cucinavivace

I've only had one cancellation and it was by support because I showed the buyer was an identity thief. That was just last year. The possible handful of people who got mad at me for telling them they'd have taxes when they thought they wouldn't and could have left bad private feedback are all in the last couple years too. I've been on Fiverr for a long time, but I've really been active for the past couple years. I can't make any sense out of what's happening, but hopefully it means it will happen for some others too.

Just an update. I'm up from a success score of 4 to 8 in the past couple months .... despite having only 2 new orders from Fiverr directly in all that time and the rest of it being with older repeat buyers (and still not much of that - total 8 orders in 2 months from 4 customers, 6 orders repeat buyers). Let the confusion continue, but a tad more hope for those waiting it out.

Well, the confusion continues to grow and determinations continue to seem arbitrary. I have one gig with a score of 10 and another gig with a score of 4, giving me a Success Score of 6. The 4 gig is my tax gig, where people are routinely unhappy not necessarily with my performance, but with what I have to tell them about their taxes. Usually those are international people who thought they'd have no taxes here in the US. Then they leave me 5 stars publicly and take it out on me in private ratings. Anyway, I just clarify the picture for you. That tax gig was holding steady at 5 until a month ago when a more recent private rating tanked it down to that 4. I know who it was. I lost all visibility on the platform and have had 0 orders on that gig in the past five or six weeks, and it seemed I would be stuck at level 1 forever. Just this moment, with no more orders, the score on that gig bumped up to a 5 and my Success Score with it to a 7 and I'm a level 2 again for the first time since this fakakta new system went into place. Sure, I understand older reviews are cycling off as time goes by and that changes things, but the review that tanked me to a 4 on that gig was clearly very recent and my score was high enough before that even if I had a bad private rating from a couple years ago (there are no bad public ones), it falling off now would not logically have made this big a difference. So I put this here to tell you whether it ever makes any sense or not, apparently there is hope.

I've had two clients in a row devour time to over twice the amount of the custom offer. Both have been highly unresponsive and wasted a lot of time through their entire order. So here's the biggest problem with these private ratings ... I can't say anything. If the private ratings were asked for upfront only, that would be one thing. But buyers are getting an email 24 hours after order completion to leave private feedback. I can get a five star review and have everything be fine, then leave an honest review saying the buyer was unresponsive, and get kicked in the backside with negative private feedback a day or two later in retribution. They really should give the buyer one shot at feedback, whether it's public or private or both. Making our buyer reviews a possible point of contention on that private feedback is perhaps the most unfair part of the whole thing. We can't see our feedback first. They shouldn't be allowed to see theirs before the review process is complete either. I decided to bring it up in case anybody thinks this is all right after the order and they're safe. Think hard about whether or not a buyer is worth complaining about, because they do have a chance to kick your score after they see what you wrote. And I know for sure it happened to me a couple weeks ago.

Oh, Fiverr customer support provides the wrong information all the time. I've had them tell me the wrong timeframe to leave a review, the wrong timeframe for a customer to complain and ask for a refund, the wrong eligibility for early withdrawals, the wrong eligibility for promoted gigs, the wrong information on public ratings duration, the wrong information on subscription cancellations ... A couple weeks ago I had a complicated situation with a buyer on a subscription and wanted to block him from buying from me again. A CS rep told me that blocking a buyer only blocks them in the inbox. I had to send her their own documentation saying that if a buyer has a completed order with you, blocking is supposed to completely block them from your profile. I never got a response. I'm not saying it's wrong this time. That "relative to other sellers" bit is a cut and paste from the gig score documentation, not even that rep's personal response. But assuming CS's information is gospel at all times is definitely misplaced faith.

Amazon and all the rest do the same thing. Here are the "sponsored" ones and here are the search results sorted by relevance. It always ends up with someone who's near the top anyway also showing in the paid list, which I suppose is not a coincidence and in a way is the whole point. If they took that guy near the top out of the regular search because he was right above it in the paid search, we'd all yell and scream that many people skim right by the paid listings (I know I do).

Right. But there has always been the option to call CS to have a review manually changed (under certain circumstances) for 30 days. I don't know that it's locked to that timeframe, but I doubt whatever the timeframe is Fiverr is not bothering to program "seller has also left a review - buyer review locked - count rating in score." They're just going to say it's 14 days or 30 days to release ratings into scores for all cases. The actual review editing period is possibly irrelevant compared to the potential allowed review editing period across the board, because Fiverr is lazy. That's an assumption on my part, of course, but that's just speculating as to why the point is the point and is probably not very important. The point is seeing "this rating will be factored into your score in the coming weeks," however briefly they had it publicly, says to me they actually mean weeks. So it's doubtful you'd see any score change right away on a burst of good ratings.

Just FYI on the many ratings/no score change conversation, I think I mentioned this a number of pages ago and I don't know if it ever made it into the documentation, but at one point early on in this process after I got a review the system also gave me the message "this rating will be factored into your score in the coming weeks." I don't think they actually count the public ratings in your gig score until after the "BS timeframe where buyer gets to change their mind" period. So that's at least two weeks, and I think it's 30 days on some of the technical categories. I'm not clear on if it's the automatic period or the period they have to contact support to manually get a review changed (which in the past was 30 days, who knows now), but it appears that it's intentionally not right away.

I'm convinced, as mentioned above, the private ratings actually have more influence than public ones. I did the math on a pretty thorough review of all my orders, and in my case there is no way more than 3% of my buyers had any reason to leave anything truly negative in a private rating. And so I think reasonably far fewer than that actually did. In those cases, I think they were folks who didn't like what I told them about the tax code itself, not how I personally performed (people get pretty irate when you tell them they're breaking the law), and in one case a communication issue because his English was horrible and I don't speak Romanian (at all). Still, my perfect 5.0 and 100% on all metrics public score translated to a Success Score of 4 and dropped me from level 2 to level 0 when the new system kicked in. I have since graduated to level 1 (whoopee) with a Success Score of 6, but I'm guessing I'll be waiting at least until next tax season when the volume is better to get up to a 7. In short, I'm convinced one bad private rating probably drags down as many as 50 public ones.

I know this is an old post, but just since you got some pushback to clarify, those are not free in the US either. I switched to Payoneer for the direct deposit (the only reason I have a Payoneer account) so I only had to pay $1 for the withdrawals. When I use PayPal for the withdrawal I get charged 2.9% + $.30 just like any other "goods and services" payment. Frankly, this is the kind of nickel and dime stuff that annoys me about this platform. They can't figure out ACH direct deposit or eat any fees at all to get us paid after charging that much upfront? On top of everything else, that's just greedy. And it's not like it's difficult or expensive to save us that headache and show a little goodwill. I pay my own sales people every month through PayPal and Venmo because PayPal and Venmo have to handle my 1099s and I have zero ongoing record keeping headaches on their payments. I upload a single spreadsheet to PayPal. The payments go to all my people's PayPal or Venmo accounts instantly. I get charged 2% to a maximum of $14, which means for anything over $700 it's under 2%. So if I pay someone $700, it's $14. If I pay someone $10,000, it's $14. If I only pay someone $200, then it's $4. The average for the whole year usually comes out just over 1%. If I didn't do it I'd have to raise my commission rate from 20% to 25% because nobody in the financial industry is accepting a net 16% commission after withdrawal fees because I'm too lazy to figure out how to pay them properly, or too greedy to eat the cost myself to use PayPal for my own convenience. That's the overall problem with Fiverr - short term, forest-for-the-trees mentality that's too busy grabbing for extra pennies to see the big picture that's best for everyone to create a "professional environment." I mean if you're going to take the easy way out, that's the easy way. Alternatively, if you're serious about being a platform for professionals, figure out how to pay them directly and properly. This middle ground, hobbled-together, multiple third party payment methods with no free option get your money is baby stuff. Well, that was far more typing and a much bigger deal than I planned to make of this. It was supposed to just be the first paragraph, but there you have it. I am uncontrollably annoyed by the stupid little things. Oops. 😄

Sorry, is this a quote from Fiverr or did you write this?

I stopped paying attention to whether or not it said waiting for a reply because I figure even if they don't flag it the timing of my reply still might count in my "average response time." Mine's under an hour from instant replies in longer conversations. Now it's just habit. They used to have it in our stats, so I assumed it mattered there. But either way I figure it can't hurt for marketing. My nearest competitor's average reply time is 4 hours and I've had a couple buyers mention they picked me because they hoped they wouldn't have to wait long (like they just wanted an answer on depreciation while they were in the middle of doing their taxes or something). I figured it's worth keeping it up.

Hahahahaha. I am so tired of finding new ways to say "Thank you!" and "My pleasure." so I have the last word in every conversation. I think it makes me look like some kind of narcissist in some of those chats. "Thank you!" "Oh and thank you too." "It's been great." "My pleasure." "Ok see you next time." "Ok." " 🙂 " " 🙂 " I had one lady who did pretty much that for a long time, so I finally had to tell her "We can do this all day if you want, but Fiverr dings my reply rating if I don't reply last. So, I'm gonna have the last word no matter how long this goes! 😄 " She laughed but then she said "You seriously have to reply to every single message, even just a final thank you or these smilies? That's ridiculous." Yes. Yes it is.

I didn't want to offer it as anything definitive, but since all this started if I have a delivered order waiting for acceptance or feedback, I get no more inbox inquiries. I can get three or four people a day sending me messages via inbox proving I'm visible, and the minute I deliver an order it all stops. My last order the guy didn't even accept the delivery, no feedback. I haven't had an inquiry since then. Six days. The guy just kept chatting with me via inbox after delivery, since that order page is such a pain in the rear to message on. He was happy enough, but never indicated that by accepting delivery and rating. So, here I sit. Now mind you, I am a lowly level 1 at this point. Perhaps if I were level 2 again it wouldn't. I have no idea. But it's happened exactly this way on every order since the new system went in. If a delivery or feedback is pending, zippo.

Well that explains it then. Thanks!