Jump to content

Okay SELLERS, let's talk about private reviews


mjaninea

Recommended Posts

Yeah, I got demoted from PRO due to the "private rating" silliness, even tho I was making the 80% of the sales within my category and I was the best seller. Been talking with my Customer Success Manager for months but my criticism of the system is always met with "that's how the platform works".

First of all, it's annoying to be contacted again to leave a rating on something that you rated once. 
Second of all, you can have 6 private reviews total for 1000 orders, if 3 of them are negative than your overall private rating is considered bad, which is ridiculous. 
Third, people who leave private rating might be inclined towards a negative rating, which with the second point I brought up is a ridiculous mechanic

And last of all, the wording of the Private Review is just awful, thank you for pointing it out @enunciator

This is such a ridiculous metric and I'll be honest, it ruined my business completely. 

Before I was promoted to PRO I was making 1600-2500$ per month. After I got promoted to PRO I was making up to 4500-5000$ per month and I was the absolute best seller in my PRO category, 80% of the orders were going my way, I was outperforming like 20 other PRO gigs out of 30 within my category with my single gig but due to the "Private rating" mechanic I got demoted. Not only did I get demoted, but my profile was messed up.

Since the demotion I've been making 100-200$ which is 3 times less than what I did on my first month as a completely new seller so this mechanic is just absurd.
Another thing - the more orders you get, the more "private ratings" you can have. The other PRO gigs in my category had 1-2 total review for like a year, literally no one bought them. I was having that amount of reviews per day. When you take into account how the private rating works this just will punish high-performance sellers. 

I DON'T LIKE IT. I HATE IT. IT RUINED MY BUSINESS. TRUE STORY 😞

  • Like 35
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi I feel your pain. I worked as much as I could to get to level one just to be demoted two months after because of one late delivery. I got back to level 1 with a 4.9 rating the next month but my account has not been the same. All my recent sales has been from repeated buyers. 

  • Like 25
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...
Guest dmc_art

Total chaos and goes against sellers. Satisfied buyers barely care to leave a review, while those who have anything to say against the seller will gladly do.

I suffer from those feedbacks, ok? I had a few mentally ill clients that left a bad private feedback. Out of 60 clients, only 3 max had left negative feedback and I lost gig quality, thus I can't promote my gig, I'm out of clients for a month now - and no one writes, no one orders.

Congatz to Fiverr, I'm not bringing any profit for me nor Fiverr now. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest dmc_art

Check the topic Mental Health in the General Discussion tab.

With loads of mentally unhealthy/ill minded/mentally retarded people all around the globe, and Fiverr being open for everyone...

Of course, negative reviews and private feedbacks will happen often. But this platform kisses the dirty bottoms of all the buyers as they're paying, and working against the sellers in a way. 

And the sellers are the gears that are turning this machine.

Shoot me, but I really can't find any logic behind the behaviour and some policies here

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

90% percent of buyers didit gave private feedback because it ask twice for rating but when it comes to bad experience they definitely do private rating. It hurt a lot sellers in rating. How as a sellers can be deal with it?

Edited by digitalkaam
  • Like 9
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...
On 3/16/2023 at 4:49 PM, digitalkaam said:

90% percent of buyers didit gave private feedback because it ask twice for rating but when it comes to bad experience they definitely do private rating. It hurt a lot sellers in rating. How as a sellers can be deal with it?

Yep, imagine my shock when I went from a PRO verified seller that's making 3000-4000$ per month to making less than my FIRST month on Fiverr. 

All because of like 5 Private Reviews due to the average score, after 1500 successful orders, big percentage of returning clients and everyone always reaching back to me to express how happy they are with the delivery. I was getting tips way too often too.

Then, with that system, the people that did bother to leave a private rating of course were the people that weren't happy with the order and went out of their way to leave a private review. These are the bad clients that didn't even bother to reach back and let me know what was wrong with their order, I usually always try to provide revisions and go out of my way to appease clients. The public review system was enough of an extortion method, the private rating is overkill and actually hurts people that overperform. 

Fiverr was the best freelance platform, but in my opinion they ruined it. I guess that's why Fiverr stocks went from 400$ to 20$. They made the design of the site worse, the design of the order page worse, overcomplicated and less intuitive for both sellers and buyers. They messed up their algo with the whole private review system as it's penalizing people who are overperforming with the way it's set up. Absolute disaster, hopefully, they read the forum and they can get some proper feedback and revert things to how they were before.

  • Like 8
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Another downvote for private feedback. It hurts everybody's business and lowers the general quality of work. The seller gets demoted without knowing how to improve their work. The buyer is asked to leave feedback twice and as mentioned earlier in this thread, private feedback will have a negative bias. I'd go so far as to say that the buyer is encouraged to publicly lie about their experience as they're prompted to leave two different feedbacks. Ultimately, Fiverr loses revenue. If anyone from Fiverr is reading this, please reintroduce transparency and honesty in the system and get rid of the private feedback feature.

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree, private feedback is bad to begin with. Why not rely on public feedback and go behind a seller's back? It shows a lack of faith when it comes to the qualities of the freelancer, and as others said, most people that leave a private feedback are unhappy clients, a happy client barely leaves public feedback..

  • Like 9
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest aj_designstudio

I am pathetic listening to similar painful stories from you. Try to:

+ Contact previous clients to give you more work

+ Build your own brand, strengthening social media platforms, and business website

... and what other successful people are doing...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...
On 3/9/2021 at 1:49 PM, mjaninea said:

Exactly my point. By asking buyers to leave “private reviews”, they are making them think they can leave a 5star review and then be honest later anonymously. So what’s the value of the public ones? Both for the seller and for the buyer… Plus, sellers have NO IDEA of what the buyers complained about, and who did, so

  1. How can we, as sellers, provide the service and work that buyers are looking for if their complaints and honest reviews are hidden from us?
  2. What if a buyer used this against a seller, leaving a very bad private review? How can the seller explain his/her side to CS?

They do affect gig rankings. Even more than the public reviews.

1. same question

2. same question

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...
On 4/27/2023 at 12:16 PM, siridhata said:

The private feedback is such a flawed and unfair system for sellers. One or two bad private reviews are enough to kill your best performing gig despite you performing well & having perfect metric score for years.

Yep. That was the case with me and as explained before, I went from 3500$ per month to 35$ per month. I don't understand how Fiverr is not seeing how this hurts the platform and good sellers. 

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well you can always expect people to leave a random review. I had someone that rated me at 1 AM their time feeling pressured by Fiverr, they gave me a positive review in text form, but the lowest amount of stars. God knows what private review he left. Now due to that and a couple other questionable reviews, I am in the doghouse not even getting a single message, let alone order from new people.

  • Like 5
  • Sad 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 4/11/2023 at 5:45 PM, aj_designstudio said:

I am pathetic listening to similar painful stories from you. Try to:

+ Contact previous clients to give you more work

+ Build your own brand, strengthening social media platforms, and business website

... and what other successful people are doing...

1 => It's considered spam.

2 => It's OUT of the Fiverr platform, meanwhile we are discussing about what happend IN the platform. 

You gave us 2 actions which are totally useless bro. Please be polite or just leave it.

----------

About the private feedbacks, I have been badly experiencing these, like @worthforcheap. For the past 2 years, there are many times I suddenly got the notification "Gigs cannot be promoted". Everytime I got that, I know that maybe some clients gave me bad private reviews. And I couldnot see my gig ranking when I search some terms (meanwhile I was always in the first page at normal state). In that period, my sales revenue wend down so bad. I only got orders from my old clients.

Then, a few weeks or a few months after, my gig ranks again, and months later, they disappear again, repeatedly... This is so disturbing that I wrote some topics 3 months ago.

As it turned out, you guys also experienced same situation, private feedbacks harm us so bad, so so bad. 

I dont say that private feedback is bad, but it is unfair. You got 100% comlete, 100% ontime, 100 response, 5 star ratings for more than 600 orders... But few bad private feedbacks pull you down from the ranks, is that fair? You used to bring thousands of usd/month for Fiverr, now it's only a couple of bucks, is that what you want Fiverr? 

The impression is only as 1/10 as before, the revenue is same as my newbie time on Fiverr. I also think it's time to move my freelancer career to another platform. I really hope that Fiverr can listen to us.

 

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 5/23/2023 at 9:57 AM, michaelscottmk6 said:

1 => It's considered spam.

2 => It's OUT of the Fiverr platform, meanwhile we are discussing about what happend IN the platform. 

You gave us 2 actions which are totally useless bro. Please be polite or just leave it.

----------

About the private feedbacks, I have been badly experiencing these, like @worthforcheap. For the past 2 years, there are many times I suddenly got the notification "Gigs cannot be promoted". Everytime I got that, I know that maybe some clients gave me bad private reviews. And I couldnot see my gig ranking when I search some terms (meanwhile I was always in the first page at normal state). In that period, my sales revenue wend down so bad. I only got orders from my old clients.

Then, a few weeks or a few months after, my gig ranks again, and months later, they disappear again, repeatedly... This is so disturbing that I wrote some topics 3 months ago.

As it turned out, you guys also experienced same situation, private feedbacks harm us so bad, so so bad. 

I dont say that private feedback is bad, but it is unfair. You got 100% comlete, 100% ontime, 100 response, 5 star ratings for more than 600 orders... But few bad private feedbacks pull you down from the ranks, is that fair? You used to bring thousands of usd/month for Fiverr, now it's only a couple of bucks, is that what you want Fiverr? 

The impression is only as 1/10 as before, the revenue is same as my newbie time on Fiverr. I also think it's time to move my freelancer career to another platform. I really hope that Fiverr can listen to us.

 

It's unbelievable, 8 hours after this post, my gig got the notification "not promoted anymore" lolz.

  • Like 2
  • Sad 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 minutes ago, michaelscottmk6 said:

It's unbelievable, 8 hours after this post, my gig got the notification "not promoted anymore" lolz.

It might have to do with bad performance and not meeting the metrics. They do cover metrics for the past 60 to 90 days so.. It seems that it happened in February for you too, so try to see what might cause this aside from bad private reviews. My success manager told me I have some bad private reviews, and because of that I barely have orders from new people. Yet none of my gigs were affected when it comes to promoting them. So there's another underlying issue, don't blame it solely on your private reviews.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, donnovan86 said:

It might have to do with bad performance and not meeting the metrics. They do cover metrics for the past 60 to 90 days so.. It seems that it happened in February for you too, so try to see what might cause this aside from bad private reviews. My success manager told me I have some bad private reviews, and because of that I barely have orders from new people. Yet none of my gigs were affected when it comes to promoting them. So there's another underlying issue, don't blame it solely on your private reviews.

For 60 days I dont have any canceled order bro, all 5 stars ratings, 1h reply, no late delivery. So why 😄

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

29 minutes ago, michaelscottmk6 said:

So why

Bad private reviews. 

Worse performance when compared to others in your subcategory.

Other hidden metrics from Fiverr. If they already did this in February, then there is an issue you don't know about which seems to be recurring. Public reviews are not the only thing.. late deliveries, lots of revisions, those can also impact stuff. 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 5/24/2023 at 4:55 PM, michaelscottmk6 said:

For 60 days I dont have any canceled order bro, all 5 stars ratings, 1h reply, no late delivery. So why 😄

I've been saying the private reviews system is unfair to sellers. Then lately I've been reading more and more stories of similar experiences from a lot of sellers and it got me thinking maybe this is just how the new algorithm works. I mean I'm starting to find it weird that all of us are getting  bad private reviews while having perfect public reviews. So maybe buyers leaving the private reviews unattended could also cause problems for sellers?

Then again I also see some sellers in my category who always have orders in queue. So whatever is effecting us somehow is not effecting them? I don't know, I think all the answers are just not as simple as we thought they were.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...