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Cancelling gigs and buyer freebies: like drugs, just say no


emmaki

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Here’s a tip.

Stop cancelling and giving out free work to every single difficult seller who crosses your path without even checking out your other options. Customer Support is there for a reason. If you have done the work according to you gig standards, and your buyer turns into a hellbeast, then do not be scared to say “no.”

All you are doing is showing these kind of buyers that they can not only get free work, they can do it by being incredibly rude.

Don’t even rise up to them! Just refuse. You’ve done the work. Are you proud of it? Did it take you 103 hours? Are they being unreasonable? Document that **** and take it to Customer Support. Find the chink in that buyer armor, and ask for a second opinion. Let them get mad and throw their toys out their ****** pram. Be professional. Demand the money that you ask for.

******** These people are out to **** you and you don’t even get to enjoy (or not) altered reality. By all means, ask for advice if you’re not sure what to do when confronted with a weird buyer and you don’t know what to do: there are plenty of people here who want to help.

There are valid reasons to cancel a gig–but I’m seeing too many people doing it who don’t need to, and are screwing themselves while rewarding bad behaviour. Just say no, goddamit, or ask for advice.

I’m half tempted to start a website called Freeberr and market it so you guys can do what you’re doing already without the worry. And yes–you will STILL get bad reviews.

So there’s this week’s top tip: stop being an idiot. And don’t invoke some half-baked idea of karma if that’s your thing. You chose to cancel. No karma there, mate.

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I agree. I don’t understand it when I see people saying things like the buyer was dissatisfied with what I delivered so I cancelled the order.

You have a right to be paid if you do the work. There is no reason to cancel the order.
If you did your best, as you should with every order, do not cancel the order.
If they want more work done, send them a custom order.

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I’ve offered a money-back guarantee on my work since I started on Fiverr, and out of 924 orders, I’ve only refunded 39. Would I be at least $195 richer right now if I hadn’t refunded those orders? You bet. But $195 isn’t worth dealing with nightmare clients. I’d rather unhappy or problematic clients found another seller than take up my life. I don’t gross as much as some sellers do on Fiverr, but having said that, I haven’t climbed to the 3rd ranked seller in my category by accident. Since February of 2015, every month my net pay has been higher - it’s only gone up - so I’m going to continue doing what I’m doing because it’s working for me.

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There’s a lot of terrible advice on this forum. One of the most destructive ones is the canceling one. There are valid reasons for a cancellation strategy, but a sizable majority of cancellations are “eek, might get a bad review, will cancel!” when a well-reasoned ticket to Customer Support will keep the money and dump the review.

If you’re writing to CS and saying “dis buyer sux so hard it blows” then… you’re not going to get anywhere. The goddamn TOS says that CS aren’t going to pay attention if you don’t explicitly state the issue.

Now, you can applaud tips like “to be great success on Fiverr, first you must making a profile”, or you can do some research for yourself, understand what’s going on and how you can protect yourself. If you won’t, then your business will fail. If you don’t believe me, take a look at whining threads from 2012 or whatever. Oh look, inactive profile or not available. This is business. Treat it like a business. Don’t respond with “thank, help much” to tips like “you must make the nice desciption wit a tag”. WTF dude.

/rant

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James, you’re a smart seller: I’m sure you had valid reasons for each and every one cancellation. I’m directing this more at sellers who had no need to cancel but did anyway. In one case today, I gave advice to a seller and they cancelled due to a poor understanding of… well, anything, really.

I think it’s important to remind sellers that they have options and advice available to them. It’s very frustrating sometimes. I think I have about 80 cancellations, the vast majority being mistakes (“I didn’t mean to order this”).

I’ve also had a situation where I had an order cancelled and a refund from Fiverr for the whole order, because I was right and that buyer was a major, major PITA that everyone wanted to get rid of–but it was known that I had delivered.

If you’re not getting results from Fiverr in disputes, you’re wrong, or you don’t have a case. I’m sick of these complaints where people crumple. Don’t crumple.

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I refused to cancel an order for 4 days one time in spite of numerous continuing threats and the buyer finally agreed that he was wrong to try to cancel and I was right. It was a $10 order. If you know you did the order correctly, do not cancel.

In this case the buyer didn’t understand English and seemed to think he had applied for a job of some kind after I had completed the order.

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I wonder just how many orders are cancelled for this reason. It seems to be a pretty well established idea among sellers, even level 2s and TRSs.
The mere mention of a bad review or dissatisfaction with the order is enough for many sellers to cancel, regardless of how much work they have put into it.
I get it that sometimes, cancelling a $5 order might save you time but it really irritates me that people encourage others to do the same and state that it is the way to go. Grow a pair people!

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It is. If you’re an ambitious seller starting out, then yes, it’s good advice. Once you have thousands of reviews though… you can afford some lame ones. Having a few bad reviews is good for business too! After all: you can’t please everyone.

I’ve just regained 99% overall rating. One 3-star review will send me back to 98%. And I got a glowing 4.5 star review last week. GLOWING. Some people will say you should cancel because it ain’t a perfect 5. The .5 was because I didn’t respond to his “order status” message a whole 2 days into a 10 day deadline and delivered the next day.

Nobody’s getting a refund. Just a pointed comment if I’m “used again” like an elderly condom.

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I got this.

“You… WITCH! I will tell everyone you are a WITCH and you practice WITCHCRAFT! I had an itch on my right shoulder the other day and IT’S YOUR HEX! Now I will tell everyone unless you [garbled unreasonable mess]!”

“Piss off”

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lol

This is ironic, right? Check out the Forum Rules.

EDIT: if a buyer writes like this to you after you deliver, contact Customer Support. Their fair and level-handed equanimity has won awards in many countries, and you may be pleasantly surprised.

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The username will be deleted. I was delighted that your review came with a portfolio example, however.

Here is the review. Savvy internet users know what to do! “This is total crap! Not only has more than enough time passed for my project to be completed but the seller has been incredibly non-communicative and has failed on numerous fronts with allowing sneak peaks of the project that were promised as much as three times. NEVER DEALING WITH THEM AGAIN!!”

The seller doesn’t have a particularly good rating in the first place. Check it out. This is what I’m talking about.

Conner, if you paid $5 for this crap, you got what you paid for. Conner, your name is making me laugh. Conner, what exactly was this char for? A Helldiver’s rip-off in flash? Or some other online “game” for 12 year olds to yell at each other about yo momma?

Conner? Why? Grow up. That’s concept art for your shit game that nobody will buy. Do prove me wrong, but you’ll need to move outside Fiverr.

Conner.

Where’s the real, uh, con… uh?

Conner?

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Well this is ironic; we played ‘ping-pong’ with the cancel/decline button for a week, with a buyer who had us edit a 55,000 word document, flawlessly. We dared him to show us just one area that he found a discrepancy/error, one single one. His only excuse was - “there wuz many erors and even terrible spilling, and no it’s not my job 2 show yuu guys… that’s yore job.” – This person’s order received over 3000 corrections due to their horrendous grammar and discombobulating writing style.

Formulating a case about this to CS was done in no time, and did we enjoy that game of ‘ping-pong’. The buyer was sacked from the site within 5 days, and of course - everything else went in our favor.

Newbies - don’t be afraid to play ‘ping-pong’ if you know you delivered profound quality; if the buyer is adamant that there was something unsatisfactory, please have them direct you to it and please try your best to address it. If there’s no logical explanation or cooperation from their end, retort to Customer Service, and yell “Game on.”

Hint - If you hold out for long enough to even spot a threat from them about a negative review etc., you can use that as hard evidence to have them spanked by Customer Service.

Cheers,
Speedy876

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I have a Buyer right now. After the Work is done right According to his Requirements(Modification etc) He said that he want to See the Proof of the Size of the image(he thought i was a newbie). I sent him a Screen shot of PS displaying the image size. He then Reacted as he and his partner want a full refund and he will ask someone else to do the job(after getting the files). I Simply Refused in a big ‘No’ and Sent a Ticket to CS explaining each and Every word plus the Screen shot that i sent him. i have my money and after the ‘No’ he haven’t Replied me back(Even no Review).

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I did this just a few days ago. I refused to help someone with something after the work was done because they asked for something I didn’t offer. Fiverr support gave them their money back and ripped me off even though I completed my end of the deal.

Looks like even if you’re in the right, and you stand up for yourself, you still get screwed. Lost $105.

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