For Buyers : How to get more quality response for your custom buyer request?

[wingrid3r]

If you are tired of looking for a good freelancer to work on your project and you want to understand how this site actually works, then my friend you’re on the same boat as every other clueless new buyer on this site. Continue to read on and you’ll understand how this site works.



Lets face it; Fiverr has become a jungle in the last few years and I - as a seller- have seen how the level of censorship has grown. So lets start with a little history lesson.

In the beginning fiverr was very seller oriented, the current buyer’s request area is an entire page now; while back when I was new it was a small sidebar barely containing 10 request at most and there was no way to browse older requests. Add to that the fact that even back then you couldn’t share your email with your buyers/sellers and the main reason behind it is because fiverr is afraid of losing out on even a tiny fraction of it’s revenue to users who take the clients offsite and deal with them directly. This resulted in a love hate relationship with fiverr and before the current version of fiverr was launched (Fiverr 2.0) many fiverr clones came up like Doofa, zerk etc



The owners of these sites were actual top sellers on fiverr who either had some of their highly rated profiles banned because of email sharing or they got a dozen of fake reviews from their competitors. The other very real and significant reason for the sprouting of so many fiverr clones was because the sellers really hated to lose 20% of their sale value on sales that were already undervalued. Since fiverr is a very late entrant to the freelance marketplace it was facing with sellers who were used to cheaper commission rates from sites like Freelancer.com (known as Getafreelancer back then), Elance, Guru etc.

Now I am talking about the time when there were no gig extras or a mechanism to buy multiple gigs at once, so convincing some buyer to buy the same gig repeatedly was harder back then especially when you always had someone on the queue willing to do your job for much less.



But Shai Wininger and his team were very aware of the problems. Its not like that fiverr.com doesnt deserve your sale’s 20% - they have a 24/7 facebook and google campaign on multiple keywords, they were once banned on twitter and any tweet containing the hashtag #Fiverr was marked as spam. All of this hardcore marketing costs real money and is the real reason you have so many Impressions / Views on your gig. Even the most poor quality gig has at least some Impression / Views.



Then came along Fiverr 2.0 the current version of Fiverr which has been improved by a huge margin both in terms of bug fixing and optimization since it’s implementation in 2012.

But none of it was good enough for me to spend more time on fiverr getting underpaid. Even gig extras only allowed maximum $50 per customized extra. But the nail in the coffin was when I had some serious family issue and had to relocate, it was such an emergency that I didnt get to inform my active customers or pause my gigs, as a result I got a few bad reviews and I left fiverr.



It’s been 2 years since then and I’ve come back here every now and then to see how they have improved the site. I can still see they discourage sellers from sharing their contact details. They had already made a mini work around to the portfolio issue by creating the ‘Live portfolio’ where essentially your every delivery gets auto added to the Portfolio that is hosted on fiverr through your gig. Not the most efficient, but at least it was something.

The next improvement was allowing custom quotes to go up high as $4000 which really opened up the door for many serious freelancers and small production houses to re-enter fiverr’s domain. So if you’re a buyer and have not received a good response to your custom gig request then you’re wonder if fiverr has got mini studios working here and so many good freelancers then why aren’t I getting any quality response to my custom request? or; why can’t I find a good variety of quality sellers?



Here’s why; the way the buyer request works is pretty basic. You need to have a gig already created in the same category in which the specific request has been made from the buyer. The fact that there are so many categories here and there are so many specialized profiles that not every profile can see all the requests, because they might not have gigs in the same category where you listed. I’ve seen some serious top buyers list request without categorizing. Even if they do get noticed by the right people, most of the times they would be out of responses. At least before one could simply contact the buyer directly, but now there is no way to do that. As far as I know fiverr has also not introduced any plans to sell ‘responses’ / ‘offers’ -or bids, which most freelancing platforms do.



So what should you do to get proper exposure to your requirement other than going off of fiverr?

Simply use the FIVERR FORUM.

Now this is a tool that most internet users from the yesteryears LOVE to use. Use the forums to properly explain what you want and what sort of freelancer you are looking for. You will find that you will get much better responses than the auto response you get from your buyer request through fiverr’s mainsite.

There is no word limit here, neither are there any tag restriction nor geo restriction.



So go ahead and give it a try, when you have your next project try posting about it here on the forums INCLUDING the usual buyer request page.



Hope this helps.

~

LK