How to avoid negative feedback?

[uxreview]

I’m hoping that some of the top sellers will share their ideas on how to prevent negative feedback. I’m not talking about the cases where a seller is trying to get off the hook for a delivery failure. I’m talking about the cases where a buyer had different expectations or they simply misunderstood the gig.

Right now I’m offering order cancellation, meaning if you don’t like the result then I’ll cancel the order. However, this will impact my ranking in search results and some users might abuse refund option. They claim that result wasn’t good enough and they get the gig for free. It’s not like I can take my website audit back from them.

Secondly, I encourage buyers to contact me in advance to agree on the order details, but not everybody follows that advice. I wish Fiverr had some kind of approval stage for sellers to accept the order. For example, buyer fills out the requirements and if seller sees that this is not something they can help with, then a seller can cancel it in advance without any impact to ranking. Getting a lower ranking is just my observation, because after a cancellation my gig views pretty much disappeared. Although the buyer was happy with the cancellation, because they wanted something else and I found them a better gig.

Now, I’ve seen that some sellers offer a discount on the next order for a positive feedback. I haven’t tried it myself, but I suppose it only works for some gigs. If you’re designing a logo, then it’s unlikely that same buyer will order another one, unless they are reselling these logos.

Are there any other tactics that you can use to prevent negative feedback? Obviously writing a good description and FAQ’s is the first step.

[zeus777]

After working here ( and outside Fiverr), I simply came to the solution that in some cases,
no matter how hard you try, you just can’t make everyone happy.
All I do is just do my best and hope the sellers will like it too.
If they are not happy, I will offer a cancellation. Sure does annoy the hell out of me, especially if they get away with getting free work, but there isn’t much I can do.

I am aware that some people will do pretty much anything in their power to avoid
negative feedback, but personally I’m not sure if I’m willing to go that far.
If the person leaves a negative comment, I will leave a comment that sounds fair and
professional so the others can read it.

[uxreview]

Yes, I suppose so. If I had hundreds of reviews then getting few bad apples is just statistics. Right now I can’t afford any bad reviews and I always try to go the extra mile, even if it means that I need to cancel and recommend a different gig that buyer should have looked up in the first place.

I checked your gigs and I like how you have clearly defined what you do and what you don’t do. I’ll probably need to work on that as well.

Thank you for your feedback, I appreciate it 🙂

[djgodknows]

How about using your actual location instead of a fake one, that can help in not getting negative feedbacks!