Fiverr's fees are counter productive

[visualstudios]

Just wanted to share an experience I had recently.

A YouTuber looking to produce an e-learning course contacted me. He was looking to have one module of the course made per week, for 52 weeks (so, an entire year). We had a call, went through all the details, and I proposed a price per module based on the information. It was too high for him, so we negotiated a bit on the price, and I came down to a value that was acceptable to him, while still being interesting for me.

I quoted him at $1200 per module. He accepted. I sent an offer. He didn't accept it, complained about the price, and only when he sent me a screenshot did I understand what was happening. Fiverr was charging him around $1350. My price, as stated on the offer... plus around $150 in "fees". 

The client refused to pay that. I refused to take the loss myself, since I had already agreed on a price lower than my initial proposal. Conclusion? The buyer went away, we did no business, and that was it. He did not go with another seller either, he found somebody else outside the platform and went that route.

Now let's do some math. Had he accepted, at $1200 per week, Fiverr would be making $240 per week on this deal via commission. For a year. That's $12480. For doing NOTHING except getting me the lead. They would have to spend ZERO on future marketing for this client. They would have to spend ZERO on costumer support (it simply would never be needed in this situation). They would spend ZERO in server costs (since Fiverr's upload system is so bad, I need to pay for my own Filemail server to be able to transfer video files that are well over 1 GB). 

They would have no costs going forward with this, at all, except minimal transaction costs WELL covered by the 20% commission they are taking. But $240 is not enough, apparently. They wanted to make an extra 150*52, or $7800 on top. A cost that I would literally have to eat myself, since the client just wouldn't accept that added expense. 

So congratulations, Fiverr. The greedy tactic of just adding a % based fee regardless of order value just made you lose 12 grand in possible profits. Just because you demanded to make 20k instead, at my cost. For doing nothing but getting me the lead. Even taking 20% for the entire thing is highway robbery, the fees should have a sliding scale. Makes no sense to pay 20% for a $5 order and also pay 20% for a $5000 order - the work on Fiverr's part is the same in both cases. I feel like Fiverr actively punishes people for having high prices, which is incredibly dumb. They should encourage it. Right now it feels like high price sellers are subsidising all the meksells, which is very annoying.

I hope Fiverr is happy with their strategy. I'm not.

 

[visualstudios]

2 minutes ago, raj_proservice said:

Fiverr always Charged On their Rules

 

1 minute ago, raj_proservice said:

Thank you for share your experience

Please don't spam my topics with posts that add no value and say nothing. Thanks.

[leannelrivers]

11 hours ago, visualstudios said:

So congratulations, Fiverr. The greedy tactic of just adding a % based fee regardless of order value just made you lose 12 grand in possible profits.

I couldn't agree more. It is greedy and I cringe with embarrassment every time a buyer brings it up with me. And another fee if hey want to tip me. It should be one set order fee and a small on at that. I really hope someone picks up on this post and the impact of it taken into consideration.