Who Is Planning to Cancel Seller Plus Premium Ahead of the Price Increase?

[katakatica]

8 hours ago, emmaki said:

Two oversights in 48 hours? 

 

Fiverr's communication HAS been pretty meh for the past year or so. Not sure if you remember that time everyone (seemingly) got the message that their performance has dipped below standards... OR even just recently when the APP could have absolutely had a pop-up of 'hey, we are changing the system now so if you don't update in x hours, you won't see your ranking anymore'. 

I wouldn't be surprised if whoever is in charge just does not realize how serious these oversights these can be. If you've only sold, say, max 10 things on the site, you might not (yet) get the stress of 'is this a bug or am I screwed????

That being said, this time round I think it's more just... not everyone got the mail because maybe certain mailing lists lack some people...or something. 

 

 

[manucorsi]

$39 in the face of a drastic, but apparently widespread, decrease in customers/requests,
It seems to me at least the wrong timing choice to do this 😅

the service is certainly good and offers a lot of useful stuff,
but $39 a month seems rather excessive... 
At least I would like them to be justified in some way, perhaps with an improved service, with new useful functions etc...
Like it, you get the feeling that it's just another way to make a profit at the expense of sellers

Edited April 8 by manucorsi

[terrygrantvo]

Those of us in the US (I assume elsewhere too) can just write it off, as this is a textbook definition of a business expense, but there is a point at which it becomes about the principle of the thing, yeah?

 

The only feature I find useful is the ability to turn on RTO when I am going to be out of town, and if they're going to charge everyone the same inflated rate, then I'll probably just cancel and only ever fire it up when I need RTO. 

Kind of like how I only have Netflix when they put something out I actually want to watch.

Buyer Insights was kind of useful at first, then it became obvious the info they were providing was a generalized guess at best. My SM is a very nice person, but there isn't much she can really do for me, as maintaining a gig isn't rocket science and they're not allowed to act as CS either. I already get the 7 day clearance from TRS. The 'advanced stats' are laughable because again - maintaining a gig isn't hard. The partridge squawked too much and the pear tree died after a year, so what else is left?

[newsmike]

9 minutes ago, terrygrantvo said:

The only feature I find useful is the ability to turn on RTO when I am going to be out of town, and if they're going to charge everyone the same inflated rate, then I'll probably just cancel and only ever fire it up when I need RTO. 

Kind of like how I only have Netflix when they put something out I actually want to watch.

Was thinking about that, but isn't there a waitlist once you quit to rejoin?  May not be ready when you are, can someone confirm?

[donnovan86]

20 hours ago, manucorsi said:

the service is certainly good and offers a lot of useful stuff,
but $39 a month seems rather excessive... 

There's a lot of filler in there. How many times did you use the negative keywords, coupons and follow up messages? The last 2 in particular are things you can do yourself when you create a custom offer, or you just connect with previous buyers again. Realistically, request to order and instant withdrawals are the best things about the $39 package, the rest is skippable. Having a success manager isn't really that helpful for a lot of older, vetted sellers, it's more useful for newer people that don't know how to optimize their gigs. So generally, there are 2 major reasons why you would go with the $39 package. For me, even if I used instant withdrawals sometimes, it's not worth it to pay double what I pay now. 

[williambryan392]

3 hours ago, terrygrantvo said:

only ever fire it up when I need RTO.

3 hours ago, newsmike said:

isn't there a waitlist once you quit to rejoin? 

I would think with 99.9% certainty that there is.

I would also think that you would go to the bottom of the waiting list.

There is also the inevitable cost in time/effort (however small) for them to onboard/offboard sellers to SP, so you may well go to the bottom of a 'secondary list'.

Fiverr no doubt has a retention/churn metric for sellers on SP, and it would be something that they want to keep as low as possible, so they may avoid readmitting someone for fear they will only churn again.

 

[emmaki]

One good way to reduce churn and increase retention - bear with me here, because I'm going to share a wild and crazy thought - is perhaps:

• Not increasing your price by 50%/100% for "price alignment" without adding new values/features
• Not lying about "locked-in prices" for above group of sellers
• Improving the quality of existing features
• Better and more consistent quality of SMs

It's not rocket science. I'm going to guess that Fiverr leadership had a ritual ceremony where they asked the All-Seeing Neo (not the retail model) to tell them how they could make more profits. At the height of the ceremony, which involves a lot of fire, blood, silly clothes, and even sillier chants and dancing in a secluded woodland area, Neo told them make them pay. And lo, Neo spake and the decision was written on a stone tablet in the blood of a lamb for some intern to code into the website. 

I, for one, am not paying for Fiverr's demonic woodland office parties. 

Edited April 9 by emmaki

[williambryan392]

26 minutes ago, emmaki said:

• Not increasing your price by 50%/100% for "price alignment" without adding new values/features
• Not lying about "locked-in prices" for above group of sellers
• Improving the quality of existing features
• Better and more consistent quality of SMs

I could counter by saying they have added new features since launching it (RTO for e.g.), and have only now increased the prices. New features aside, inflation could be a justification in itself.

Going back on locked-in prices isn't cool so no disagreement there.

I haven't really kept up with the improvements, but I think in addition to launching new features haven't they improved the keyword tool? Not sure about the other features.

SM quality does seem to be a recurring issue for some on the program, so again no strict disagreement. I do sometimes wonder if people overestimate how much an SM can do though, but they should certainly be available to you and respond in good time. Unsurprisingly though good people cost good money.

Years ago I had a team of success managers, and for a client to be eligible they had to meet a recurring revenue requirement to be admitted to the program. The SM didn't come with a fixed fee, but the company charged a percent of the client revenue as an overall fee, and in turn the success managers earned commission based upon client revenue growth. 

[donnovan86]

14 minutes ago, williambryan392 said:

I could counter by saying they have added new features since launching it (RTO for e.g.), and have only now increased the prices. New features aside, inflation could be a justification in itself.

 

Realistically, most of the new features are useless. The service is quite expensive for what it provides, and I am sure a lot of Fiverr sellers that had a special price will downgrade. I will keep the $20 package to see buyer insights and withdraw in 7 days, but I won't pay double that for instant withdrawals that I use from time to time or RTO that's not necessary in my case. 

[williambryan392]

8 minutes ago, donnovan86 said:

Realistically, most of the new features are useless. The service is quite expensive for what it provides, and I am sure a lot of Fiverr sellers that had a special price will downgrade. I will keep the $20 package to see buyer insights and withdraw in 7 days, but I won't pay double that for instant withdrawals that I use from time to time or RTO that's not necessary in my case. 

I don't use all the features (maybe I should), but coupons for example really don't appeal to me, neither do instant withdrawals although I have used it once or twice. I really love buyer insights, RTO and my SM.

I feel that the SM is the thing that moves the needle for most people. If your SM is great you maybe don't mind paying a bit more, if they're not, and you don't use all the features then I completely understand downgrading. 

Ultimately we all have to decide how we want to grow our 'fiverr business', and for some it's not worth it, for some it is.

[emmaki]

40 minutes ago, williambryan392 said:

Unsurprisingly though good people cost good money.

I had my first SM before the SP program was a twinkle in Fiverr's eye. All my best SMs were pre-SP.... the real problem here is Fiverr. I'm sure you do love your SM if he's good. The problem is that a lot of them aren't. I know better than to pester mine with CS stuff because I've been using them since 2017 or something. 

As a TRS for close to a decade, I have stuff like priority support, 7-day payment etc without SP (unless something changed). The KW research is useless: 

The other KW tool already gives me terms I use, so it's not very helpful - and it also neglects to mention the "keyword spam" issue in gig descriptions where you get told off if you use e.g. the word "books" too much. So a lot of those keywords are not natural, but a result of getting around another filter. So.. yeah, both of them are useless. 

Even Google Ads gives free users better data than this pile of horse droppings. Apologies to horses and their surprisingly voluminous output, whose manure at least is an excellent fertilizer and helps things to grow. 

I'm not into loan shark deals, the thing that tells you how your gigs compare to others tells me I'm outperforming everyone (my profile is dead), the webinars are useless, coupons, after-order spam don't need any programs to be done. Buyer insights aren't terribly insightful (and can be turned off by buyers - I prefered being able to quickly look at their profiles, but apparently that's a feature Fiverr decided to make impossible without writing their name into the URL bar for everyone) - don't need priority vetting for TRS...

There's just nothing in there that interests me. Oh, the articles are ChatGPT. Perhaps I'd miss the SP forum, but let's face it, that's not value-add from Fiverr, but UGC. 

I have pointed all this out to my SM several times and in much more detail, only to be told that she's ready to take me through a guided tour of how useful this thing is. I keep telling her that this is a waste of both of our time. She'll pass my suggestions on, of course, but we all know what that means. 🚮

Let me also point out that RTO is conspicuously missing from Fiverr's "list of benefits": 

There is nothing on the horizon. There have been good suggestions from others recently (on @donnovan86's post IIRC) but you think any of them are going to happen? It's just like PG: a lazy, greedy cash grab. It's an old trick: add a bunch of random "bonuses" onto an offer to increase its "value". That does not mean that they hold any true value. 

And yes, for some sellers 1 or 2 features is probably all they need. So why not just make all of these separate addons so people who want the money stuff get the money stuff etc. It shouldn't be a radical concept to the platform that came up with the whole idea of "gig extras". 

Just to circle back a bit: a bad SM can destroy your Fiverr business. If you take Fiverr staff advice and it happens to be wrong, you will be on the hook. There's nothing they can do. Except maybe fulfil their job title, but I digress...

For $19, it's tolerable. A 100% price increase with nothing added and the reasoning of "price alignment" is an outrage. 

[donnovan86]

9 minutes ago, emmaki said:

Let me also point out that RTO is conspicuously missing from Fiverr's "list of benefits": 

It appears for me, so I am confused...

[emmaki]

Well, that's interesting. 

[emmaki]

I had an idea that might help increase the value of SP/P: Introduce new payment options. Sure, I don't really approve of locking them behind SPP or whatever, but there is plenty of demand from anyone outside the USA to be able to use stuff like Wise, Revolut, ACH, (etc). 

The other solution is to get hired in Fiverr Enterprise, but AFAIK, that marketplace is even more dead than the regular one. And Fiverr still hasn't clarified whether it is truly feeless for Fiverr sellers. It's a bit mind-boggling that such a simple question cannot be answered, isn't it? 

[leannelrivers]

8 hours ago, newsmike said:

Was thinking about that, but isn't there a waitlist once you quit to rejoin?  May not be ready when you are, can someone confirm?

I've rejoined SP three times just to use the RTO while I'm holiday (I never use an SM or coupons) and then cancelled it again. I've never had to join a waiting list. I don't know if that will change, but until now I could just hop in and out. 

[williambryan392]

Just now, leannelrivers said:

I've rejoined SP three times just to use the RTO while I'm holiday (I never use an SM or coupons) and then cancelled it again. I've never had to join a waiting list. I don't know if that will change, but until now I could just hop in and out. 

Interesting! I stand corrected!

[smashradio]

1 hour ago, williambryan392 said:

I really love buyer insights

 

But they nerfed that (or didn't tell us at first and only added the notice later). Both order completion rate and average order price is "Based on activity of similar buyers" and consequently has no value. Especially order completion rate, which could be very useful, but I'm sure Fiverr did that to avoid sellers discriminating against buyers who've had a lot of cancellations. 

Beyond that, I agree with you. I see it as good value, but I'm not a fan of what they did with increasing the rates for early-birds. 

 

[catwriter]

Cancelled the subscription last night. Ends on the 25th (tomorrow).

[donnovan86]

39 minutes ago, catwriter said:

Cancelled the subscription last night. Ends on the 25th (tomorrow).

I think the next month will be when they charge $40 for me. I just got charged the regular $20 last night. I will just stick with the $20 I think. Not sure if I will cancel, but definitely not going for $40.

[catwriter]

3 minutes ago, donnovan86 said:

I think the next month will be when they charge $40 for me. I just got charged the regular $20 last night.

Yeah, I could have had another month of $29 since my payment is due on the 25th, but I decided to spend that money on something else. Like food.

[donnovan86]

4 minutes ago, catwriter said:

Like food.

Great choice!

[visualstudios]

I'll keep paying it, regardless of increases. Unfortunately, RTO is mandatory to work here under the new rules, and it's locked behind the paywall. RTO should be the way the platform works by default, but it is what it is. Better than not having it at all.

[yassine_no]

I'm fine with the pricing, I think it's a pretty fair deal tbh. They've charged me the $39, even though my account is restricted 😅

[melanielm]

So, what exactly are they going to charge me next month?

This is what my page looks like:

(I'm probably cancelling anyway.)

[catwriter]

28 minutes ago, melanielm said:

So, what exactly are they going to charge me next month?

This is what my page looks like:

 

It took them 2 months to change the analytics page, so... Maybe they'll change this one on May 1st, maybe 2 months later.