Important Update: Some canceled orders now qualify for buyer reviews

[elitedesignuk]

1 hour ago, venonusa said:

Nice to see all these comments... 

This new option seems made to make sellers communicate more with customers and not deliver late orders... If you're complaining about this change, it could mean that you are one of those sellers who doesn't communicate and deliver often late orders... and it will make unhappy customers ....

Not quite true - I am a Top Rated Seller -  my communication is, if I do say so myself, nothing short of outstanding, I have 2,000+ 5* reviews and I have NEVER delivered late.

This new 'feature' doesn't seem to address poor comms or late delivery does it?  My understanding is that a late delivery is already a 1* review?

What this does is penalize sellers like myself who, whilst we go out of our way to over deliver, there are times when the buyer simply can't be satisfied and the only rational course of action is to initiate a cancellation - We have lost our time and the buyer is refunded - still on the 'buyers side' but I can appreciate why the platform operates like this - but we both get to 'walk away'.

Now, with this new feature, the buyer who can't possibly be pleased, gets to leave a review while going off with their refund - I can't see any circumstance where a buyer, who is taking a cancellation because it's impossible to satisfy them, will do anything other than leave a 'bad review' - essentially then this is an 'Automatic Bad Review' for a cancellation when the seller simply can't satisfy even an unreasonable buyer.....

Tell me - how is this fair, amicable or an improvement?

[silvana23]

What a terrible update. Totally unfair to the sellers, I'm very disappointed with this update it's just pointless.
 

[elitedesignuk]

15 minutes ago, Shiran.M said:

7. What does ‘unresponsiveness’ mean? 
A seller who fails to respond for 24 hours (or even longer for orders with a very long delivery time) is deemed “unresponsive” and may be subject to reviews on canceled orders. 
 

Might sound obvious but can someone explain what this actually means?

So - I have a buyer and they send me a message and I reply within 24 hours. 

They then reply with 'Perfect! Thank you for the update'

Of course I don't reply to their last message because....well.....it didn't need a reply so would that then be counted as 'unresponsive?  Should I now make sure that, whatever happens, I am the LAST person who wrote in EVERY message thread?

Any explanation / clarification would be greatly appreciated.

[donnovan86]

12 minutes ago, elitedesignuk said:

My understanding is that a late delivery is already a 1* review?

It was in the past, I don't think that's the case anymore.

[zeecreations]

26 minutes ago, Shiran.M said:

If you think a buyer-initiated cancellation is unwarranted (like when buyers ask for unlimited revisions), you can reject the cancellation, as long as you’ve delivered based on requirements that were set. 

Reject cancellation and then what? I contact CS, Buyer contact CS. Who are you going to side with when the order is properly delivered, up to the quality showcased. But the buyer still didn't like it.

What happens then? You're always going to side with the buyer and cancel the order. Then they leave 1* and we are doomed. How will you handle this situation differently? 

[elitedesignuk]

2 minutes ago, donnovan86 said:

It was in the past, I don't think that's the case anymore.

Ah - ok....well I missed that update! 

Surely - a BETTER way to increase buyer satisfaction would be to bring that back....late delivery DESERVES a 1* review....I can absolutely support that.

Perhaps late comms could effect the max rating available - for example for each 24 hours that goes by without a reply the max rating a buyer (even a happy one) can give goes down by 1* - 24 hours late Max 4* / 48 hours late Max 3* Etc......that would be fair because we are here to provide exceptional service and improve the buyer experience.

But this new feature just isn't that - this feature provides equity to those small number of buyers who just can't be pleased.

True - there aren't many I reckon that I have perhaps 1 in 100 or less.....but even then if they had been able to review that would have given my profile potentially 30 1* reviews!  (1% of 3,000 completed orders) - unacceptable.

The current way it works is fair, it is amicable and it does benefit the buyer - We have done the work for no reward (because it's impossible to make everyone happy all of the time) and they walk away with a full refund - it's a good outcome and balanced IMO - this new proposal......utterly, totally and completely awful.....just not thought out at all.

[zeecreations]

28 minutes ago, Shiran.M said:

5. What is considered an unsatisfactory delivery?
Unsatisfactory deliveries vary, so it really depends on the specific case. Our customer support team is here to help if you have questions about deliveries.

How will you determine an unsatisfactory delivery? If the delivered work is Top-notch but buyer still refuses to accept it. Will you force them to accept it? NEVER! 

What happens in this scenario? You cancel the order, 1* review and we are again doomed.

Provide a solution?

[bobipineman]

31 minutes ago, oskars25 said:

Thank you for bringing this up!

 

My question is, is there a chance for fiverr to lower that 20% off the fee for order, since we all pay taxes and in the end we end up in 50% giving away. So imagine, you worked all day for  100 usd, almost half away goes to you guys and half to our goverment. I think its not fair. 

 

Also i have seen people using same gig videos in past with different profiles, i reported each of them gave CS alot of evidence, and you guys just ignored! 

It would better if it was a variable fee: the  higher the pay is the smaller the fee will be like
under 30$: keep the 20% fee
30$-200$: 10% fee
200$+: 5% fee

[oskars25]

58 minutes ago, elitedesignuk said:

Not quite true - I am a Top Rated Seller -  my communication is, if I do say so myself, nothing short of outstanding, I have 2,000+ 5* reviews and I have NEVER delivered late.

This new 'feature' doesn't seem to address poor comms or late delivery does it?  My understanding is that a late delivery is already a 1* review?

What this does is penalize sellers like myself who, whilst we go out of our way to over deliver, there are times when the buyer simply can't be satisfied and the only rational course of action is to initiate a cancellation - We have lost our time and the buyer is refunded - still on the 'buyers side' but I can appreciate why the platform operates like this - but we both get to 'walk away'.

Now, with this new feature, the buyer who can't possibly be pleased, gets to leave a review while going off with their refund - I can't see any circumstance where a buyer, who is taking a cancellation because it's impossible to satisfy them, will do anything other than leave a 'bad review' - essentially then this is an 'Automatic Bad Review' for a cancellation when the seller simply can't satisfy even an unreasonable buyer.....

Tell me - how is this fair, amicable or an improvement?

Thats the thing what i am talking about. Specially in Video editing service, when all depends on the materia lwhat they sent 

[oskars25]

26 minutes ago, bobipineman said:

It would better if it was a variable fee: the  higher the pay is the smaller the fee will be like
under 30$: keep the 20% fee
30$-200$: 10% fee
200$+: 5% fee

Forget about it, that will never happen. It was made for people to dont do money loundering

[nunulka]

56 minutes ago, zeecreations said:

How will you determine an unsatisfactory delivery? If the delivered work is Top-notch but buyer still refuses to accept it. Will you force them to accept it? NEVER! 

What happens in this scenario? You cancel the order, 1* review and we are again doomed.

Provide a solution?

I agree it happened to me. The client refused to accept the delivery  and wrote just I dont like it without any explanation, then I found he ordered at same time (before I delivered my design) for the same project at other seller cheaper and there he accepted it. He ordered at several places and made a "private contest".

Edited June 15, 2023 by nunulka

[roxana_nesfintu]

3 hours ago, nicks_voice said:

 

3) Picky sellers - some paranoid folk will definitely start turning their gig to request-only mode / question buyers a lot more and accept less briefs- drop in sales for them (and in turn, Fiverr).

 

I'm the picky seller. 👋 

Due to past experiences with very confused, unresponsive or arrogant buyers I made sure to become the one who choses the buyers to work with and not vice versa (thankfully happens very rarely to have clients who place orders without discussing before, maybe 2-3 times per year).  

After this update I will surely increase my selection even more.

If the client:

- is not 100% clear about what he/she wants, and very detailed about the requirements

- doesn't display 100% politeness and education in communication

- keeps me chatting for days and days before placing an order

- doesn't seem to know the field and how things work

- doesn't have experience 

- is unresponsive and doesn't reply fast or to all my questions  

-doesn't know how the platform works

then I definitely want to have nothing to deal with them.

These might seem basic requirements to start an order but sometimes I'm still patient and tolerate buyers who are a bit impolite or buyers who are nice but unexperienced, well... from now on all these buyers won't be accepted anymore, just as extra caution.

I'm more than happy to end up with half of the orders I have now. My peace of mind comes first! 🤗

 

[newsmike]

2 hours ago, hightlink said:

"This new option seems made to make sellers communicate more with customers and not deliver late orders" 🤣 

I can't go anywhere for more than half a day without having to take the laptop with me because if I activate vacation mode, when I get back to work, the algorithm is made in such a way that your gig won't get sales anymore and you will have to struggle to rank back up.

This is just modern slavery and all the changes made only accentuates it. But it seems some people don't care about their rights.

 

EDIT:  "This content must be approved before it can be posted." 🤣 no more free speech

Nonsense. 

[nunulka]

13 minutes ago, roxana_nesfintu said:

I'm the picky seller. 👋 

Due to past experiences with very confused, unresponsive or arrogant buyers I made sure to become the one who choses the buyers to work with and not vice versa (thankfully happens very rarely to have clients who place orders without discussing before, maybe 2-3 times per year).  

After this update I will surely increase my selection even more.

If the client:

- is not 100% clear about what he/she wants, and very detailed about the requirements

- doesn't display 100% politeness and education in communication

- keeps me chatting for days and days before placing an order

- doesn't seem to know the field and how things work

- doesn't have experience 

- is unresponsive and doesn't reply fast or to all my questions  

-doesn't know how the platform works

then I definitely want to have nothing to deal with them.

These might seem basic requirements to start an order but sometimes I'm still patient and tolerate buyers who are a bit impolite or buyers who are nice but unexperienced, well... from now on all these buyers won't be accepted anymore, just as extra caution.

I'm more than happy to end up with half of the orders I have now. My peace of mind comes first! 🤗

 

I agree it does not worth the stress. Do you know how to refuse polite a client without giving much info why I refuse to accept the order also do you have enabled the option "Request to order" (if you are seller plus)

[roxana_nesfintu]

Just now, nunulka said:

I agree it does not worth the stress. Do you know how to refuse polite a client without giving much info why I refuse to accept the order 

Yes of course, there are several ways to do that: 

- "I would love to work on your project but at the moment I have very limited time and I can't take other orders, but thank you for your interest"  

- "I checked your project but I'm not sure if I have the capabilities to deliver a satisfactory result, therefore I prefer to not take this order" 

- "I'm sorry but unfortunately I do not provide this type of service..........." (here you must find something specific that you won't do, each case a different story) 

- Or if you find a very impolite person just leave the conversation at some point. 

No I don't have "request to order", but that happens very rarely in my case, 90% of my clients always contact me first, so with automatic orders you just have to deal with and ask as much as you can in this case. 

[visualstudios]

3 hours ago, roxana_nesfintu said:

I'm the picky seller. 👋 

Due to past experiences with very confused, unresponsive or arrogant buyers I made sure to become the one who choses the buyers to work with and not vice versa

Yep, that's the way. Also, request to order on everything.

[norloxd28]

I'm pausing my gig temporarly until I see how this update works and how sellers are affected by it :/ 

[imraan_zaack]

This is a terrible update. Buyers can misuse this feature and blackmail the sellers as well. Fiverr always thinks of the buyers only

[gurgenbenashvil]

Are we sure this is going to be helpful for sellers too..?

[emtiiyaz_emon]

In my opinion : This update may be harmful to sellers if their orders get canceled.

Because the buyer will surely leave a bad review for the seller if this is the fault of the buyer. 

Let Me know Your opinion guys.

Thanks.

[charlsmcfarlane]

I don’t like this 

With this change in place, any misunderstanding or miscommunication can be blamed entirely on the seller, regardless of the situation. There could be a language barrier, the buyer could have placed an order without fully reading or understanding the description, or they might just change their mind or start asking for things that were never agreed upon. Ask anyone, it happens.

Sometimes sellers spend hours working on a job and for a variety of reasons, it just doesn’t work out. At least when this happened and an order was cancelled, a seller could swallow the lost time and money and rest assured that their rating wouldn’t get hammered too. Now, if the order is cancelled, the seller loses the time and money and they’re subject to a one-sided review process.

I personally have a very high review rating and a very low cancellation rate, so I don’t expect this to hurt me too much, but I am generally struggling to see the value in this change.

I guess it might weed out some poor quality sellers but the problem is, poor quality buyers can continue as they were, without even the chance of getting a negative review. It is already a pretty unfair system where sellers can not review a buyer if the buyer doesn’t review the seller first. This just further weighs the review process in favour of the buyer, at the expense of the seller.

Fiverr…

• Please pay attention to the countless replies to this.

• Please listen to your seller community, who are the core of your business.

• Please show you care about buyers and sellers equally and reverse this decision (or, at the very least, show that you’re interested in the process being fair and allow sellers to rate their experience too.)

 Thank you

[newsmike]

14 minutes ago, charlsmcfarlane said:

At least when this happened and an order was cancelled, a seller could swallow the lost time and money and rest assured that their rating wouldn’t get hammered too

That is the false "sanitizing of reviews" that this is designed to eliminate. People giving refunds to avoid the bad review, which leads to fraudulent representations of perfect sellers with 0 complaints because they buy off buyers with refunds. 

This is a positive move for honest reviews. 

[visualstudios]

18 minutes ago, newsmike said:

This is a positive move for honest reviews. 

Overall, combined with the reduced threshold for level metrics, and if it's well implemented, it's probably good. We will have to wait and see how they deal with cases of buyers acting in bad faith though, that can make or break a system like this.

A good point mentioned above is that sellers should also rate the buyers in the case of cancelations, I don't see why it should be one way only. Of course that's if the buyer ratings are a system that Fiverr wants to keep, given the way it works now it's not particularly useful and could probably be removed.

Edited June 16, 2023 by visualstudios

[newsmike]

37 minutes ago, visualstudios said:

and if it's well implemented, it's probably good.

Absolutely agree.  I was thinking about the a scenario where a buyer is deciding between 2 sellers, both offering the same type of logo design and at the same price.  

Seller A: 100 reviews, all positive except for 2 that ended in cancellation, for whatever reason. 2% failure rate.

Seller B: 100 reviews, 100 positive. Except that this seller refunds 10% of orders as cancellations to avoid negative reviews. 10% failure rate.

If buyer selects seller B, thinking that he is getting a better seller with no complaints, the buyer has been defrauded by a seller who sanitizes complaints, and a system that allows the seller to do so by concealing vital information. Buyer B is 5 times more likely to disappoint. 

When you come down to this, there is no ethical argument in favor of concealing such data from buyers.

Edited June 16, 2023 by newsmike

[visualstudios]

But that's the best case scenario. In that case, of course it's good. But theoretically we already had the cancelation rate metric to deal with sellers doing that excessively.

What I'm worried about are buyers canceling and leaving bad reviews that are completely unwarranted (because they changed their mind after delivery, because they want more services and not pay for them, because they want something different that the seller doesn't offer, because they "don't like it" and are, quite frankly, wrong, or simply on purpose). All these things can happen. On a low volume seller, that does a couple orders per month, that can be catastrophic, and there's very little they can do.

Edited June 16, 2023 by visualstudios