Fiverr you can't just trust posive reviews

[mrcableguy]

Dear Fiver people,

I’m trully shocked, I’ve bought some web traffic from a very promosing add from this person

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https://nl.fiverr.com/conversations/******************

He didn’t deliver what he promissed, in fact it was abominably bad. So I left a negative review.

What happens, the person just deletes his gig and the bad review is gone. Not only of the gig but also in his user profile the review I left is just gone.

How on earth do I know if a seller is legit and reliable if you are just able to delete negative reviews ? No only from the Gig but also from the profile.

Fiverr, this is a MAJOR shame…

[fonthaunt]

A seller cannot truly hide from this forever, and it damages them in more ways than 1, so if the review was deserved and other buyers have similar problems, it will have a cumulative negative effect. Although a seller can hide or delete the gig with the bad review, the first way that impacts them is that they also cannot display any positive reviews that might have been on that gig. They’d have to re-create the gig as a new arrival, which makes it less likely to sell.

Much more important, a removed gig does not remove the impact a lower review has on overall rating percentage. You see this heavily on a brand new seller, so I’ll give you an example based on that. If a seller is brand new and has one 5 star review, their overall rating is 100% positive. If you buy from them and have a negative experience and leave them a 1 star review (example) they can hide the gig to hide the words of your review, but the impact stays. Their positive rating becomes 50% positive which is terrible. They are no longer eligible for more levels, they cannot bid on buyer requests, and buyers will mostly ignore them. They can only rebuild by getting more positive reviews to bring the rating back up to at least 90-95%.

It makes sense than an established seller with more reviews would be impact less due to ratios. If 100 buyers loved their work and 2 did not, that should impact the rating in a minor way. Otherwise, there would be competing sellers or buyers with an agenda who would deliberately rate a seller low just to harm them. It’s set up to be as balanced as it can be. I don’t love the 5 star system and I don’t think it is the best reflection of the truth for the seller or the buyer. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s as simple or as easy to escape as it sounds from your description.

[misscrystal]

His gig is gone. How many times are you going to attempt to post about this and give his name? No one can even buy his gig.

[mrcableguy]

@admin my sincere apologies for not reading the rules and place a username.

Dear @fonthaunt, thank you very much for your very detailed and friendly answer.

@misscrystal I have no idea what so ever why you have such a negative attitude towards me or what’s bothering u. Let’s keep it on topic please, I wasn’t complaining about your ‘online love spells’ so don’t make it personal.

Let me summarize my objections by explaining the case.

Before I buy something I would like to be able to see the positive and negative reviews of a seller. It doesn’t mean when a seller has 80% good reviews en 20% negative or leaning towards negative I won’t buy something, but I would like to use buyer feedback to decide for myself if I want to order or not.

In this case the user created 5 or more gigs with the same service. I’ve looked at the profile and the gig, both had 100% positive reviews. So I ordered a gig (for bringing visitors to a website).

The seller didn’t only not deliver the quantity as promised but also automated traffic (so called bots, not a real life person).

In stead of asking for a refund I thought it would be more usefull to leave my feedback to inform other possible buyers.

It’s quite painfull to see the seller just deletes this single gig, thereby removing the review I’ve wrote from both the gig as his seller profile and just continues with the other 4 gigs which offer the same services. He or she can of course make another new 5th gig and just continue with a clean sheet. Just repeat this process over and over again and you always have 100% positive feedback. Any new buyers aren’t able to see what all previous buyers had to comment.

Now I do understand from the friendly answer from @fonthaunt the reviews are not deleted but go on an ´invisible´status and there will be an overall impact on the profile.

The problem is I´m not familiar with any algorithms that decide when a gig/seller is showed or not. It is not possible for me, or any others buyers, to determine if the seller is reliable.

When I buy goods or services on words most famous auction site I see the overall rating of the user and al his or her sales. When they remove a listing obviously any feedback about that listing doesn´t change to an inviseble status.

And to calm down people who are thinking ‘you’re are just nagging’ as well as here as on the auction site more than 90% of my feedback is really positive.

My main question would be, why are buyers not able to see the full review history of a seller?

[misscrystal]

@misscrystal I have no idea what so ever why you have such a negative attitude towards me or what’s bothering u. Let’s keep it on topic please, I wasn’t complaining about your ‘online love spells’ so don’t make it personal.

Usually when you start a thread people will post comments about it so that’s what I did.

How is asking that “making it personal”?

[mrcableguy]

Ok to answer your question. I’m planning to open 1 topic, I’ve made a mistake by not reading the rules and post a username, see my sincere apologies. I’m not planning to post a username since it’s against the rules (in the second post i’ve opened I didn’t mention a username).

Have yourself a great day !

[fonthaunt]

I am going to respond very briefly* to what you wrote here but also a general comment the the thread below some of the other replies. This part is only regarding what questions I am interested in from your original post.

I can entirely understand your desires to see all reviews. Fiverr hits sellers very hard when it comes to reviews and most sellers feel an incredible pressure to maintain 100% 5 star feedback until they have hundreds of reviews. If they do not while building up to hundreds or thousands of reviews, sellers often are either eliminated from the Fiverr home search page or they are dropped low so that it is much harder for buyers to find them. When you add that to the cumulative effect of all reviews, a seller with fewer reviews has an enormous struggle to get a reasonable freelancer business on this site and earnings start out small after Fiverr’s 20% cut and PayPal’s cut. If a seller tries to limit early bad reviews which may be caused by the initial learning curve, they may have to refund the buyer. By doing that they lose their time and money (justifiably or not) and sometimes buyers don’t respond to the refund offer which puts yet another negative mark on a seller’s account. Other things that negatively affect sellers here are late deliveries even if not the seller’s fault and how fast they respond to messages even if the slowness is at 2 or 3AM. Sellers have no way at this time to purchase ad space or boost their gig listings on Fiverr, so literally the only thing that really helps a newer seller to succeed is their reviews.

That still doesn’t make me disagree with your desire to actually read the reviews instead of just seeing the impact in terms of lowered ratings and search rankings. It just makes me sympathetic to what newer sellers might do to minimize damage to their “storefront.”

It’s quite different for sellers who have already gained thousands of total positive reviews even if some of their individual gigs have only a few reviews. Since it’s about ratios, a TRS could be minimally affected by a 1 star review but a new seller could be badly affected by a few 4 star positive reviews. Sellers with lots of reviews usually leave the bad ones on display because otherwise the good ones are hidden too. Most of the time when a seller deletes or hides a gig with a lesser review, chances are they are doing so because they don’t yet have enough reviews to take risks.

Anyway, that’s a lot of words to really say that I don’t dispute or disagree with your actual point, but comparisons to other sites only go so far. Many sites don’t punish their users so heavily for every single misstep.

On this - “It is not possible for me, or any other buyers, to determine if the seller is reliable.” I agree. However, reviews alone are not enough. The best way to learn about the reliability of a company, auction seller or freelancer is to try them out. You can’t always do that on some sites because it would be too costly to just do “tests.” On Fiverr, you actually can. A $5 investment for a sample is incredibly useful by itself, and if it’s a bigger order you can pay in milestones allowing you to back out at low cost if it’s not going well. Sure, reviews are nice, but they can be fake on any site and they aren’t the only barometer.

As far as your last question - why are buyers not able to see the full review history - I actually think that’s not necessarily what was intended in the beginning. Fiverr is actually not a very old company, and they did not start out using a star review system. At first there were also no levels, no Top Rated, and far less competition. If a seller got a “thumbs down” on the binary review system, it was automatically attached to that exact gig. It still affected the comprehensive rating just like now. If someone paused a gig, the review was hidden then too, but since Fiverr was small and few sellers had yet mounted up thousands of reviews, rankings quickly went down if someone got bad reviews. In time, Fiverr changed and reviews became more important while competition also grew. During all that, the code was already in place for a review to be attached to an individual gig. I could see Fiverr changing that at some point down the road, but since it’s an issue that has only become more pressing in the past couple of years, it’s going to take quite a bit of time to re-code for that. You’d have to write to Customer Support to see if they can share more than that.

*Note to @writer

[writer99025]

You said: “I am going to respond very briefly to what you wrote here”

😃

[fonthaunt]

I want to say here that I think your response to @misscrystal was not nice at all. The forum rules are right up on top and to the right, so if you had read those you would have known about things like username callouts, posting duplicates on the same topic, and more about the review process. Since you didn’t read, you broke several rules and your other post was one of them.

You said:
"I’ve just posted my wonders about a fiver user who is removing negative feedback completly, a few minutes later my post

http://forum.fiverr.com/discussion/fiverr-you-cant-just-trust-posive-reviews/ is just offline ?"

You made that other post only a short time after your original was removed and even though you clearly would have seen a big page telling you that your post was under review, you had a bit of a tantrum.

You also said:

Is this how Fiverr handles his own negative feedback, just the same as a seller on fiverr ?

I really would like a response en a public discussion with other buyers. Please don’t remove this post again.

As you now know, Fiverr did not remove your post at all. A volunteer forum team member did as a courtesy to other readers since the post broke the rules. The volunteer took time from their purchases and sales to moderate. As soon as it was ready, it was popped right back in the forum.

In addition you demanded that your 2nd post (breaking the rules on duplicate topics) not be removed.

You want sellers here to be held accountable for their actions, though?

I’m not writing this to overly get on you, quite honestly, I just want to point out that in my own opinion, @misscrystal may have been a little tough on you too, but she was right and she didn’t break the rules. I think it would have been a lot nicer to just admit that you made some mistakes and move on.

[fonthaunt]

That’s a very good point. Of course, for me at that moment - that was brief! (Simply horrible!!) The OP may have fainted while reading, which is a plus. Writers like me are very lucky that most buyers WANT word count. Writers like me are general not good as copywriters. The title of my next books is 53 words long… 😃

[writer99025]

😃