The reality of the success score.

[thinupa_wije]

Hi,

I have been a seller on Fiverr for several years now and I loved working on Fiverr. But recently I've been seeing a greatly biased seller statistic metric system with the introduction of the success score. I would explain why I am saying so. Earlier there were only 2 feedback systems per order. One for the seller and one for the buyer. But someone in Fiverr thought that it would be a good idea to collect private buyer feedback in addition to these and develop a new statistic entity called the success score. In the old system both the buyer and the seller cannot see the feedback the either has left for them until they have left their own feedback. This ensures that both the seller and the buyer will leave true feedback without being affected by the feedback left by the other. For example, if the buyer left 5-star feedback because he was satisfied the seller could leave 1-star feedback if he had any problems with the buyer. Since the buyer has already left feedback, he or she won't be able to change their feedback just because they see that. But now with the private feedback system the only thing buyer has to do is leave the worst possible private feedback if he or she wants to get back at the seller. This is not a common occurrence as most of the buyers are fully satisfied and a pleasure to work with, but for those unpleasant experiences where the seller feel like leaving a lower feedback, they will have to hold it back and rate them 5 stars as they don't want the buyer to destroy their statistics because they were honest enough to share their true experience with the buyer. I think it is clear there's no point in maintaining the buyer feedback system anymore as no seller will dare to leave a honest and lower feedback even though they strongly feel like doing so. 

The second thing is practicality with filling 2 feedbacks. The buyers most gladly fill the feedback form after the seller requests. Most of these are fully satisfied customers who wants to share their experience with the seller. After filling the public review (which is also an additional thing they do after purchasing a service, as its not mandatory), most of the satisfied buyer will never fill the other private feedback form. But still, it plays a huge role in the ranking of our gigs. With the type of clients we get (There are people who are extremely busy and come to us to make their work and life a little bit easier), we can't ask them to fill another feedback form after they have just filled one feedback form. This is just impractical and stupid. I don't think anyone enjoys filling not one, but 2 feedback forms after purchasing a service. In contrast in those very rare instances where the buyer is unhappy, they will make sure to fill all the feedback forms in a negative way as they have had a bad experience as they believe (and it might be 100% true). This is totally okay if this thing happened with the positive feedback as well but if we think sensibly and practically a satisfied buyer won't bother filling 2 feedback. So eventually there will be more negative private feedback than positive ones in sellers who get many orders and have a few disagreements on a very minority of their orders which is a normal thing, leading to their gigs getting deranked. 

I would like to hear other's opinion on this as I could be wrong and misunderstood on this. Will appreciate any ideas and opinions so we can all understand the platform and make it a better place.

Thanks.

[priyank_mod]

"Private Reviews" are NOT new and they have been around since quite some time. Once someone mentioned on the forum that they used to be part of Fiverr's system even before 2020. 

New review system prioritizes private reviews, almost nullifies 5-star public reviews and brings onboard a large array of other factors to calculate gig and success score. 

[thinupa_wije]

3 minutes ago, priyank_mod said:

New review system prioritizes private reviews, almost nullifies 5-star public reviews and brings onboard a large array of other factors to calculate gig and success score. 

Yup. Its with the prioritization of that the issues arise. If it was a minor component, they won't affect the sellers much. I totally agree with the fact that sellers should be assessed in all the new arrays but shouldn't it be important to find ways to address the above issues also, while doing that. Thanks for the reply.

[zachary_pel]

26 minutes ago, priyank_mod said:

"Private Reviews" are NOT new and they have been around since quite some time. Once someone mentioned on the forum that they used to be part of Fiverr's system even before 2020. 

New review system prioritizes private reviews, almost nullifies 5-star public reviews and brings onboard a large array of other factors to calculate gig and success score. 

hello priyank_mod,

Could you please provide more details?  I have been completing gig and receiving 5 stars reviews but my success score keeps going down. I am a relatively new seller that has only completed a few orders so far. The delivery is always accepted  and I always offer  a redo if the customer is dissatisfied.

I am  just somewhat confused why the score keeps going down.

 

[sabin_ecom]

Thanks  @thinupa_wije for sharing your perspective! Your points about the feedback system and practicality of the new structure are insightful.

[nickwilcox]

On 1/7/2025 at 11:24 AM, priyank_mod said:

"Private Reviews" are NOT new and they have been around since quite some time. Once someone mentioned on the forum that they used to be part of Fiverr's system even before 2020. 

New review system prioritizes private reviews, almost nullifies 5-star public reviews and brings onboard a large array of other factors to calculate gig and success score. 

Where is this documented?  If 5-star public reviews are null and void, why even bother asking the client to fill them out?

[chuoichien1102]

Satisfied buyers will not care about private ratings, they focus more on their work. As for the few bad buyers, they will have bad private ratings.

[chuoichien1102]

1 hour ago, nickwilcox said:

Where is this documented?  If 5-star public reviews are null and void, why even bother asking the client to fill them out?

I read many topics on the forum about this issue: They say that public rating 5 stars does not affect success score much, private rating affects more. But no one refers to any document saying so.

[priyank_mod]

2 hours ago, nickwilcox said:

If 5-star public reviews are null and void, why even bother asking the client to fill them out?

Because that's what prospective buyers will see when they are searching for services and even evaluating a seller. 

We still need good public ratings but the weightage of private reviews is much much higher. 5-star public ratings are default and expected from us all the time and they don't drive the performance of our gigs, but bad public ratings still have enough weightage to crash our gigs.  

 

[akshay_sihag]

On 1/7/2025 at 9:50 PM, thinupa_wije said:

I would like to hear other's opinion on this as I could be wrong and misunderstood on this. Will appreciate any ideas and opinions so we can all understand the platform and make it a better place.

Fiverr was, is, and always will be buyer biased no matter what. They think buyers are everything, they give an edge to the buyer in everything whether it's feedback, order cancellations, ticket response time etc etc. 

This is the reason why i quit fiverr after whole 5 years myself. 

Sellers mean nothing to fiverr because let's all face the reality here, the number of sellers on fiverr is more than number of buyers on fiverr. The competition so much that, there is around 1000 sellers per 1 buyer.

If every single day 100 sellers are registering on the platform to become a freelancer, only 10-20 buyers are registering to buy the services. 

In a nutshell without buyers there won't be any sellers, so that's why fiverr is biased when it comes to buyers and they give more power to them than us sellers