The level system :Success score is like an insult to sellers

[amansr]

As the title sounds, I think either we as sellers couldn't propagate our voices to the top or the Fiverr management has turned so egoistic that they don't care how sellers feel. With every change, there's someone explaining how it's so positive and a part of the grand plan to help sellers but I think it's just rubbish.  There's absolutely ZERO transparency. My success score changed overnight from 6 to 5 despite not having any orders in a month (all positives before that) and improving in the sub-categories "effect". 

Now it's just an AI game show. Things like "comparing to sellers in your own categories" don't even make sense. Those with already a big client base and big repute are logically bound to perform better in the short term. And someone starting from scratch is most probably going to fail. 

People have made a legitimate career on this site, and to lose it all because of some AI experiments is nuts.

To restore the faith and positivity and this site as previously, I think we should make our voices clearer and ensure that it reaches the top of the management.

Edited June 22 by amansr

[donnovan86]

26 minutes ago, amansr said:

I think we should make our voices clearer and ensure that it reaches the top of the management.

There was a lot of debate, it did reach management and they made some changes, like switching from emoji back to stars. However, the success score system is here to stay.

Funnily enough, this system is more transparent than what it was before. You had no idea why you were deranked and stuff, now you know, every gig shows what's affecting it, be it cancellations, communication, etc. We didn't have that before. Nor did we have a score showing us how we are ranked, what buyers think about us, etc. A lot of this was private, so from that extent, there is more transparency. And let's face it, no company will always tell you everything about how they rank sellers. Look at Google and many others. Why? Because people will always try to find ways to manipulate the system. And many of them already do on Fiverr, one way or another. They use AI without disclosing it, they try to cancel orders and curate their reviews, etc. 

In your case, the success score is lower most likely because your last review was many months ago. And the success score is taking into account those newer orders more. I don't know the exact timeline, but I assume they are just taking into account the last half a year or a year, and if you continue to have no orders, that will be a challenge. 

Try to market yourself more, get some orders and things will get better. Obviously if there's no new data for Fiverr, things aren't well, because they expect you to sell stuff. If you don't, that's an issue. 

[amansr]

21 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

 

Funnily enough, this system is more transparent than what it was before. You had no idea why you were deranked and stuff, now you know, every gig shows what's affecting it, be it cancellations, communication, etc. We didn't have that before. Nor did we have a score showing us how we are ranked, what buyers think about us, etc. 

In your case, the success score is lower most likely because your last review was many months ago. And the success score is taking into account those newer orders more. I don't know the exact timeline, but I assume they are just taking into account the last half a year or a year, and if you continue to have no orders, that will be a challenge. 

Try to market yourself more, get some orders and things will get better. Obviously if there's no new data for Fiverr, things aren't well, because they expect you to sell stuff. If you don't, that's an issue. 

I beg to differ, and if you see other sellers' reactions you'll see that they also feel the same way, not just me. We KNEW  before the exact reason for upgrades or downgrades because there were a couple of quantifiers, Order competition rate, minimum rating and response rates were not something complicated as things are now.  just some extra parameters that we don't know how they work or change does not mean transparency.

Generic advice like sell more, do more are good in theory, I had a LOT of orders with repeated clients with good reviews after the new system but my success score stayed at 6. Optimism is really good but you can't use it to cover the ongoing flaws, that's a recipe for disaster.

Just don't see it as MY problem, try to see how other sellers are affected and how they are feeling, and then you'll realize it is a real thing.

[jhordanpadilla]

Well, I am in favor of the new system, I reached a score of 4 on a scale of 1 to 10, I reviewed my mistakes, my points to improve, and it made me unconsciously work much better, and in 1 month and a half I rose My review was 7 out of 10, that meant that I greatly improved my performance on the platform in 1 and a half months, so you can easily reach 10 with effort and dedication.

[iusmandev]

We also facing the same issue but waiting for anyother update to change this level system...

[donnovan86]

1 hour ago, amansr said:

We KNEW  before the exact reason for upgrades or downgrades because there were a couple of quantifiers, Order competition rate, minimum rating and response rates were not something complicated as things are now.  just some extra parameters that we don't know how they work or change does not mean transparency.

To me this feels a lot more transparent, mainly because until we got the success score, there was no way to know your buyer satisfaction rate, or how private reviews affected your account. Now you do, and you can see exactly where you were hit. Whether Fiverr sees you as a bad communicator, if people left you a bad review, or you didn't deliver on time, you get to see what affects the order the most. The problem for some sellers now is they are using ALL the data, not just 3 things to decide your score and ranking.

And it's by design, I assume. Check every category, there are WAY too many sellers and Fiverr lost around 300k buyers last year. There are way more service providers than buyers, and as a buyer, it's very difficult to narrow down the right seller just because everyone is level 2 or above, with 4.9 or 5 stars. After the success score and new review system, I started seeing more accounts with 4.8 stars or less. Clearly they want to ensure that there are less people with the highest performance, and when someone gets a great review, they actually deserve it. 

I doubt they will stop here when it comes to filtering sellers. They added reviews for canceled orders, now the success score, I think they will continue with other ideas, most likely. 

However, I don't see this success score system as being perfect. My main issue is that you are compared to others within your niche, so if someone outsources like crazy and keeps a good score overall, your score will be lowered because you have a lower performance. So you're compared with an agency even if you're a solo freelancer like me, which is obviously unfair because those people can do 30x the work since they have way more manpower...  Among others...

1 hour ago, amansr said:

repeated clients with good reviews after the new system but my success score stayed at 6.

There you go. REPEAT CLIENTS. Getting orders from new clients and having great private and public reviews will help. But since you only have reviews from older clients, those won't really shift the balance for you that much. Not saying they are irellevant, but reviews from new clients tend to hold a lot more weight. 

I don't see this as your problem or X's problem. I see it objectively, and in general those that have few orders per month will encounter this problem. That's because even a single bad private review, be it shared by mistake or not, will be extremely detrimental. I know how other sellers are feeling, and I know that many of them are feeling bad about this because they are affected, they have a lower score. I respect their opinion, just like yours. That doesn't mean I have to agree with it. 

But from being affected by this to saying that's an insult to sellers.. Go to Upwork and you will see that they also have a very similar system. And whomever has any private info or metric for ranking will never show their secrets, because it's prone to abuse. There will always be metrics that are kept a secret/private. I doubt Google will ever say exactly what criteria they use for ranking, they shared some things, but a lot of it is kept under wraps. And it will never be public. Similar to that, Fiverr says to buyers (when asking for private reviews) that they are safe, and that data will only be used by Fiverr, it won't be shared with sellers. If they promise them all the data is kept private, do you think they will ever show that to us? Absolutely not, and realistically they never showed anything, only with this success score system they started showing, generally, what areas are affected, be it cancellations, communication, customers were unhappy. 

As I said, I respect your opinion, I understand the problem, I decided to slim my offerings from 6 gigs to 2, and realistically I just have 1 that I focus on the most. So for me, the success score system helped, because I started seeing exactly what Fiverr thinks of my gig. I started with a success score of 9, and now I am at 10, because I knew what to address and focus on. 

I wish you all the best with increasing your success score. Maybe create new gigs, try to offer more freebies, who knows. People might also rate you poorly in private due to pricing, who knows man. And remember, private reviews matter a lot, maybe those return customers leave a public review but they don't share a private review. So there are let's say 1-2 positive private reviews out of 15 orders, and a negative one or two. Fiverr sees this as 50% positive and 50% negative if you have 2 private reviews that are negative and 2 that are positive. Obviously, those negative reviews hold a lot more weight than you expect. And I can say for a fact that a lot of buyers in my case rarely leave reviews, under 50% of my orders are rated, and I can only imagine 60% of those rated orders won't get a private review, maybe more, because most regulars in general either don't leave a review and see the Fiverr review reminder emails as a nuissance. I would definitely see them like that if I bought weekly.

Edited June 23 by donnovan86

[amansr]

Thanks for the insight, you put some good points to consider.

45 minutes ago, donnovan86 said:

However, I don't see this success score system as being perfect. My main issue is that you are compared to others within your niche, so if someone outsources like crazy and keeps a good score overall, your score will be lowered because you have a lower performance. So you're compared with an agency even if you're a solo freelancer like me, which is obviously unfair because those people can do 30x the work since they have way more manpower...  Among others...

that's my whole point. it sucks so bad. We can only imagine what new sellers must go through. I understand they're trying to filter out some sellers but this way it would be just agencies and big outsourcers remaining in the end. Most of the solo sellers like us would end up leaving because it would become harder and harder to compete with these big agencies and outsourcers over time.

[amansr]

1 hour ago, iusmandev said:

We also facing the same issue but waiting for anyother update to change this level system...

As others said, this system is here to stay for now, unfortunately.

[donnovan86]

59 minutes ago, amansr said:

Most of the solo sellers like us would end up leaving because it would become harder and harder to compete with these big agencies and outsourcers over time.

It all comes down to performance. If your gigs have good performance, they won't be punished. However, as sellers, we can't see the entirety of our performance because Fiverr keeps private data access restricted, which makes sense. They might remove the comparison with others, however the system itself is most likely here in the long run. I started seeing more people with 4.8 stars on average or less, so if they want a more diverse landscape and stuff like that, I would say that it's working. I don't want to engulf myself with negativity, so I just focus on what I can control, which is the work I send to my customers. Then I just go from there.