eHarmony Blog.com

So, I have been conducting a little experiment over the past few weeks. As a special promotion to Match.com subscribers, they offered a subscription to Chemistry.com at a discounted rate. I figured, what the heck, I’ve used eHarmony for so long, let’s see what the deal is by the company that once appeared to be their most significant competition.  So, I subscribed.

Here are my observations having used it for a few weeks. I would also encourage anyone interested in trying Chemistry.com to look over the information that Gary Stock published in addition to what I’ve written here.  Between the two, I think you will decide your time and money are better invested elsewhere.

The short story:

Chemistry.com fell short of my expectations in so many ways.  Here are the reasons why…

The only one good point (well, sort-of…):

Unlike eHarmony, they show you photos of your matches along with their profiles as a non-subscriber. However, this is provided you see their profile before they do. If a match “shows interest in you”, you get a big “subscription plan” page (because they think they “have you” because a “live” person is actually interested) and you can’t see their photo.  Are you kidding me?  You are trying to convert me to a subscriber and you take away their profile?

Major issues (or in one word, FAIL):

I signed up for an account on there probably two years ago to see what it was about and to take the personality test. My first order of business was to call their customer service to ask to re-take the personality test since it had been so long ago, as I noticed a significant difference in my matches when I did so with eHarmony.

You can not retake the test.  Their site was not designed for it. You would have to create a new account to do this.  This was not feasible in my case, since the subscription was linked to that specific account.

If you want to suspend matching (i.e. waiting between their free weekends, which they do every six weeks), you have to “archive” ALL your current matches (archive = close them).

You only get a maximum of five matches per day. If you review all five, you can click a link to try and find five more, so a maximum of ten if there are enough matches.

Traffic there is pretty abysmal. As a subscriber, I got the maximum number of matches in the first week and then it drastically tapered off. I didn’t get any matches towards the end of the month.  Their matching database is obviously much smaller than eHarmony’s (see traffic rankings) and the “we have too many women” scheme they kept e-mailing me about it was not very truthful.

Communication statistics are abysmal. Most matches did not respond.  Very few closed me out.  Even with a free communication weekend, there was essentially no communication by matches. I got a few to the e-mail stage but they turned non-responsive after a few messages and requests to meet in person.  I had been doing their free weekends for several months I did not even get one match to open communication and I don’t really even recall but a handful that responded.

Customer service is not anything special. They have links on the website to contact them but the automated responses (or form letters that customer service representatives send) are just as bad as eHarmony or Match. The so-called “elite concierge” service that was touted doesn’t seem to be any different or helpful than the operators I got at Match.com. In fact, I’m willing to bet they are housed in the same phone bank. At least, they do make their phone number easily accessible from the website (unlike eHarmony).

In the end, I went out on one date from Chemistry.  I recently found out that we had also been matched on eHarmony (during the Dec-Jan FCW and I couldn’t see photos) and she closed me out for must haves and can’t stands.  So, in terms of providing a good screening mechanism for a long-term partner, it seems that they fail there, too, if you use eHarmony as a benchmark.  The fluffy questions they use in the communication process seems to encourage meeting instead of screening folks out, so I’m not sure overall, how much better it is than Match.com.

Less critical issues:

Initiating communication is a two step process. First, you “show interest” and then you send a first set of criteria (sliders that show your preferences for several important relationship attributes). This is annoying because you have to do two things and if you are interested, why on earth wouldn’t you just go ahead and send the first stage criteria?  Extra mouse-clicks and it is cumbersome.

If a match shows interest in you, it seems as if you only the have choice of showing interest back on the first day. Why is this a problem? Well, you either show interest, or you can’t clear them off your plate and try to get five more matches. If you aren’t interested, you have to show interest in them to “clear them” to try and find more matches.

Their user interface provides a nudge link right beside each match which is nice compared to eHarmony. However, on page #2 of matches and beyond, it automatically reloads page #1, which is really dumb (sent e-mail to their tech support about this “bug”). I was able to get around this by loading each of those links in another tab. So, it is a few less clicks than eHarmony but still cumbersome.

They have an additional feature, the “first meeting request”, which I think is pretty pointless. In the past, apparently it suggested a location near the two of you to meet (heavily biased towards Starbucks) but it has been replaced by what is essentially an e-mail form with fields for you to enter a date, location (with a link to a search engine) and message to send what looks like a fancy “greeting card”. Very lame.

All your messages get lumped into a single e-mail inbox, so seeing all prior correspondence with a match is not easy like on eHarmony.

Matches don’t always have a delivered date viewable, so it was a pain to track them in a spreadsheet to determine match statistics for the site. A match has to be “closed” in order to see when they were delivered or any of the dates. This is especially a problem with matches that suddenly became “unavailable” and you couldn’t even get to their profile to get the date they were delivered (probably closed their accounts or suspended matching). At least eHarmony leaves that info on the match list so I could account for them in my spreadsheet…

In the end…

I could go on and on about all the other deficiencies.  I think that ultimately, the software features of Chemistry will end up being merged with Match.com (already have started to see some of that) because of having such a low subscriber population.  Sure, they may make more money per capita on Chemistry but my guess is that it is not doing anywhere near the business they hoped it to.