A heads up to buyers about what a cancellation does to a seller

[Guest lisha5684]

Here is a message to a buyer who ordered one of my gigs, then cancelled because they simply did not read the entire description of the gig before ordering. All buyers need to read this, this is important for all buyers to understand:

"I cancelled your order. However I would like to explain something to you just so you are aware next time you order something on fiverr.



The only problem with cancellations is that, for sellers, when cancellations add up to a certain percentage of the overall sales, a seller’s level status will be removed, which I have worked very hard to receive, as have many other sellers.



So in the future, I would just hope that you would read the entire description when purchasing a gig on fiverr so that you don’t run into that problem again. I run a highly reputable twitter service for people, and it is your prerogative to not give out your password and that is fine.



However, in the future just don’t order something without reading the description so that you know what you are getting into. Some sellers will not cancel an order for you if they know you are cancelling when you did not read the description of what the gig entails.



It is the seller that gets the consequences of the actions of buyers in this instance. Not that it’s fair, but that’s the way it is on fiverr because fiverr protects the buyers, not the sellers. Sellers should have rights, but it is up to us to protect ourselves.



I am also a buyer on fiverr too, but being a seller really helps me be a better buyer as well.



Anyway, thanks again for at least giving it a shot. And thanks for your understanding in this matter. Fiverr is a livelihood to a lot of sellers, so I just want you to have a heads up about what a cancellation does.



Best of luck to you in everything, and I would be happy to be of service to you somehow in the future."

Note to all buyers. Read the entire description before you buy. Please. And thank you! 🙂

[ryangillam]

Indeed, the worst thing is people who don’t read the time it takes to deliver. I have a pretty long lead time (20 days) due to a lot of orders. I then have people complain that that 20 days is too long and they cancel (had 25 cancellations this way), and from time to time I have people beg for it to be done quicker but can’t afford the gig extra, 10 cancellations this way. It is very disheartening. Of course, I also have a couple of cancellations from people for no reason at all, which again is annoying. So I do wish buyers would pay more attention and that your post will go a way towards this!



Ryan

[improfessional]

Yes, It happens all the time, Even more than half of the cancelled orders in my case are either cancelled by support or by buyer and i am to be punished for that. That really is unjust!

Last cancelled order was also by buyer and he din’t even have to ask me for cancellation.

[Guest besttraffic4u]

wow, sellers should deliver excellent gigs to run away from the idea of cancellation then. Buyers should understand the gig before ordering please.

[vfowler]

It can be very frustrating. I understand legitimate reasons, but I’ve had 2 cancellations this week. One because the buyer simply clicked on the wrong gig, and one because his/her ebook ‘no longer exists’… he just bought the gig yesterday afternoon.

[Guest sandra4service]

yea

[beatcraigslist]

Lisha5684, don’t fret over it too much, it’s just not worth it. I have had almost every type of problem imaginable with buyers here and I have had enough frustration to power a city. Much of the frustration has come from how Customer Support has dealt with the situations also. I am the kind of person that if there is a problem I must find a solution. So I have kept tweaking the gigs, my responses, how I deal with buyers, and on and on, to where now I have a much lower drop out rate. Just keep tweaking and you will find how to reduce this problem also.

[crcanny]

My single cancellation came from what I think was a troll, giving me a refugee camp in a war torn country as their address. I was very polite, didn’t question it (hey, refugees need stuff too) and I guess they didn’t get the response they wanted, so they cancelled a few minutes later. It was irritating because I did everything ‘right’ but what can you do?



I do think there should be a penalty on buyers for cancelling before 24 hours are up.

[Guest zulualpha]

Might be nice if Fiverr could add a little note that reminds buyers before they click buy to message the seller if there are any doubts and make sure first that they know what they’re buying. It should be common sense, but obviously in our world where everything has a warning label, there are people who really do need the warning labels.

[beatcraigslist]

We the sellers are brutalized (thats the honest way to put it) here on Fiverr. We get punished in great amount for any slight little thing, but we get rewarded very little (if at all) for doing great work. Case in point. I have changed the way I deal with buyers to try and get them to leave more feedback instead of no feedback at all. So I have had numerous buyers leave positive feedback. It took probably 10 positive feedback to increase my ranking from 90% to 91%. Wow, big woopy! So earlier today I get one buyer (whom I am currently trying to get him to change his feedback) leaves me a negative feedback. Not because I did anything wrong, he just said that “He already knew all the stuff I gave him and he felt he wasted his time” Unfortunately he did not follow all the information links I gave him. So he was missing much of the info (I agree with those that say users don’t read instructions). So my gig was at 100%, and this guy leaves me a negative feedback and suddenly it drops to 93%…WHAT!!! Is that fair? My ranking dropped from 91% to 89% WHAT WHAT WHAT!!! See what I mean? It took 10 positives to get a one point increase but one single negative gave me a 3 point drop, and a 7 point drop on the gig itself? WTF!!!

[lolacey]

Mutual cancellations don’t affect my status, their status, and we can move on peacefully. More people need to use that.

[wolfstarpicture]

Reply to @lolacey:

Mutual cancellations do affect your status, in the form of levels. Get enough mutual cancellations and you can loose your level or not even be permmitted to the next level.



In all honesty guys… it’s not the buyers fault. It’s Fiverr’s fault for having a system that brutalises sellers.

Mutual cancellations SHOULD have NO impact on a sellers status in anyway shape or form.

“Buyer has not submitted required info” Button should be enabled to pause timer and stop unecessary cancellations.



If the buyer has receieved work and they are not satisfied with it, we should be able to do either a FULL refund or a PARTIAL refund, with no consequences on Sellers.



It’s all about customer service, and Fiverr is stopping is from doing our jobs properly, because we are all fearful of cancellations and it affecting our selling power.

[wolfstarpicture]

"possibilities for the buyer to:

• Cancel
  
• Leave bad feedback
  
• Ask refunds
  
• Don’t submit a rating so that we have to wait longer for the money
  
• Be difficult and eventually demand the seller to do something, if not then leave bad feedback or cancel the order
  
• Let sellers first submit their work, then leave a negative feedback and tell your seller that they will remove the feedback when they give a refund
  
• Cancel an onder due to late delivery while it’s their fault
  
• Ask unlimited revisions or leave bad feedback
  
• Leave bad feedback while it’s their fault - and Customer Support won’t remove the rating because your buyer needs to be satisfied"
  
  
  
  I agree arnevb, it would be good to get an official response from Fiverr on this and why they have a system setup like this on the reasons you posted above.

[lolacey]

Reply to @wolfstarpicture: Wait, it does? I’ve had to cancel 5 or 6 orders and I’m a level 2. I feel like if they demoted me I’d have to have a huge talk with customer service about how it wasn’t my fault.



EDIT: Actually as a higher level than just 0, I’ve had to talk to the customer support a lot- Once for an accidental bad feedback and a few times over misunderstandings. I’m sure they’d understand that you were demoted by accident.

[vpix360]

I’ve only had two cancelations and both of them were for legitimate reasons. The client changed their mind or the scope of the job changed. There needs to be some better policies here by Fiverr to ensure that a cancel does not HAVE to ALWAYS reflect badly on the seller or buyer.



Life happens, and sometimes there’s no negative need to have a CANCEL show up as a black mark against the seller or buyer.

[Guest lisha5684]

Reply to @ryangillam: wow, that is really sad. If a buyer can’t afford to pay the gig extra to get it done sooner and they need it done sooner, they’re gonna have to go with a different seller. Simple as that.



Reply to @improfessional: I think that a cancellation, no matter how it happens, should not affect anyone negatively. Almost all stores in the real world accept returns and there is an even greater possible loss for that with damaged goods that are returned, than here on fiverr where there is no physical object being purchased then returned. There is no loss for a cancellation to occur on fiverr, so why should someone be blamed or demoted for it?



Reply to @besttraffic4u: I think anyone who is worth keeping their level status IS delivering quality to their buyers. It is the buyers who have unrealistic expectations or are ordering things without even knowing what they’re ordering.



I’ve had people say they “accidentally” ordered. Or they accidentally ordered twice and only wanted one. For this, there needs to be a confirmation after clicking the order button: "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO ORDER? CLICK “YES, I WANT TO ORDER” or “NO, I DO NOT WANT TO ORDER”"



Reply to @vfowler: And you are the one who is going to be possibly punished because this person’s ebook no longer exists when he ordered yesterday. WHAT??? That is ludicrous!



Reply to @beatcraigslist: Yes, that is how you have to deal with it. Keep updating things and the way you respond to buyers. But everyone is different, so there’s always going to be something new and crazy to deal with. And fiverr support is actually great. I have always gotten a lot of help from them. So I would hope they would understand and be able to fix the problem if I ever got a level demotion because of buyers’ negligence.



Reply to @crcanny That’s crazy. There are too many wackos. On this one I would definitely say that you could talk to support about this if you ever lost your level status.



Reply to @zulualpha: YES! Exactly. There needs to be a confirmation step when ordering (“are you sure?”). Almost anything you buy online has a confirmation, so why doesn’t fiverr have this one step. This would actually probably solve half of the situations with this issue.



Reply to @arnevb Yes, there are definitely amazing buyers as well! I started a thread about an awesome patient buyer I had the other day. He made my day!



Reply to @beatcraigslist yeah your percent rating goes down a lot with one negative feedback until you have a TON of feedback. And even then, let’s say you have 999 positive feedback and one negative feedback, your feedback rating will be 99% even though it is obviously closer to 99.9% (which is closer to 100 than 99).



Reply to @lolacey Yes, mutual cancellations can lead to a level demotion. I have not had it happen to me, but it has happened to some people on here. I am not sure what percentage of cancellations of orders, but it has to be something like 10% or more, which is pretty high, but still it can happen if you just happen to get a lot of crazy buyers.



Reply to @wolfstarpicture I agree that there should be no consequences to sellers for mutual cancellations since it doesn’t really affect fiverr at all as a business. It’s really simple actually. And isn’t this partially the reason why we don’t get our money for 14 days after an order is completed?



@lolacey I agree that fiverr support would understand your side of the story if you got demoted and would probably fix things for you if it truly wasn’t your fault.



@vpix360 Congrats on only 2 cancellations. You’ve gotten very lucky with getting common sense buyers.

[wolfstarpicture]

Reply to @lolacey:

Usually (not always) but usually they won’t demote you, just stop you getting to the next level.

I had to fight to get my level 1 status, cause a buyer ordered 7 gigs, and I had to get customer service to cancel them all because he never had the information for me to do his order.



After completing 10 orders and here for a month, they refused to give me lvl 1. about 8 angry emails later… they give in and give me lvl 1.

[ruanna3]

I’ve watched this thread with great interest, because I recently accidentally bought a gig on my phone (clumsy fingers). If you’re logged in on a mobile, purchasing a gig is a one-touch transaction.



It’s my hope that Fiverr does add another level of confirmation, because I felt bad for having to cancel the gig (which sadly was not something I could use). It was in no way the fault of the seller, so I hope it doesn’t tag her. As a seller myself, I would feel really bad if that happened.

[Guest lisha5684]

Reply to @wolfstarpicture: Good for you! Congrats! Hard work does pay off 😉



Reply to @ruanna3: Yes, accidents happen. And that’s exactly why fiverr should add a confirmation. Yet again today, someone ordered the wrong gig from me. No problem really, I just told him that I could work on the gig he wanted in “this” order. Doesn’t really matter as long as what is discussed is delivered and for the price at which it was discussed. But then the problem is when you accidentally order but then don’t need any service from that seller, so that strategy doesn’t work then. Hence, fiverr needs to make another confirmation step for order purchase.

[beatcraigslist]

Reply to @ruanna3: I had that happen to me a while back and suggested the same thing, but everybody shot me down saying that “We dont want to give buyers any reason to back out of the sale, and one extra confirmation step could do that” I agree that you want to make a sale as quick and speedy as possible, but this one button mistake is a pain in the butt I think.

[ruanna3]

@beatcraigslist I certainly can’t speak for all buyers, but I know that when I decided to purchase a gig recently I did a ton of homework. I looked at their ratings, their gig description, their samples, to be sure that it was exactly what I wanted. Once I decided, I would have purchased from that seller even if I had to click through three or four buttons.



If someone is such a fairweather buyer, they’re potentially more likely to cancel anyway. And one extra click would’ve kept me from having to cancel due to a misclick, which was certainly not the seller’s fault.

[ruanna3]

@lisha5684 yes, I always get tickled when people buy a “jazz” gig from me in order to do a “musical theatre” gig or vice-versa. But it’s fine, since I really just offer all the gigs to show the range I can do. Yes, I’d like it all to be attributed to the proper gig, but at the moment they are all singing gigs anyway 😃

[jamesosix]

I do believe fiverr should do more to protect sellers. If a buyer cancels then why should the seller suffer any consequences? It’s not like the seller cancelled it.

[mark74]

Reply to @lolacey: mutual cancellations do affect your status as long they reach a (unknown) percentage of your deliveries!!!

[Guest sandra4service]

how do you handle free riders buyers when they request for cancellations?