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It's been said numerous times, by numerous people & even staff on the forums, that 

 could help our performance in terms of score and ranking. It's been heavily debated on 

should sellers provide more than they were asked for and that's agreed on the mutual contract beteween the parties that is formed when the customer accepts the offer. 

I understood both sides. I had really succesful collaborations when delivering a little extra, and customers returned with more projects, and left fantastic feedback, but at the same time, I felt that is not really 

on the seller's side to be pressured to deliver extra, just to get that 5/5 review instead of the 4/5 review, since I saw the 5/5 as the contract's obligations were succesfully met, and the work was done as agreed. 

This week, I've put myself in buyer's shoes, and ordered something trough Fiverr, being on the other side of the contract. Our contract was specifying that I will get 50 variations of an image, in 48 hours, and the images will be in a certain format, for the specified price. So, if we take these essential conventional obligations, it's safe to say, I should've been 

our contract to meet the following essential elements: 

Then, after publicly rating the order, I've recieved the email from Fiverr, asking me to 

that specific order. One of the questions was asking me how do I feel about the seller providing the ordered service. Now the interesting part is, that the 4/5 option corresponds to "

". I was surprised and shocked by my initial reaction, because I've clicked on "

". Then I snapped out of it and remembered how important are these private reviews for us, sellers, and quickly selected 5/5 on everything. 

Let's analyze this a bit. I am a seller here, that is aware on the importance of reviews and more importantly, private reviews. With this in mind, when reading the tags above the number of stars I could've selected on that question, 

first instinct was to click on "As Expected"

, because everything was exactly as expected, the above-mentioned contractual obligations being fulfilled. Now just think on how the 

, who is not a seller here and doesn't have the knowledge on how impactful can a single review be, perceive that! 

Taking the example from above, for the 5/5 "Exceeded Expectations" to be 

Then, we can make a hot take conclusion that the 5/5 rating is not at all justified if we only deliver the agreed work, in the agreed terms. 

with school grades since a good friend of mine is a History school teacher. I've asked him 

when do he grades students A+ instead of A?

 He told me that if the student performs well on the test, and responds with the expected answers, the grade is A, and if the student elaborates more (and accurate) on side topics that have direct implication in the subject of the specific questions, he rates them A+, 

With that in mind, I came to the conclusion that if I want to recieve a 5/5 review,

by providing a little extra than was initially agreed on in our contract

 (be it in the number of deliverables, shorter delivery time, different services that were not agreed on initially, different formats etc). Otherwise, the 5/5 review is not objectively justified. 

I'm not here to bash on the way the feedback system is implemented, and debate on how the questions or the visual elements that the customer face when they have to rate us are set, since that already happened a few months ago on the forums, and I have no interest in rioting about that. If these are the rules, and this is how they are now, we should do our best to understand them and 

This experience changed my whole perspective about how the ratings should be perceived and how customers perceive that. For some of you this might be very obvious, but for those who didn't realised this yet, I hope the above mentioned example would help you improve your collaborations with your buyers, and increase your chances of success. 

Understanding the difference between 4 and 5 stars

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