Need Some Help

[cyaxrex]

Hello Fiverr people!

I hope that you are all enjoying 2016 so far. I am as I see to be experiencing a surge in orders at the moment, but it is in this regard that I need some advice from some pro sellers especially.

Basically, I offer everything on Fiverr for $5 and if you ask me I offer incredible value in this respect. The only problem is I have one gig which is suddenly being flooded with orders. Of course, this is what everyone ideally wants on Fiverr, In this case I feel bad about complaining.

The problem though, is that I’m just one man and have work commitments outside of Fiverr. In this respect then, when somebody orders 10-30 articles on my best selling gig with a turn around time of 48 hours, I simply can’t handle this kind of volume. This happened this week. Worse, at the same time I was also being flooded with singular orders every day.

In the end then, I had no choice but to extend my standard delivery time to 6 days as opposed to my standard 2. The problem? I still have new orders coming in, but they have slowed to a trickle.

What I wanted to ask in this case, is how other people manage when this happens? Does anyone have an ideal delivery time which doesn’t seem to stem orders?

Of course, I know that a lot of Fiverr sellers would love to be overwhelmed with orders. In this case I hope I don’t sound condescending. I just really would like to hear from writers specifically, how they manage their time.

Also, with the volume of orders which I’ve had over the past few days, I have seriously thought about just working on Fiverr full time. The only problem? I freelance full time and I’m terrified of the idea of depending on just one platform.

In short then, what’s your perfect turnaround time? Did implementing it impact sales? And if so, did those sales later recover?

Thanks in advance. Andy

[eoinfinnegan]

When choosing anything about my gigs I always look at the Fiverr search system. Look at what people are going to set as the parameters of their search.
In regard to order time, the options their are 24 hours, 3 days and up to 7 days I think.
Therefore, going from 2-3 days should not make much of a difference, but remember that setting it as 4,5,6 days means you are showing in the same results as people who take a week to deliver. I suggest that you may want to offer a 24 hour gig for single articles and clearly state that multiple orders need to be agreed in advance with a custom offer.
I can’t imagine many people will order bulk without contacting you first, do they? If they contact you first then tell them 10 takes 3 days, 20 takes 5 days etc - if they want it quicker add a bit to the cost so that it is either worth you losing some sleep for or, as usually happens, the extra time is not a big deal any more.

[cyaxrex]

Yes, this is my problem, people are ordering in bulk before asking. 6, 10, 22 orders you name it. In fact, I stemmed the flow by increasing my turnaround time to 6 days just before a guy ordered 22 articles and he was a little upset.

This is my problem.

[eoinfinnegan]

Clearly say in your gig description that anything over X (5?) number of articles MUST be discussed first. If you don’t do something you are just gonna end up with late deliveries and negative reviews.

[writer99025]

Hey, you won’t believe my delivery time - 14 days. I have had this for almost a year now and it allows me to keep everything in control. I make it very clear on my Gig description that I take 14 days for the delivery. So, while I get fewer 1-article orders, I get enough bigger orders (8-10 articles) from regular clients to keep me busy. Now, that has certainly cost me, I am down in the search results despite having just 1 negative review in 2 years for my article Gig (and 875+ positive). Had I kept my delivery time 6-7 days, I would probably get 3 or 4 times as many orders…but it would be impossible to manage all the work. I am, as of now, happy with what I get. May drop the delivery time in the future if I find myself less busy.

[cyaxrex]

Thanks for all the advice. I actually cleared all my big orders and was about to reduce my turnaround time, but then got a new order come in for 10 more articles. In this case, I have left delivery at 6 days, as I also seem to be getting orders for 1-2 articles coming in which so far evens out my workload. In fact, I even have time to walk the dog these days! Of course, I will see how everything goes.