Not every seller is a scam artist... even though experiences may say otherwise

[missashley8705]

I started working for a client (as his virtual assistant) about a month ago. He left me in charge of outsourcing certain tasks. He has worked with Fiverr sellers before and in fact we met on Fiverr. A few of the tasks he wanted me to oversee were ones he had already been in discussion with Fiverr sellers about. He set me up with his Fiverr user name and password and asked that I get the ball rolling with the sellers he found. After looking at the correspondence between him and two different sellers doing two different services, I cancelled both orders.

One seller was almost a month late on delivering and had provided a thousand excuses for his lack of service such as “I sorry about u work sir, I hav to finish my term paper befor I able to help u more. I ask u just be pashint with me little more and I get u ur work. It OK sir, be happy.” That is a word for word excuse this seller gave on a $220 order.

The next seller was from the US. He was a level one seller offering an updated wiki page for $5 but upon being messaged by my client, he said that it would be $90 and the payments had to be individual $5 gigs. He went on to say that he really wanted to make level two so my client needed to place 18 different orders and provide him with 18 five star reviews so that he could get his level two badge. All this was included in the sellers first message to my client. I am a level two seller and in the beginning I NEVER would have made these demands or treated a client that way. Needless to say, dismissing both of these sellers was an easy decision.

Next I had to find new sellers for the jobs, creating a professional PowerPoint presentation and creating a new Wiki page. All the sellers offering to do the wiki page cost a minimum of $90. The five dollars is for a consultation. However the gig title doesn’t say that. I understand that you can’t put everything in a title but it shouldn’t be a flat out lie. “I will create or update your wiki page for $5” this could mean that you will only create a very basic page or only make one or two small updates and that would still fall in line with your title and allow you to upsell in your description. But to say that in your title and then have a note at the bottom that says “the $5 gig will only cover a consultation” is dishonest and unacceptable. If you can’t offer your trade in any capacity for $5 then you shouldn’t be here. I agree that sellers shouldn’t have to offer the world for $5 but whatever you say you will do in your title for $5 should be offered on some scale. Contractors who build million dollar homes offer free consultations so where does a Fiverr seller get off on offering a consultation for $5? In that case, the gig title should be “I will consult you on your wiki page for $5”.

Honestly, when I was actively selling, I didn’t realize what other sellers were doing. Now that I have seen the behaviour of some of these sellers, I am disgusted! There are many quality buyers that come to Fiverr and abruptly leave because their first experiences are with junk sellers who offer a bunch of BS instead of quality work. I fully intend on reporting the sellers I found that don’t offer a version of their title for $5. These scam artists are sending away buyers that some of us sellers would love to have had and it’s not right.

Anyway, I just wanted to share because I was completely blown away by how many bad sellers there are on Fiverr… I had no idea! To all the good sellers, it sucks to be us. We are being given very bad names by a large percentage of these crappy sellers.