donnovan86

Well, just like reviews for canceled orders, the majority is a victim due to a smaller groups stupidity, I would say. People manipulated orders and canceled just to curate reviews. Here some abused the system because they could and look at what happened. It could also be a sign that Fiverr's CS team is smaller and some people got fired due to budget cuts, who knows.

Great ideas. Will they be implemented? Probably not, and that's a shame. Because people need to know when we delivered exactly, if it was much earlier, etc. I had a person tell me I delivered late, even if I sent the order 5 hours in advance. That's because they ended up seeing the delivery half a day after delivery and assumed that's when I delivered....

I agree. It's the same when sellers ask a buyer for their review. It can easily backfire. It also came out of nowhere, they could have timed it better, after a platform update or something.

There is no double standard. Even if you follow Fiverr's practices, you are allowed to ask for a review. You are not allowed to ask for a 5 star review or a specific number of stars. They did the same here, they encourage you to leave a review. They don't say what review to leave them, nor are you forced to leave one.

Hmm, interesting. In my experience, I didn't encounter any issue. Strange that CS didn't help you, though.

Clearly the solution was added because a lot of people were making nonsense requests that are usually solved via the Help section within Fiverr. They wasted a lot of customer support time, so now we have to go through this bot and waste time... all of us. At least we know who to thank.... So yeah, clearly this is a solution for Fiverr to relieve some of the pressure their customer support team has, while shortening their response time. In various cases, we had to wait a day or multiple days for a reply, I can only imagine things are quicker now.

They don't. There is Fiverr staff here, but not support people. Contact them directly. As for your issue, maybe you used Promoted Gigs last month, be it accidentally or not and you forgot about it. I've been using the service since the begginning and it's rather transparent on how your funds are used...

I think I told you 5 times now that Fiverr only tracks the last 2 years. Average reviews change because of that, even if you have a ton of reviews, if you're slacking, it will damage your reputation. Obviously you just care about your situation now which is understandable, and fail to see the larger picture. Everyone is affected by a bad review. Talk to them, ask them what was wrong and learn from that. Don't mention the number of stars because it will get you banned eventually for review manipulation. It was already talked about countless times and nothing was changed. Nor should it be changed, because why would new gigs or sellers have any protection when older sellers don't? It's very important for the platform to maintain equality and not be very biased one way or another. So objectively, I don't see them changing anything about this anytime soon. I would even venture to say that they wanted buyers to leave more reviews under 5 stars, they even allow canceled orders to be reviewed now. So when a new search engine enters the market, Google has to offer them a certain market share? Is that what you want? That's not how real business works. If you want to stand out, you need to show you're the best of the best in what you do. Delete gigs that have just a few reviews and which you think won't have good performance. Most successful sellers had dozens of gigs over the years, we experiment, we see what happens and go from there. I deleted many gigs with 10 or even 100 reviews because the demand was not there anymore, or like you, I had people rating that gig randomly with 3.0 reviews saying very good work, thank you. It's not like this is a new issue or anything, it's been the same for a decade since I've been here. There will always be people that leave random reviews and there's nothing you can really do about that. Do you really think Fiverr will delete those reviews and replace them with 5.0? They won't. And they won't offer a different review average calculation for other gigs, either. It would be unfair to anyone else. I am just wasting my time trying to help you and explain. I'll just use my time better elsewhere.

Wait for their reply.

Well, the thing is, people rate the work provided, they can also rate communication, but realistically, you don't need to have a personal connection with each client. Some people will come back, but there are also people that just buy something that's a one-and-done thing. I had people purchase a letter for a specific business idea they wanted to promote, they were happy with it, so they rated it very well. However, I also have people that continue to place orders for over 8 years or more. So in my opinion, it doesn't matter the length of the project. If you deliver great results, I really doubt that buyers will leave a bad review. And in many cases, the 4.3 or 4.7 is justified, there can be a revision, or the buyer wanted things to be a bit faster or the quality could be slightly better. I do agree that there are also people who rate randomly, and the mobile app bug where they leave all 5 stars yet the result still has 4 stars in one of the 3 criteria hasn't been fixed yet. I think a lot of buyers come just to buy something now and they won't continue working with that person because they don't need that type of service anymore. As long as you deliver good work, you shouldn't be worried. Sure, some people might cut a star or two here and there, but for a lot of buyers, written reviews matter. I can say that for certain based on my own experiences with buyers, even during the past few weeks.

Clearly the system was made to stop everyone from having 5 star reviews across the board. And it did, at least some people are affected, and we see more and more 4.8 and 4.9 star reviews on average for gigs, when last year around this time, there were only 5 star reviews across the board. I am sure that was the intention, to have less people with perfect reviews because it's much harder for customers to pick someone.

Even if I am not affected as much by that 20x the order, 1x the deadline problem, it's still there, and staff knows, it was acknowledged on the forum by multiple Fiverr staff members. And it's one of the many issues, like having unlimited revisions provided to customer even if you want to limit them to 3 for example. The system will always allow people to ask for as many revisions as they want, even if you limited the amount of revisions you offer. And as you said, that's just the tip of the iceberg, there are tons and tons of other problems, smaller or more important that were not solved for years now.

I think there was a 50+ page topic on this alone, Fiverr knows the situation, and all that topic did was it encouraged Fiverr to change reviews from emoticons back to stars. As for 4.3 and 4.7, I am sure Fiverr wants that so not everyone has 5 stars. The benefit is, if you barely have a few review, you can start a new gig and you won't lose that much. But with an older gig, that's harder, you actually need a lot of reviews to get back to 5.0.

That's because public reviews you see are very minor to non-important when it comes to ranking. Private reviews, cancellations and a lot of other stuff has way more weight when it comes to ranking. And since Fiverr will never disclose everything taken into account while ranking.. we can only go with the info we have. At least the success score system brought us a score and some details about each gig, what's bad, very bad, etc. Before that, we had 0 info and a gig could drop without even having any idea. At least now we kinda know what's the thing to focus on.

The thing is, you are compared with people within your niche. It doesn't matter if others have thousands of reviews in other niches. What matters is your niche. At least when it comes to ranking. Human perception.. that's up to the buyer obviously. I am not sure what you expect though.. Fiverr to have a system where new sellers will always have a 5 star rating for a few months, where the rating is not lowered even if reviews are not the best from customers? If that's the case, that would be extremely unfair towards people that have been working their ass off for years. I agree some people leave reviews randomly and I've been a victim of that myself, many times. But overall, things iron out eventually when you will have more orders. Fiverr ads don't really matter now because everyone has access to them. So it's pretty much paying for exposure against others that pay for exposure, so it's no different than regular search. Only Fiverr has to gain here, because you pay for more exposure, without any guarantee of getting it. Not sure about you, but my results have been abysymal during the last 2 months or so since everyone had access to the promoted gigs feature. So yeah, I wouldn't rely on that for more orders, at least in my case it's a waste.