Tales from the dark side (Match.com): Part III

…continuing from Part I and Part II…

When we last left my tale, it was month three of six for the “Make Love Happen” guarantee which would net me another six months of free subscription. It is now month eight…

You can guess what happened, eh? Love did not happen for moi. In fact, quite the opposite emotion started to develop: hate for Match.com.

Some have quibbled on the various consumer advice boards that getting the guarantee was a painful process or that they were denied it for some reason. It was pretty simple – call them up during the last 7 days of your 6th month (after having sent the requisite 5 e-mails) and your subscription extends for another 6 months. Well, apparently, they got rid of the phone call and on your guarantee status page, there is a link you click to automatically extend your service. Personally, I think they got rid of the phone call to reduce the workload on customer service and having to hear complaints from dissatisfied customers.

So, that was the easy part. What’s the hard part?

It takes up time. A lot of time. Even if you have an efficient search strategy. Yes, eH only nets you a couple matches a day. To find a handful of matches a day on Match.com and message them is far from the simple and quick process on eH. Probably budget 30-60 minutes to find them and compose an individual message to each of them. Yes, there is the “Daily 5″ feature that is supposed to present you with ideal matches each day but I find the chopped down version of the profile it presents you to be lacking and you have to go look at the full profile to make an informed decision and to be able to send a message.

I’ve combed through a thousand plus profiles. I quickly realized that things get repetitive and you need some way of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Two approaches:

1) Add the ones you are interested in to your “favorites” list. Great, the matches you are interested in are tracked. Bad news, though. If they are subscribers, they now know that you’ve added them…which begs the question…why haven’t you contacted them? One would assume that you aren’t a subscriber. I have had one female add me and that’s all I can imagine as to why I haven’t heard from her. It’s even lower on the totem pole than “winking” to indicate interest. One still wonders what the deal is with all the emancipation and women’s lib. Women are still stuck with the cultural norm that the man must do the asking, which I still find rather confusing.

2) Remove from search. Easy enough. Once you’ve seen ‘em and don’t see you are compatible, they get put on a list and will no longer appear in search results. Now, they can still send you a message, which is convenient, at which point you can un-hide them again. So, I think I have 600+ profiles on this list and it would probably be greater if I weren’t so wishy-washy about some of the profiles I’ve read. The current mode of operation is send message and hide them…because…

Well, that brings us to results, summed up in one word: pathetic

I’ve sent 150 e-mails…drumroll please…which has resulted in…0 dates. Better yet…only one has gone to exchanging more than one e-mail and then they flaked out when conversation took the direction of meeting in person. Few have even looked at my profile but many (most) of the members I have messaged indicate they check the site on a frequent basis by the last-login status that Match.com indicates.

I can not, for the life of me, reconcile all these success stories, published both on their site and on various commentaries about them given my results.

Customer service issues? Don’t even get me started. I have an active complaint with them which I consider to be a major screw up by the company (the second that I’ve encountered) in terms of significant software engineering issues.

That’s all for now.

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Comments 8

SincerelyEthical wrote:
Why doesn’t Match.com just add a 12-month subscription for a few dollars more (maybe $20 more at most) than their 6-month plan, instead of forcing people to go through all this hassle to extend their 6-month membership?
It’s just another member in their databases…
Posted 30 Sep 2009 at 10:45 am ¶
Brian wrote:
Has anybody tried this new tool called OnlineWingman.com? It doesn’t work for eH yet, but it works well for match, it seems to solve the problem of sorting though profiles mentioned above!
Posted 22 Oct 2009 at 12:04 pm ¶
Scottk wrote:
Oh, I have no doubt that Match.com works…
For women.

As you have discovered, if you are Male, you are pretty much screwed.
(Unless of course, you are really good looking, tall and built)

The women don’t HAVE to do the emailing, they get a TON of emails already from guys.

The reason you see their Last Status as being pretty active all the time, is they got another email from a guy, and they are checking him out.

If the guy is really hot, they respond. Otherwise, they simply delete your email WITHOUT clicking on the “No, I am not interested” (WHY FOR CRYING OUTLOUD??? IT TAKES 2 SECONDS!!!).

EH evens the playing field, which is why, for all the faults of EH, it is still a better site for guys, than Match.com
Posted 22 Oct 2009 at 5:22 pm ¶
SingleGuyInNC wrote:
“Unless of course, you are really good looking, tall and built”

Well, I’m tall (above average height for the US). I have been told that I am good looking by women not related to me (and some had favorable numbers on hot-or-not). I am in good shape and I exercise quite a bit more than most people. Using those metrics, I’m not sure what gives in my case. Surely some of the women I’ve messaged can’t all be getting Mr. Goodbar who is also brilliant and everything they could ever want in terms of personality?

Women quibble about men idealizing their figures and being overly picky about appearance, but they are doing the same?

I really have to wonder what sort of standards the women on Match.com have that they can afford to blow off so many potential suitors. So, if Match.com doesn’t work for men (they can’t get responses or don’t find anyone) but it works for women…how is the site working? It just doesn’t seem to add up.
Posted 22 Oct 2009 at 8:19 pm ¶
SingleGuyInNC wrote:
Quick look at OnlineWingman…the dating metrics “tab”. Uhh, yeah. If I got that ratio of messages replied, I would be somewhat happy with Match.com being worth what I’ve paid for it.
Posted 22 Oct 2009 at 8:23 pm ¶
Scottk wrote:
SingleGuyinNC,

Yeah, at first blush it doesn’t make sense.

But I believe (and there are some stats out there that indicate) that the ratio of guys to girls on Match is like 75% guys/25% gals.

That helps the women a lot right there.

However, I also suspect there are a few really good looking guys that get to ping ping among the average to good looking+ women.

Match.com doesn’t target the LTR/marriage kind of guys, so there are a lot more players out there.

(Try doing a “reverse search”, by switching your search from “guy looking for girl” to “girl looking for guy”. Take a look at some of the active guy members.
You will see a LOT of obvious players. Its actually kind of an eye opener. I knew after doing that search that I wasn’t on the right site, if girls actually go for the guys that were pulling up in my reverse search.)

Because of this, I suspect there are a number of guys that are getting to play with a lot of those 25%, and then rest of us get the few remaining percent.

EH differs in that the ratio is closer to 50/50.

Also, I suspect players generally don’t like EH. They know that women on EH are looking for marriage, and that is definitely NOT what a player is looking for.
(Ie, I think EHarmony scares of the players)

This is why I generally feel EH is probably the best online site for non-player guys.
Posted 22 Oct 2009 at 9:21 pm ¶
SingleGuyInNC wrote:
If this is true, then I will probably be done with them when my 6 month extension is over. I’m just not seeing the point in paying them for the opportunity to send e-mails into a never-ending series of black holes. I might as well start asking out women that I randomly meet while outside of the home, which probably has a greater chance of success and deciding if they are good matches over coffee (which you end up doing ANYWAY when transitioning from online to real life).

What is so sad is that these women, most of whom advertise on their profiles that they are tired of the bar scene and want to meet someone new just keep making the same old mistake over and over again and don’t give us nice guys a chance. Their loss, I keep telling myself (but I’m having trouble believing it).
Posted 25 Oct 2009 at 11:58 pm ¶
SingleGuyInNC wrote:
Update:
It took nearly somewhere between six and nine MONTHS (I expired in Feburary and poked at my profile just now to see if it was still there) for them to resolve the complaint I alluded to above that was a bug with their website that could have taken care of in 5 seconds at an SQL command prompt.

I was around long enough that I had “recommendations” filled out during the “get a friend to write about you” campaign, figuring that others would jump on the bandwagon. Apparently, no one else did. The problem was that the data was still stored in the database and the page display algorithm still displayed it but the interface for the user to that data was removed without warning and no way for the user to alter/remove the data.

When I inquired via phone (multiple e-mails failed to get resolution) the CS rep I talked to told me that HER OWN PROFILE had the same issue (recommendations on there) and even as a company member, their internal support to the engineers had not gotten hers removed upon request. I requested to be escalated to a manager and to have a formal request put in (the same one that she did). The manager more or less would not do anything for me in terms of an extension of service because their product was defective and my profile, in my opinion, stood out as “odd” with those recommendations. He hung up on me (I am sure it was not my phone that resulted in the call being disconnected, probably not a coincidence that it was right at closing time for their CS center). At a minimum, he should have called me back out of courtesy like most other customer service centers do but did not.

That has probably been the worst customer service interaction I’ve ever had with any company.
Posted 16 Jun 2010 at 3:17 pm ¶

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