Official feedback thread re: the new leveling system

[cucinavivace]

On 3/27/2024 at 3:24 PM, katherinasim said:

Does anyone see any changes in your Success Score Stats? In March I have completed 7 orders, 6 of them with 5 star rating (1 autocompleted), 2 of them with the "Fiverr's choice" badge, and still this gig has a score of "6" and strong negative in "client satisfaction" 😅 I have no idea how to improve it

Also you have a lot of orders and ratings. I don't know how many are in the last two years, but six new ratings is probably only 1% or 2% of them overall. So, they're not going to change things very quickly. Someone with 10 ratings in the past two years, one new rating is 10% of their performance. Someone with 1,000 ratings, you'd need 100 new ones for a similar affect in the same time frame, I'm guessing.

Might sound horrible, but it means a negative one is likely to affect you less too.

Edited March 29 by cucinavivace

[vhskid]

1 hour ago, charlsmcfarlane said:

If it’s taking into account a specific time frame, for example the last 24 months, then changes can happen at any time. Let’s say you had a negative private review 24 months ago. As soon as you hit 24 months and one day, that negative review isn’t impacting you any more, so your score would seem to inexplicably increase.

I have no idea if this is how it works, I’m just guessing at what could cause movement like this with no orders.

The 2-year window concerns the Rating score (stars), not the Sucess Score. 

But yes, we'll never know how this is all interconnected in the black box.

For my SS change, I'm betting either an effect of the scores being dependent on other sellers' performance or "fine-tuning" the algo by Fiverr's product team.

 

 

Edited March 29 by vhskid

[priyank_mod]

On 3/28/2024 at 1:57 AM, vhskid said:

My SS went 1 up recently, but I haven't had any new orders / reviews since January.

Since we have a rolling time window of 2 years - may be a bad review/cancellation from Feb-March'22 went out of the consideration set and is not influencing the score that strongly anymore. 

[vhskid]

49 minutes ago, priyank_mod said:

Since we have a rolling time window of 2 years - may be a bad review/cancellation from Feb-March'22 went out of the consideration set and is not influencing the score that strongly anymore. 

 

Again - the 2-year window concerns the Rating score (stars), not the Sucess Score:

 

So the 2-year-old public and private reviews go into ⭐️ Rating.
We were never informed about the time scope for the Success Score.

I think that there is a very widely spread misinformation and / or misinterpretation among the sellers in this forum regarding this. 

This score, that score. This rating, that rating.

 

 

[ch6k0r]

27 minutes ago, vhskid said:

 

Again - the 2-year window concerns the Rating score (stars), not the Sucess Score:

 

So the 2-year-old public and private reviews go into ⭐️ Rating.
We were never informed about the time scope for the Success Score.

I think that there is a very widely spread misinformation and / or misinterpretation among the sellers in this forum regarding this. 

This score, that score. This rating, that rating.

 

 

Success score seriously needs a new long page explaining all the mysteries and the questions that everyone (including myself) keeps repeating.

[priyank_mod]

44 minutes ago, vhskid said:

Again - the 2-year window concerns the Rating score (stars), not the Sucess Score:So the 2-year-old public and private reviews go into ⭐️ Rating.
We were never informed about the time scope for the Success Score.

I think that there is a very widely spread misinformation and / or misinterpretation among the sellers in this forum regarding this. 

This score, that score. This rating, that rating.

 

 

 

Success score clearly takes ORDER HISTORY of gigs into consideration. 

[vhskid]

1 hour ago, priyank_mod said:

 

Success score clearly takes ORDER HISTORY of gigs into consideration. 

 

But we don't know if / how the ORDER AGE matters for the SS.

The ⭐️ Rating and Success Score metrics can approach the interpretation of data differently.

 

 

[enekoviolin]

MY PERSONAL AND HORRIBLE EXPERIENCE WITH THE NEW LEVEL SYSTEM AND SUCCESS SCORE

Hello, I am Eneko, enekoviolin on fiverr and is the first time I join and write a message on the forum. I have reached out to investigate and understand which has been other seller's experience with the new level system. I have been reading many pages from this thread, but sorry, in advance because I didn't read all of them so maybe I lost some information or I am doing some questions that were already answered.

My experience with the new level system and specially with the success score has been terrible bad and I went down to level 1 with a success score of 6. I have been active in fiverr since 2014, 10 years (with some stops), made 660 orders and I mantain a 4,9 rating all time (553 reviews). If you are a seller as well, you would understand how hard is this and how much I worked and I am working for this.

Just so you can have an idea, in the last two years I had these orders and ratings:
In 2024 24 orders, 0 cancelled, all the public reviews 5,0
In 2023 77 orders, 3 cancelled, all the public reviews 5,0 except two 4,7.
However the Success score's areas indicates that the 'client satisfaction' is having a negative impact on my puntuation, does this make any sense? I know that some 'private' reviews can affect negatively as well, but I don't think it would be so much different from the clients that didn't make a public review...

I have contacted fiverr's customer service several times so I can try to understand what is going wrong with my performance and how I can improve and all I recieve is useless information and not practical, in many cases being contradictory depending who are you talking to. 

My personal situation being exposed here, my only hypotesis is that all-time reviews/orders and cancelled orders are taking into account to indicate this success score: of course when someone like me has been making orders the last 10 years, at the start you make mistakes, you don't know how it works perfectly and you go learning... Is something from 8-10 years ago relevant for today's success score? However, fiverr sent me different answers related to this depending on the person from the support I was talking to; one has been: "considers a wide timeframe of your performance", other has been: "The calculation of your overall Success score is determined by the success scores of each gig in the last few months under the new level system". Some of you here are clear that the success score takes ALL the history orders, but customer support from fiverr doesn't have it that clear when you ask them this directly...

Apart from other messages that haven't been useful for me, these are some contradictory and comments that I recieved from custommer support, ones that I don't understand or I don't see reasonable at all: "Revisions/delivery extensions/partial refunds are tools to increase the buyer’s satisfaction, and therefore, we recommend using them to improve the buyer’s experience"
However, other fiverr custommer support, told me: "deliver on time without unnecessary revisions", isn't these two different messages contradictory? Lead me thinking they don't even have clear how the metrics or algorytm works.

Conclusion:
I have readed some sellers with similar problem or situation, is there something we can do to demonstrate our annoyance and displeasure with this level system and specially the success score metric? Did fiverr say something about all the injureds we were?

Sorry about this long message and thank you if you have ended up reading it all. This situation doesn't make any sense to me and maybe you guys have been investigating more about this and you can give me a little bit of light or more information to understand it.

Thank you in advance,

Eneko
 

Edited March 29 by enekoviolin

[donnovan86]

51 minutes ago, enekoviolin said:

However the Success score's areas indicates that the 'client satisfaction' is having a negative impact on my puntuation, does this make any sense? I know that some 'private' reviews can affect negatively as well, but I don't think it would be so much different from the clients that didn't make a public review..

It can be. Last year I barely had any reviews under 5 stars. Yet my success manager said I have a low buyer satisfaction rate, which is the current success score basically. So people were happy, came back for orders, but some rated me poorly with private reviews. Some people will leave a random rating. Others leave a bad rating accidentally, and I am sure a lot of buyers have no idea these private reviews matter. In fact, lots of them ignore these, and when most people ignore them but a buyer that has a vendetta and wants to leave only bad reviews will leave such a bad private review, that will damage your success score quite a lot.

[katherinasim]

@enekoviolin Hi! I was trying to understand the system for almost 1,5 month now, but it's just senseless, that's it. There is no logic. My bestseller gig has a score of "6" and a "strong negative impact" on Client Satisfaction. But it has a 5.0 star rating from 234 public reviews and is currently selling with a "Fiverr's choice" badge. (Already got 4 orders as a Fiverr's choice).

[donnovan86]

52 minutes ago, katherinasim said:

But it has a 5.0 star rating from 234 public reviews and is currently selling with a "Fiverr's choice" badge. (Already got 4 orders as a Fiverr's choice).

That's an indicator that private metrics are not very good for the gig. It might also indicate that few people leave private reviews, and if the only private review you have is a bad one, for example, that can have a "strong negative impact" as you said. It definitely happens to me for a gig where I only had 2 reviews/orders in the past 5 months. And they both had 5 star reviews publicly, however a month ago I had negative impact shown, since last week it's strong negative impact. And keep in mind the last order was finalized and reviewed 2 months ago. 

[marinanp86]

13 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

Yeah. And they make new ones. They use fake identities. I agree, there could be different ways to handle. But it's easier to use AI in order to track metrics and take action based on that. And also cheaper, when compared to paying people that manually track and do those things.

They cannot use fake IDs if that is controlled by human support. It's not just about sending a photo of your ID, they may ask you for a photo to support your ID, summaries of services that prove your address, etc. It's easy to refer to an edited photo; If detected, that person is blocked.

But precisely the dilemma here is not that, but rather that, as you say, it is cheaper to have AI and not the human personnel necessary to control these situations.
It's all based on the decision to reduce your costs and prioritize your profits, so they don't care how these decisions affect sellers.

I am on another platform that is not Upwork and there humans control everything, even to create an account you must go through a review process and they are very demanding when it comes to breaking important rules, such as disrespecting a client, having multiple accounts . (that's very serious), not behaving like a professional, etc. But they are logical rules and they definitely make you a better professional.

[marinanp86]

8 hours ago, enekoviolin said:

However the Success score's areas indicates that the 'client satisfaction' is having a negative impact on my puntuation, does this make any sense? I know that some 'private' reviews can affect negatively as well, but I don't think it would be so much different from the clients that didn't make a public review...

Hello friend, welcome here! I'm sorry for your situation, many of us are going through the same thing here.
No, it doesn't make any sense how they are handling the metrics. Nobody understands anything. Not even the support can give concrete explanations.

 

8 hours ago, enekoviolin said:

Some of you here are clear that the success score takes ALL the history orders, but customer support from fiverr doesn't have it that clear when you ask them this directly...

According to Fiver, only the last 2 years of rating history are collected. That's what they announced.

8 hours ago, enekoviolin said:

I have readed some sellers with similar problem or situation, is there something we can do to demonstrate our annoyance and displeasure with this level system and specially the success score metric? Did fiverr say something about all the injureds we were?

I think Fiver has seen our discontent here on the forum and in the number of queries sent to support. He's just not interested.

The only thing that could be done is to create a new conversation thread, only for sellers, in which we talk about a proposal that would then be raised in a serious and respectful manner, but for that all sellers must join (absolutely all) and that is very difficult, since not everyone will want to risk their metrics if they are good.

Unfortunately there is nothing to do, just migrate to other platforms.

[donnovan86]

9 hours ago, marinanp86 said:

They cannot use fake IDs if that is controlled by human support. It's not just about sending a photo of your ID, they may ask you for a photo to support your ID, summaries of services that prove your address, etc. It's easy to refer to an edited photo; If detected, that person is blocked.

 

If there's a way to bypass a system, cheaters will always find it. Clearly there are people here on Fiverr with multiple accounts that receive orders on all of them. They have different images (usually girls), the same image format, the same username format, and they even shared reviews between each account. I saw that myself and I only searched within my niche, so obviously there must be in other niches. As I said, if people want to cheat, they will find ways to do it. After all, every week you have people asking on the forum if it's ok to use an autorefresher.... 

9 hours ago, marinanp86 said:

and there humans control everything

It might be a smaller platform then. As they scale, they tend to use AI more and more. I don't blame them, if AI can take over repetitive tasks and save money, why wouldn't you use it? 

[dewale_xpert]

Thanks for this, my issues currently is that my account has been placed under review for the past 3-4 months now for policy violation which was not pointed out to me, or even received a single warning, i never had a fight with any buyer neither i have received a project without doing a good job because i have completed almost 40  orders on this account and i only received 4 star ratings twice. currently i have a balance of $146 on this account and my livelihood situations depends on it. now my question is , what can i do to get this sorted because i have contact support without getting it solved.

[emmaki]

re: succes score. I googled "what is the success score" and got a nice page from UW about the "job success score", after which I noticed a lot of similarities between the two platform's scores.

So if anyone is confused by Fiverr's SS, perhaps they will find answers on UW 🙂

Obviously they are not identical because that would be stealing. I have no moral judgement here: the flow of "ideas" between UW/Fiverr is apparently free-flowing.  

[tosindev]

Hi, I'm really affected and confused with the new leveling system: My success score has remained at 6 with client satisfaction and effective commination being labeled as "negative impact" without any pointers on what or where I did wrong or how can I improve aside from the Fiverr help page. Can anyone redirect me to where to find more insights on this so I can actually improve.

Thanks

[chellerose]

Having the same issue here. As soon as the "official" implementation of the rating system, I've dropped from 8-12k impressions per day to ~2k. It's actually a visual drop on the graph on the exact same date that the seller rating changes took effect. The ONLY change on my account? A drop to Seller Succes Level 9 for a gig that ONLY has cancellations due to buyer accidental purchases, buyer out of scope requests, or buyers that purchase and then disappear for A YEAR (and a one-off where a customer re-ordered because he forgot to apply a coupon discount the first time). EVERY SINGLE TIME, customer service "fixed" my cancellation rating back to 100% and this has been consistent for the past 4 years because obviously, these are not a seller's fault.

Yet cancellations are now showing as a "strong negative impact" on my gig and my gig is getting hardly any impressions due to cancellations that I can't control (and which were determined to not be my fault). And Top Rated Sellers or people with popular gigs are even more affected as it's more likely that people buy without reading your gig (happens often) and then need to cancel (again, because they didn't even read your gig). When my profile was on the front page and open to orders, I would get an order almost WEEKLY for someone asking me to build from scratch the "entire front page of Etsy/Amazon" (with all full functionality, of course) without even reading my gig. Then those would require cancellation for being out of scope. And now, all of those cancellations are now affecting me, which is horribly unfair, especially when Fiverr basically hides the full text of your gig on mobile, where tons of people purchase.

I have an agency with employees now doing nothing because of this change. We're now focusing on moving off this platform to other competitors because this change is ridiculous. 

Edited March 30 by chellerose
adding more

[marinanp86]

15 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

If there's a way to bypass a system, cheaters will always find it. 

There are always ways to reinforce control and security so that the number of fake accounts is minimal. Wouldn't it be better to reinforce that instead of screwing all the sellers who are doing things right?
The update does not have to do exclusively with the number of bad salespeople, but with the cutting of expenses and automation of personnel.

15 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

I don't blame them, if AI can take over repetitive tasks and save money, why wouldn't you use it? 

Because what is currently happening happens, the platform goes crazy with hundreds of errors.
Cheap is expensive 🥴

Edited March 31 by marinanp86

[donnovan86]

12 hours ago, marinanp86 said:

Because what is currently happening happens, the platform goes crazy with hundreds of errors.
Cheap is expensive 🥴

12 hours ago, marinanp86 said:

Wouldn't it be better to reinforce that instead of screwing all the sellers who are doing things right?

That's because almost everyone that's an active seller on Fiverr with a few hundred reviews or so has 5 stars and is a level 2. So they just found a way to lower review scores across the board. And I am sure they won't be stopping here. If anything, I can only imagine it will get much tougher for us sellers. As I said, everyone said what they wanted about the new systems, Fiverr knows, but there's no indicator that the success score will go away, at least not for a while. I wouldn't spend so much money and time on something just to throw it away because some sellers that aren't even under contract with me anyway are unhappy. So realistically, I don't see them making any major changes. 

As for success scores being low for some people, we don't have the full story. We don't know 100% of the metrics behind the Success Score. We can assume, obviously, but without having access to all the data, you can't realistically know if the success score is correct or not. Objectively, that's the case. There are some things I dislike, including sellers being compared with competitors, so if you have 2 sales and the competitor sales are 10x that, then it impacts your own score. So I can see why people have a low success score, because competitors have more sales, who knows what private reviews they got, etc. There's just a lot of hidden info, data that's not accessible. So without seeing all the data and seeing how the score is calculated with complete transparency.. it's difficult to say the score is wrong or not, objectively at least. 

Edited March 31 by donnovan86

[marinanp86]

4 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

That's because almost everyone that's an active seller on Fiverr with a few hundred reviews or so has 5 stars and is a level 2. So they just found a way to lower review scores across the board. And I am sure they won't be stopping here. If anything, I can only imagine it will get much tougher for us sellers. As I said, everyone said what they wanted about the new systems, Fiverr knows, but there's no indicator that the success score will go away, at least not for a while. I wouldn't spend so much money and time on something just to throw it away because some sellers that aren't even under contract with me anyway are unhappy. So realistically, I don't see them making any major changes. 

mmmm sometimes I find that you just want to be right about something...

I have already given my opinion on this:
Bad sellers are just the excuse, it's about Fiver automating the platform to reduce costs.

For everything else there are always solutions, but the high-level solutions are with HUMAN support.

If you're okay with Fiver's update, I wish you luck. Bye bye.

Edited March 31 by marinanp86

[donnovan86]

1 hour ago, marinanp86 said:

mmmm sometimes I find that you just want to be right about something...

 

Yeah, because we know each other very well, LOL. I just shared my opinion, as you did with yours. It's not like in the grand scheme of things our opinions matter anyway, Fiverr is still going to make changes that are "good for business".  Sometimes that's pro-seller, most of the time not the case. Just because I tend to have a more objective look at things, that doesn't mean that I agree with the latest changes.

I just know that as a single seller, my power is very limited and if someone that's a Pro/TRS seller with over $1 million in sales showed Fiverr the issues we face, why this success system doesn't work.. yet they still didn't make changes to it, I don't think they will listen to sellers like me or you. They already know the community hates this system, but we already have a month and a half since its introduction with no changes (aside from customer support-canceled orders not being taken into account). But other than that, no visibile changes, we are still compared with others and even if we have great reviews private or not, we can still have a low success score because a single seller is compared with an agency masking themselves as a single seller. Try to surpass companies with 20 employees that deliver orders every 10 minutes....  

I explained some things to you, objectively, if you don't agree with them, that's fine.  I don't care if people agree with me or not on the forum, everyone has their own opinions and ideas anyway. 

1 hour ago, marinanp86 said:

If you're okay with Fiver's update, I wish you luck. Bye bye.

I am not. Shared bad things about the update as well. Clearly you're not reading so I won't bother replying any further. Goodbye as well. 🙂 Hopefully if they do make changes to this, they will be more pro-seller rather than pro-buyer. But I somehow doubt that. All the best and good luck to you!

Edited March 31 by donnovan86

[rakibulhasanacc]

On 2/22/2024 at 4:00 PM, carineb said:

No Fiverr member has commented on the answers to the 3 questions in the customer satisfaction questionnaire, which now jump directly from "Average" to "Very Good".
I really don't understand why there's no nuance between average and very good!

"Very Good" is now worth 4 stars, whereas "Very good" used to be worth 5 stars. The number of stars required to maintain our Level must be lowered accordingly!

I notice that Fiverr has understood for the CS questionnaire that it is important to have a nuance between Average and Very Satisfied... 

Yes, the thing is really this. Also, it seems the buyers don't understand how the emoji works with stars. What I got from other sellers, after updating the feedback system till now, many buyers contacted Fiverr CS to fix the ratings because they were confused when they selected emojis. How it's unfortunate, by providing tips the buyer could be rated "Value for money" as 4 or under this, by saying great communication "Seller communication level" as 4 or under this! First of all, the option/system should make sense properly to work better for all.

[Alex.M]

12 hours ago, marinanp86 said:

If you're okay with Fiver's update, I wish you luck. Bye bye.

The update wouldn't be that bad if they would be much more transparent with it ... No one knows how the success score is calculated, My success score is 10 so I shouldn't complain too much right? Well the fact is that I don't know either if I am closer to 9 or if I am going to maintain that success score... and there are no clues in regards to this. There are also many inconsistencies when it comes to some factors indicated on each gig ... I have a negative metric or what it's called on a gig with only 2 cancellations in 3-4 years, cancellations that were made through support because the buyer sent wrong instructions or ordered by mistake... and for that specific gig I still get '' cancellations - strong negative impact '' for some reason.  I talked with support and my SM about it and the answer was close to ' don't worry it won't have a big impact overall ' .. Now we can belive that it won't have a big impact or... we'll be shocked when the impact kicks in 

[emmaki]

Guys, have you seen this? Not my post, but @rawque_gulia commented that as a buyer, he had seen the return of stars in place of emojis...