Question about seller cancellations

[josemperezv]

Hi! I’ve been selling of Fiverr almost 1 year now and I’ve been doing very well 🙂 sadly, here in my country (Venezuela) we’ve been having several energy problems, translated in a lot of power outages that have been affecting my work… i haven’t had any problems with any buyers, but I’m currently working on an order that, due to the outages problem, I won’t be able to continue… i already delivered two samples of the work, the buyer has liked that but there are some bugs (it’s a website) that have to be fixed, but I haven’t had the opportunity for checking it properly, so I was thinking about ask for a cancellation, so the buyer won’t keep wasting his time (I haven’t been able to deliver any update for around 5 days 😦 ). I know I can’t ask the buyer for money directly, and that’s why I was wondering if Fiverr has an option to let the buyer (after a mutual agreement, of course) to pay part of the order, because the deliveries I’ve already done are around the 70% of the final product for the buyer, and the code I’ve done can be used for the buyer to finish his site, so there’s lot finished and I wouldn’t like to “lose” all of the work that has been delivered so far… Thanks in advance!

[diegow]

To the best of my knowledge there is no way to collect a partial payment for an order (unless you’ve used milestones, of course, but I understand that this is not your case). So unless someone has a better idea, you will need to offer your client an order cancellation, so that he then uses the refund to start a new order for the amount that you want to have him pay. This, however, comes with a couple of nasty drawbacks:

• The client may cancel the order but refuse to place a new one, in which case you would be paid nothing.
• The cancellation will decrease your order completion rate. Depending on how you are doing in the order completion rate department, that may get your account’s level demoted on the next monthly evaluation.

This said, you should explain the situation to your client, clarify that it might take you a lot of time to deliver the finished product for reasons that are out of your hands, and ask whether he still wants to move forward. If the client is not in a hurry and likes your work, he might agree to just wait until you are able to finish. Remember that a client might prefer to stick with an honest, good worker regardless of this issue rather than dealing with a new, unknown seller they don’t yet trust.

[josemperezv]

To the best of my knowledge there is no way to collect a partial payment for an order (unless you’ve used milestones, of course, but I understand that this is not your case). So unless someone has a better idea, you will need to offer your client an order cancellation, so that he then uses the refund to start a new order for the amount that you want to have him pay. This, however, comes with a couple of nasty drawbacks:

• The client may cancel the order but refuse to place a new one, in which case you would be paid nothing.
• The cancellation will decrease your order completion rate. Depending on how you are doing in the order completion rate department, that may get your account’s level demoted on the next monthly evaluation.

This said, you should explain the situation to your client, clarify that it might take you a lot of time to deliver the finished product for reasons that are out of your hands, and ask whether he still wants to move forward. If the client is not in a hurry and likes your work, he might agree to just wait until you are able to finish. Remember that a client might prefer to stick with an honest, good worker regardless of this issue rather than dealing with a new, unknown seller they don’t yet trust.

Hi diegow, thanks for your quick reply!

I didn’t use milestones. To be honest, I realized that feature a couple days ago and the order has about 2 weeks. But I’ve been trying to keep the buyer informed about this situation this whole time.

Thanks for the recommendations. I’ll talk to him!