Eliminating testimonials is a good start

[newsmike]

Sad for my acting students who were hoping to use a few fiverr testimonial gigs to hire acters. We had several and now they have disappeared. Kids are heartbroken ;( Any ideas are welcome.

thanks

ty

who were hoping to use a few fiverr testimonial gigs to hire acters

Wouldn’t the spokesperson gigs do the same thing? The only difference is that these people pitch the product without pretending to be customers who purchased it.

https://www.fiverr.com/categories/video-animation/buy-spokesperson-video?source=category_tree

[tyger3]

Thanks for the reply. Yes they would do the same. I was reacting to my students disappointment. They need a few kids and adults to complete their project and were about to order his gig. I had finally found a few kids. One guy I had been explaining the role to him to see if the character was appropriate for his son. We were to order today 😦

[orcatek]

Sad for my acting students who were hoping to use a few fiverr testimonial gigs to hire acters. We had several and now they have disappeared. Kids are heartbroken ;( Any ideas are welcome.

thanks

ty

They can still hire actors, just not for testimonials. Any other video work is fine.

[tyger3]

I agree that testimonials should be eliminated, but the kid we were going to use lost his gig overnight and i’m not sure how we find him again. A bit of notice would have been so appreciated 😲

[matureactress]

Sad for my acting students who were hoping to use a few fiverr testimonial gigs to hire acters. We had several and now they have disappeared. Kids are heartbroken ;( Any ideas are welcome.

thanks

ty

Are you teaching your students the applicable laws with regard to truthful advertising?

If not, you can easily find the laws that apply to your country by googling them.

[matureactress]

Quite a bit has changed this summer on Fiverr.

1. Testimonials are no longer offered. This is because Fiverr Sellers were cranking out videos that were in direct violation of the US Truth-in-Advertising Act. However, spokesperson gigs are still available as long as what you request is not in violation of the US law.

2. Voice Over gigs now automatically offer Commercial Use License (CUL) for purchase. This means under US law that the creator of the sound recording wishes to retain ownership and you cannot resell it. You can use the recording for the purpose of generating a profit for your company’s product services ONLY if you purchase the CUL. If you want it for say… a customized telephone greeting…then you don’t need to purchase a CUL and you can use the sound recording only for the purpose of a telephone greeting for your company.

3. Terms of Service Agreement has been updated. I recommend all Buyers read and understand what they’ve agreed to.

[orcatek]

Fiverr has not fully implemented this. If you search for testimonial, all these were shut down. If you search for review, you will find about 100 that still market this, even though it is a violation of TOS. Not sure why fiverr is slow at taking these down. It has been reported, but they are still available apparently.

[radiomachen]

Hello,

I was so happy that fiverr deleted the fake testimonial gigs. After fiverr made clear that fake reviews and testimonials are illegal, the requests for this went down. I was so happy because I had to deal with such clients a lot and always refused these orders. This was unfortunately also connected to a drop in my “completed orders” statistics when declining a fake testimonial order. For a few weeks there were just a few users asking me for this kind of thing…BUT:

NOW they are back. Users offering fake testimonials at least in the section of SPOKESPERSON (language: German) are back and I have also found some in the English section. Since 1-2 weeks I have again more and more buyers for such things again and I need to decline all the time their illegal requests. My statistic are getting worst but what should I do?

A simple filter in the text description would help to figure out which seller is offering this. I hope that fiverr is doing something against this soon.

[Anna]

Hello,

I was so happy that fiverr deleted the fake testimonial gigs. After fiverr made clear that fake reviews and testimonials are illegal, the requests for this went down. I was so happy because I had to deal with such clients a lot and always refused these orders. This was unfortunately also connected to a drop in my “completed orders” statistics when declining a fake testimonial order. For a few weeks there were just a few users asking me for this kind of thing…BUT:

NOW they are back. Users offering fake testimonials at least in the section of SPOKESPERSON (language: German) are back and I have also found some in the English section. Since 1-2 weeks I have again more and more buyers for such things again and I need to decline all the time their illegal requests. My statistic are getting worst but what should I do?

A simple filter in the text description would help to figure out which seller is offering this. I hope that fiverr is doing something against this soon.

I am not sure if you tried this already but maybe you want to add a line to your gig description and FAQS (put it on the very top and highlight it). I know there will always be people who are not going to read it in detail but it certainly doesn’t hurt to try.

It’s unfortunate that these type of cancellations are counted against you. You can also contact customer support to discuss this issue. I believe a simple pop up on testimonial gigs during the order process would eliminate most of those issues.

Maybe Fiverr will consider it in the future. Wishing you the best of luck.

[radiomachen]

I am not sure if you tried this already but maybe you want to add a line to your gig description and FAQS (put it on the very top and highlight it). I know there will always be people who are not going to read it in detail but it certainly doesn’t hurt to try.

It’s unfortunate that these type of cancellations are counted against you. You can also contact customer support to discuss this issue. I believe a simple pop up on testimonial gigs during the order process would eliminate most of those issues.

Maybe Fiverr will consider it in the future. Wishing you the best of luck.

Hello,

yes, I have it in BIG LETTERs on my gig descriptions and in the FAQs. I contacted the fiverr support concerning the statistics already but as it happens and continues again and again, I am now not anymore writing to them and just take the bad statistics. I know that it may harm my work but then I have to write fiverr every week a message 😉

[matureactress]

Hello,

yes, I have it in BIG LETTERs on my gig descriptions and in the FAQs. I contacted the fiverr support concerning the statistics already but as it happens and continues again and again, I am now not anymore writing to them and just take the bad statistics. I know that it may harm my work but then I have to write fiverr every week a message 😉

Fiverr CS can’t help. What we need must be implemented on the server side and that’s long down on the list of things needing to be fixed.

You can turn your lemons into lemonade though. This is what I’ve done…

Firstly, I state that it’s MANDATORY that I approve scripts before ordering. That cuts down on the illegals by quite a bit because they know I won’t approve their script. If they do send me an illegal script I reply with a polite “sorry, I’m not a good fit for your project”. Once, I found a Seller who I suspected would take the illegal script… and lo and behold, there it was in his portfolio, performed word for word like the script I had previously turned down just days earlier.

Secondly, to reduce the number of unreadable, non-sensical scripts I’m often sent, I offer free suggestions to improve their script, but they must message me with it before ordering.

I hope I’ve helped.

[radiomachen]

Fiverr CS can’t help. What we need must be implemented on the server side and that’s long down on the list of things needing to be fixed.

You can turn your lemons into lemonade though. This is what I’ve done…

Firstly, I state that it’s MANDATORY that I approve scripts before ordering. That cuts down on the illegals by quite a bit because they know I won’t approve their script. If they do send me an illegal script I reply with a polite “sorry, I’m not a good fit for your project”. Once, I found a Seller who I suspected would take the illegal script… and lo and behold, there it was in his portfolio, performed word for word like the script I had previously turned down just days earlier.

Secondly, to reduce the number of unreadable, non-sensical scripts I’m often sent, I offer free suggestions to improve their script, but they must message me with it before ordering.

I hope I’ve helped.

Thanks for your helpful text. The CS is helpful in my point of view and they always reset the statistics when something went wrong but it is now to offen that I have to cancel orders because of fake orders. Lately I had one client who ordered a package with 75 words included but a text with 200 words and he didn’t add commercial use but his text was absolutely an advertising. I had to open a dispute and he never responded on that. After a few days the order got canceled but even this went into my statistics. I also hope that maybe in a next update fiverr will take care of this issue. They know about it and this is the first step to make fiverr even better for all of us.

To check everytime a script before an order might be not a solution for me because the simple buyer one click experience to buy a service like on Amazon is great for most of the buyers and I like that idea too. I don’t want to make it to complicated. But it must be possible to cancel fake orders or things which are not offered in the gig to cancel without influencing the statistics. As simple as that 🙂 Then all problems would be solved.

Of course I also offer a rewriting or translation work when a client delivers something unreadable. This is ok, no doubts about that. For the buyer it must be sometimes frstrating to get a google translation script only which he paid for on fiverr already and I have to tell him that this is not working. But most of them appreciate that and order this extra gig too.

Well, in the end the buyer wants to have a perfect result which we all try to give. But on the other hand, if the buyer is not communicative or willing to pay the price for the work which he is asking for, the seller must have the possibility to react on that in a fair way too without punishing the seller in the way fiverr is doing it with the statistics.

Hope for the next update and thanks for sharing some thoughts about this with me.

Best,

Falk

[chillyrabbit]

Hello!

I have spokesperson gig and the buyer ordered testimonial, although I wrote in the description I don`t do it.

As you probably know, Testimonials are forbidden now on Fiverr. I personally think this is good for our (seller`s) safety because you never know if you in the future can maybe go to the court because of some false testimonial.

I wrote to Support, they cancel it and they told they said Trust&Safety Team to review buyer`s behaviour.

So, I think we should all write to Support about buyers that order false testimonial. Because they need to be stopped from doing that because many spokesperson sellers have a bunch of cancelled orders because of them ordering testimonials!

[legacine]

I see you have a FAQ which discusses testimonials.

This is a good step in the right direction, but in my opinion people are less likely to read that FAQ than they are to watch your video. I therefore would recommend that you state this explicitly in your video (I clicked the video almost immediately after clicking on the Gig), however I am not sure whether that is permissible or advisable.

[chillyrabbit]

I see you have a FAQ which discusses testimonials.

This is a good step in the right direction, but in my opinion people are less likely to read that FAQ than they are to watch your video. I therefore would recommend that you state this explicitly in your video (I clicked the video almost immediately after clicking on the Gig), however I am not sure whether that is permissible or advisable.

Good idea. I wanted to avoid to be negative in the video, but I think is much safer to tell it there. Tnx!! 🙂

[Alex.M]

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