From Top Rated to Level One Slipping Overnight, Despite 5-Star Review and Tip!

[canadianwriter]

I was Top Rated status, until two days ago when I got a notification that I hadn't updated my tax information (nothing had changed). I'm a professional editor who has worked on Fiverr since 2014 and I have over 600 5-star reviews (my rating is 4.9). My success score was 9, down from 10 because I recently got a 4-star review from a client whose book needed a lot of work. 

I provided the information immediately upon receiving the notification, but Fiverr has apparently punished me by demoting me to level 1 and they have also zeroed out my success score, which was 9 before this happened. 

I have done over 800 orders on this platform, most of which garnered 5-star reviews and they literally obliterated my profile overnight. Customer support will not respond to me. I work on another platform as well and so clearly I have no choice but to pick up and move on as Fiverr has destroyed my business here. 

Luckily, I'm a professional and I do have other income, but what if I didn't? I can't help but think that if I had relied on Fiverr as an income, what would this have done to me and my life? My mind is just boggled at randomly treating long-term, successful freelancers this way. An unbelievable lack of professionalism. 

[priyank_mod]

Unfortunately, alot of back end work on Fiverr is now governed by AI. And it seems like, system has paused your gigs and success score due to this tax information thing. 

Usually, support takes a few days of time to respond to non-seller plus members, so my advice would be to wait for their response. And incase they send an automated response, request them to provide human intervention. 

This is mostly like a technical issue or system bug and might not have anything to do with your selling performance. 

[canadianwriter]

I am Seller Plus—I cancelled it when this happened because I was just astonished at how badly they'd treated my business, but I'm still Seller Plus til the 8th, that's when I've paid to so my assumption is they'd honor the sub until then.

I actually paused my gigs, I'll reactivate one and wait for a response, but I'm not holding out much hope for this to go my way. I do appreciate your advice though. 

[rawque_gulia]

55 minutes ago, canadianwriter said:

Fiverr has apparently punished me by demoting me to level 1 and they have also zeroed out my success score, which was 9 before this happened. 

A similar case was seen on the Forum (before few weeks) where another user’s Success Score suddenly dropped to zero and the profile was demoted. But as far as I can remember, after contacting customer support, original Success Score was restored and also the Level was reinstated.

Your situation appears to be very similar but only customer support can clarify what is happening in the backendd, so let’s wait for their response!

[canadianwriter]

Will do—I actually reactivated a few of my gigs so now I'll just wait it out and hope for the best. 🙂

[donnovan86]

1 hour ago, canadianwriter said:

Luckily, I'm a professional and I do have other income, but what if I didn't? I can't help but think that if I had relied on Fiverr as an income, what would this have done to me and my life? My mind is just boggled at randomly treating long-term, successful freelancers this way. An unbelievable lack of professionalism. 

You have very few orders in the last 12 months. And Fiverr focuses a lot on private reviews. If that 4 star client gave you a bad private review.. and you barely had any private reviews from other clients, clearly that ended up damaging your overall success score. Because Fiverr tracks orders and data from the past 2 years. So I can see how a bad private review would damage your stuff here. 

To be fair, they just use the available data. But if some people choose to rate you poorly, be it when you cancel orders, after you deliver the work.. all of that can end up being an issue. 

[filipdevaere]

9 minutes ago, donnovan86 said:

You have very few orders in the last 12 months.

Indeed, very few orders in the last 2 years.
But normally you are warned by Fiverr (certainly as TRS) that your seller level will drop.

[priyank_mod]

28 minutes ago, donnovan86 said:

You have very few orders in the last 12 months. And Fiverr focuses a lot on private reviews.

I'm just hypothesizing this but its possible that they might have added some new tweak to the algorithm recently, for the accounts which had a relatively lower volume of orders in the last 2 years!!

Remember a couple of days back there was another topic where another seller's success score became NA overnight!! 

Without this new tweak, may be these sellers would have continued with high success core. 

[filipdevaere]

6 minutes ago, priyank_mod said:

I'm just hypothesizing this but its possible that they might have added some new tweak to the algorithm recently, for the accounts which had a relatively lower volume of orders in the last 2 years!!

That is also possible. We have known for a long time that Fiverr prefers sellers with many orders and higher prices.

[canadianwriter]

Maybe that's part of it, not sure. The thing is though I can't work full time on Fiverr and so I use it for very part time work. I kind of thought that was okay, as in not a reason to remove someone's Top Rated status if their stats were where they should be. I think if Fiverr is only going to favor people who work on the platform a lot, they should likely come out and say it. It shouldn't really be a comparison situation, if you're delivering quality work, you're delivering quality work, and I have a long record of doing that. 

I don't know, that's my take on it, for what it's worth. But if that is the case they should likely let people know so they're not paying for Seller Plus, etc. 

Oh, my success score is back at a 9, so my stats are all exactly where they were. Still no Top Rated status though. 

Edited January 6 by canadianwriter