Is Fiverr becoming another bid based freelance website?

[synthsmasher]

I have been doing freelance design work for quite some time now. I started out with participating in logo contests hosted on websites like Freelancer.com, 99designs etc.

I won a dozen or so contests and lost a ton more. The contest prize money was good but it was not a sustainable source of income.

I then tried bidding for projects for client work. Unfortunately, the reputed freelancers (I can count them on my fingers) won almost 99.9% of all the projects because of their higher reputation on these websites (even though their work was of poor quality). Moreover, these websites expect you to pay for the number of bids you can place. Thus, you spend money even before you get the opportunity to earn back even a fraction of it.

Similar was the case on websites like Upwork, Elance etc.

The main reason I joined Fiverr was because once you earn a decent reputation on it, you start getting automatic orders, without you requiring to bid for each and every project each morning and waiting for responses from prospective clients.

I had won several high value contests (above $500) on freelancer,com, but it wasnt attracting any new customers towards me. I still had to bid for new projects. And my bid was lost among the hundreds of bids from freelancers who had no experience what so ever.

Fiverr was a breath of fresh air in this regard. It worked like a charm in the beginning (approx 6 months back). I got regular order (prepaid orders) from clients, most of whom had a pretty vivid idea of what they were looking for.

Then, the “buyer request” section only had a few hundred genuine requests from buyers with only 5-25 bids. When I check the buyer request section now, it has approx 7000 buyer requests with each request having 15-35 bids. I cannot help but wonder if its the bidding game all over again.

It is common knowledge that the impressions, views and clicks are consistently dropping. Buyers have started posting their projects directly in the request section instead of placing an order directly with sellers. This causes the sellers to bid to earn their projects, pulling down their price due to the competition. This is not the business model Fiverr is based on.

[fonthaunt]

I really don’t think so. Buyer Requests has been around a long time and I think the reason you see longer “queues” bidding on them is because there are many more new sellers on Fiverr every day now. Most don’t have a chance at all to get orders in the beginning unless they have truly amazing gigs at very cheap prices and happen to get noticed in those first days in the “New” category.

That often is not enough to get them up to at least level 1 which creates some panic for newbies. They see on the forum that BR is highly recommended to help with this early-stage issue and it’s true, it does help new sellers or “old” sellers going through slow times. So, you see a high number of bids for those requests, although buyers complain that many of the offers come from people who barely read the request and just kept hitting the offer button.

During slow times I use BR and I have often gotten the sale even when I’m the 20th person or more. I read the requests carefully and word my offers to make that clear. Each time I do that during slow phases, it increases views on my gigs as well, so both my impressions and my conversation rate climbs a little which seems to drive my gigs up in search. Then I start to get orders the real Fiverr way again since buyers start to find me.

I disregard BR as soon as I can since they are typically low paying buyers with high expectations. That’s been a pattern for the years I’ve been on Fiverr even though the actual number of bids goes up. I think that most established sellers would not try to rely on bidding as their main way of getting sales from difficult and demanding buyers, so I don’t see Fiverr becoming like the others. I think there are other sellers like me who return to it to stimulate growth in sales or new gigs, but don’t use it as a primary resource. Time might prove me wrong but if so, it will surprise me.

[synthsmasher]

I too use the BR section during slow times. It is a great tool for stimulating growth and getting quick orders. My primary concern is the increased reliance on the BR due to lack of direct orders. If 90% buyers start posting on BR, then we are sure headed towards the bid system.

[liz_iudakhina]

I don’t see a problem at all with BR. Yes, there will often be 100500 more bidders for the same job, but you can always word your offer appropriately so it really targets a certain request, and is clear and engaging. By the looks of it, not everyone does it - so the competition is not as high as it initially seems…

I find BR a fantastic opportunity to build reputation. It really does seem to work.

[emmaki]

No.

Next!

[topaz_muse]

It looks that way in regards to BR but fiverr is nowhere near a bidding site. I’ve been on eLance before and the whole bidding system was completely broken with majority if the buyers heading the direction of sellers with low bids. Of course there were also buyers that would undermine the system by stating a high budget to attract sellers only to tell them later that their budget is extremely low.

Fiverr has transformed over the years from a simple 5USD gig site to a platform where everyone has an equal chance at generating income. Just keep doing what you’re doing and the buyers will surface in due time.

[Guest raimi86]

I agree. As a new seller my main goal is to secure orders through buyer requests. There is no other option other than to fake orders (which A LOT of people are doing). Even with buyer request, new sellers with great gigs are pushed out by sellers that were around in the earlier days when it was easy to get orders.

Fiverr is now over saturated. I just hope I can help a few people and deliver the best I can while I’m here 🙂

[fastcopywriter]

Nope. Bidding is optional. Buyer’s Request is where you go when you don’t have enough orders or are bored.

Just keep working on your gigs. Rewrite those gig descriptions once in a while, change your portfolio pictures, try a different keyword/tag, etc.