can offer those custom features.

    I think something is not working fine on Contractors page are filters. It is very difficult for the customer to select what’s the best contractor for his request. For example, most of the contractors offers all the “What kind of work are you looking for?”, or “What site categories can you work on?”, so filters are not usefull.

    Contractors are just ordered by publication date, so customers will always get the same contractors on top of the list. It would be better if you random order it or by modification date, so that contractors has a way to bring their profile on top everytime they update the profile (you could limit this to 1 per week…).

    • I agree with all three of umbertoZ’s points.

      Advanced contractors may have extensive experience in PHP and WP and Toolset, and cannot list all of the functionalities they can add to a client’s site. Having a list of the top dozen (or more) requests that is beyond the scope for Toolset Support would be a great help to contractors.

      I have also seen some shortcomings with filters for the Contractors page.

      It would be much more fair to Toolset Contractors to have them randomized. My first site I built with Toolset in 2014 does just that with every page refresh. It’s for the IEEE-CNSV organization of about 200 engineering contractors (not just software) in Silicon Valley. So to be fair, I randomize the order with every page load.
      I think this would be a welcome feature to the Toolset Contractors page.

      • Thank you for your suggestions. The order of contractors is adjusted and takes into an account modification date. Please note that it takes time for cache engine to pick up the changes. We will look into randomizing the display order early next week. I’ll update you once it happens.

  5. I love how you keep improving Toolset! This is the best company I’ve ever worked with, and I see you guys are getting better and better. Thank you!

  6. Hi, for some reason, I’m getting “Permission denied” when I click on the “Add new Offer” button on our profile 🙁