How can anyone possibly compete?

[lunabea]

I’ve had my book editing gig up for about a year and always done really well with it. I steadily increased my prices to one I’m comfortable with and have stuck to these prices for about 6-7 months.

I noticed over the past few weeks that my impressions are down and I’m getting very few enquiries. I’ve recently stopped limiting my orders after I finished some long-term projects, so while I expected some slow uptake initially it’s pretty ridiculous that my impressions are steadily declining over several weeks. I know gig rotation has nothing to do with it because my gig is on the second page at the top and bottom on the first page for my country.

I looked at a few of the top gigs offered in this category and every single one of them has ridiculously cheap prices compared to several months ago. Cheap as in they’re really working themselves to the bone for pennies OR they’re just not delivering good work…this seems to be the latter, as the top spot for this category in level 2 has 4.8 stars for a gig and terrible recent bad reviews. Some also have continuous 3 stars and 4 stars and are poorly reviewed. I’ve even seen my potential buyers choose these cheaper editors and then been disappointed with their work. Most of these sellers actually have clear typos and poor English in their gig description!

I know you’ll always have cheaper sellers. I completely understand that, and if someone wants to pay less to receive less then that’s fine. But what can anyone do when nearly all sellers on the first page are getting all the orders because they’re selling their services at prices 50% below me?

I don’t know why this is happening suddenly, but if it continues then I will actually have to leave Fiverr and go elsewhere for work because selling my services for $25/£18 an hour isn’t sustainable for me. I already worked incredibly hard at my current prices; it’s just not feasible or even logical for me to drop them just to compete with cheap sellers.

I’ve added a small discount to see if that picks up any interest but this is honestly just bringing Fiverr back down to the reputation of “cheap and poor-quality.”

I do know that this is a price issue because I’ve never had trouble before and any messages I do get I just get the response of “I’ll get back to you.” Then three days later they’ve bought from someone else for half the price.

Has anyone else experienced this before? Did you drop your prices to match or did you stick to your self-worth and wait it out?

[davidstrongvo]

I think something to think about is whether Fiverr is your only means of people finding you.
As a voice talent, I appreciate the Fiverr platform, however I also do direct marketing and list on other platforms to achieve as many opportunities as I can find.

I keep my prices up on Fiverr, because I know that I offer quality service and even though I don’t get a lot of quantity, when I do get an order it is a good one and I can take the time to deliver top notch quality work.

I think the answer can range by how large you are currently scaling your business.