I am very confused about success score

[mulder68]

Hi, thanks for reading and hopefully answering. 

I have been on Fiverr for over 10 years now and been up and down between levels during that time, never quite getting to Top Rated. I have a number of gigs on my profile and I am inundated with work. I have completed over 1100 orders and my most popular gig has an average score of 4.9 with ratings of 4 and 5 only, nothing less. The reviews are glowing and everybody seems incredibly happy with my service.

So why does this gig have a success score of 6 with warnings for Client Satisfaction and Effective Communication. I cant for one second beleivce that eveybody is leaving me a strong positive public review but giving me terrible feedback in private. It just doesnt seem realistic.

I have 7 gigs in total with success scores of 7,8,6,8, -, -, - 

I am not sure how the average is calcualted based on that, but I will be honest I am really disappointed in Fiverr. I love working on Fiverr and I have been here a long time and made both me and them some signifcant money and I am appreciative of the platform, but they never seem to appreciate the seller.

This new system is very unfair.

What do you guys think?

Simon

[priyank_mod]

1 hour ago, mulder68 said:

I cant for one second beleivce that eveybody is leaving me a strong positive public review but giving me terrible feedback in private. It just doesnt seem realistic.

This is TRUE for most of us. But just that, they take the weighted average of reviews to calculate our scores along with a large array of other data points (which are unknown to us) .

To put it simplistically - Just one 'not so good' or 'bad' private review can override 100s of 5-star public ratings and even a few positive private reviews and bring down the gig score very easily. Also, most happy buyers don't participate in 'private review' exercise after order completion, which kinda makes the scale imbalanced.  

[donnovan86]

2 hours ago, mulder68 said:

I cant for one second beleivce that eveybody is leaving me a strong positive public review but giving me terrible feedback in private. It just doesnt seem realistic.

You have to realize that not everyone leaves private feedback. Maybe from 10-20 orders, only 3 people left private feedback and 1 of them was negative. You might think you had 20 great reviews, but in Fiverr's eyes, based on their data, you had 33% of your customers unhappy, if we keep the 1 out of 3 private reviews being negative.

So yeah, a lot of people don't realize that a lot of people just don't share private reviews, especially those that are return clients. 

[vickiespencer]

5 hours ago, mulder68 said:

I cant for one second beleivce that eveybody is leaving me a strong positive public review but giving me terrible feedback in private. It just doesnt seem realistic.

My SPM advised me to remind buyers to fill out the private survey Fiverr sends them in my delivery message, as @donnovan86 and @priyank_mod have also suggested. She also highlighted that our averages are compared to those of other sellers in our niche, which could significantly affect our SSS. 

Edited July 18 by vickiespencer

[christiangrollm]

There are returning customers who have ordered thousands of times on Fiverr. They couldn't care less about giving public feedback, so they're never going to give anyone a private review. The imbalance when getting private reviews @donnovan86 mentioned is the main problem from my point of view. Fiverr probably knows about this but can't or won't help it. That's probably why some people got lucky and others got dumped when the new system dropped. Of course, bad sellers got hit as well, as intended, but I've heard from many good ones who have been virtually run over and simply have no strength left to take action - myself included - because Fiverr does not listen, does not help individuals who would be worth it and responds with copy/paste from their FAQ.

It's funny that I'm still a bestseller on page 1 in my niche. Despite dropping to level 0 as the only seller among my competitors and being tied there. The algorithm somehow can't categorize me, and neither can my Success Manager. Nevertheless, I have lost around 50% of my Fiverr income and have made my peace with it because I've run into a communication wall too many times when it comes to talking to Fiverr.

To cut a long story short: The whole issue is incredibly complicated and Fiverr itself doesn't know exactly how it works either, as it seems. Hence the useless official statements.

[asadbuledi]

I am a Level 2 seller on Fiverr with over 200+ completed orders with a success score of 9. I am very happy with my progress.

[donnovan86]

27 minutes ago, christiangrollm said:

Fiverr probably knows about this but can't or won't help it. That's probably why some people got lucky and others got dumped when the new system dropped.

Fiverr success managers told many sellers to contact their customers and encourage them to leave a public and private review. So obviously they know, but they do encourage the idea of telling customers to leave a review, obviously not to leave a CERTAIN review. But realistically, there are tons of sellers so they had to find a way to differentiate them. Even leaving those private reviews aside, we are compared with the success score of other sellers, and ours can drop if other people within our niche surpass us. Not to mention the success score is lowered if you have too many revisions, cancellations. Every metric is checked, and it all feeds into the success score. A lot of that stuff is private due to obvious reasons, so we can never get a complete picture.

31 minutes ago, christiangrollm said:

To cut a long story short: The whole issue is incredibly complicated and Fiverr itself doesn't know exactly how it works either, as it seems. Hence the useless official statements.

You expect Google to come out and say exactly how their search algorithm works? It would automatically be manipulated by everyone. Same here. They share some info, but a lot of stuff is hidden, due to obvious reasons. I don't have a problem with it, really. As long as I know for each gig what exactly happened, what is the issue and where I need to touch upon stuff, I am fine with it. Yes, it's not a perfect system, but clearly they are battling a lot of scammers, also sellers that manipulate the system to their own benefit.. that's why we have reviews for canceled orders by the way, because people were canceling orders left and right, buyers were left hanging, but these sellers were making money and their accounts were not affected. 

So it goes much deeper than just Fiverr relying on AI for the success score as many say. There's so much data that we don't see, and that's why these success scores might seem out of left field when we see them. Last year around this time I did not have any bad review under 3 stars since the beginning of the year, but even if I had only 5 star reviews for months, my buyer satisfaction rate was extremely low. And when I went to my success manager, they told me that private reviews are very different to what people leave publicly. I was obviously shocked because I thought people were happy with my work. The thing is those private reviews are not shared as a review of the order, the way they are shared makes them feel more focused on the experience that the person had with the platform, while slightly touching on the order itself. That feels a bit misleading and it might be a reason why there are issues sometimes.

[christiangrollm]

Yes, you are 100% correct. All your points and more have been discussed over and over again. It doesn't change my mind though that some people got run over and Fiverr can't/won't fix some issues. I  won't go into the details again, as I'm really over it. It's just sad for some.

[mulder68]

Thank you so much for the comments guys, I really appreciate you taking the time to reply. I am still getting lots of work which is the main thing but I do wonder if I could be getting more. Pretty soon I will be down to level 1 again I think which is really sad when all of the feedback I get is excellent.

It does seem like Fiverr dont really care about sellers, but then it is the same with most platforms, eBay always sides with the buyer, no matter what the issue. I will just keep doing my best, I cnt do any more thsn that.

Good luck everyone

[mulder68]

12 hours ago, asadbuledi said:

I am a Level 2 seller on Fiverr with over 200+ completed orders with a success score of 9. I am very happy with my progress.

Well good for you but I was in that position myself a month or so ago. Things can change pretty wuickly no matter how well you work my friend.