donnovan86

Level 2 sellers have 10 gigs starting today. They used to have 20. So.. it's even worse.

Well I am in that boat, I have over 11k reviews on my main gig and 17k on my profile, yet it's still 1k+ for Fiverr. Of course, people see the difference when they open that gig's page, but most people don't click.. Clearly newer services have a major advantage. I don't think it's either of those. It's just encouraging sellers to create new gigs all the time, at least in my opinion. Do you think they will ever change that? I don't think so. I think they are doing this in an effort to help everyone have a fair shot. But if you already have 1000+ orders/reviews, do you really need help? 🙂

True but then again, it will only help so much. At some point, you will feel the downside just like everyone else. And even there, it seems they just cover the past 2 years, so if you have been here for 5, 10 years or more, it's not like you will have a huge advantage.

And there you go. That's why some people have a very low score, despite having tons of great public reviews. It's unfortunate because those automatically-fulfilled or even publicly reviewed orders without a private review should automatically have a positive private review. But they don't. And if no one leaves a private review, but someone that left a bad public review did, then obviously that brings severe damage. I can say it from my own experience, between March and July or so last year I had my worst possible tenure here on Fiverr. And I had only positive, in fact only 5 star reviews. Yet my success manager said that I had multiple bad private reviews, which made no sense. Aside from some people not leaving reviews, some of them leave those private reviews randomly too. And it took a long time to step away from that lack of orders, I was lucky I had return clients.

https://events.fiverr.com/whatitmeanstobetrs It's a webinar about what it means to be TRS, how you can get there, what criteria Fiverr has when it comes to choosing a TRS, etc. At least that's what I think OP is talking about, as I only received an invitation to the TRS one. Well, I don't think there will be more info shared other than what's already available, so it seems like a skippable one.

To be honest, pretty sure nothing will change on the 14th when this goes live. They are testing a thing that I've seen in my Chrome for quite a bit, and that's scores with double digits, for example here's how yours looks. Hard to say if they will go ahead with this, but they might. And I saw on the forum others were saying about various different tests. At this point, I have no idea what they will end up with. But if they want everyone to not have 5.0 scores anymore, I guess this double digit approach will do the job 🙂

Well the thing is, I've been fortunate enough to have my gigs seen as Recommended when it comes to Promoted gigs. So, based on what Fiverr says, my promoted gigs have a higher chance of surpassing competitors. But in general, I couldn't care less about Promoted Gigs myself, I always kept it on as an extra source of orders and for me it works that way. I have multiple return clients that I found via promoted gigs so.. Since it's highly connected to the gig performance or success score, I can see why it might not work for some people. Even in my case, when I had very few orders, it's not like promoted gigs was doing good. So in general, if your gig is doing well, promoted gigs will do well too. However, I actually have a spending limit and in general, I am fine with it. I heard about people spending $50 for a single order, others get orders with under $1 spent, so it certainly depends on competition and niche. Ahhh yes, the big bucks 🙂

It might be worse, because some people don't leave a public review, but they might leave a bad private review. Also a bad private review weighs more because a lot of people don't even leave private reviews in the first place.

Did they send an email saying why you were flagged? As far as I know, if an account is flagged, then they will study the situation and make a decision. From what was said on the forum, the decision is final. So, Will the flagged status ever be lifted or expire? - they will check the account and come back with a decision, if it was a mistake your account is restored, if not, most likely it will be banned. Can flagged accounts run promoted gigs? - considering the account was flagged from breaking the rules, it's safe to say that you can't run promoted gigs, because the gigs are stopped. Of course, I am just talking from my experience and knowledge. Only Fiverr staff can confirm this.

The problem is that those people with 4 star reviews, but also some with 5 stars might have given you a bad private review. And since many repeat buyers don't bother leaving a review... if you have a single or even 2 bad private reviews... then that can destroy your gig, obviously. And I will say for a fact, my success manager told me that even if public reviews are perfect, privately some people still rate you poorly. I had that happen last year, when I had only 5 stars, but the success manager said that I also had plenty of private reviews, from the same people. The thing is, we don't know what people rate us privately. And that is a major factor for the success score.

Well for promotions you'll have varied results. In my case, generally I have a 10x return from promotions, so I am happy with that. Others spend a lot and don't get any order. So it's more about the luck of the draw there I guess. But there are people that only rely on Promoted Gigs to generate sales, I know a couple myself.

I see you had a 3 star review recently and that might have come with a bad private review as well, in fact most likely. That certainly plummets sales especially for someone that has a low sales volume. So I don't think that in your case it has to do with the review system, it's more due to that customer most likely leaving a bad review privately.

Sure, 14th, 15th... I don't think it would make a difference. If they are/will be making any changes, then those are already set in stone. I don't know why I was thinking 15th, maybe because I connected it in my mind to mid-March. I am very curious if there are any changes being made. I think the customer-support-made cancellation issue needs to be solved, that is a platform-wide issue. But other than that, do you see any other changes being made? I don't think so.

Customer support can. Maybe they send you an email or a link to join, who knows. Or it might take a bit until it's accessible.

There are responses from Fiverr, there were topics made by them on the topic and they did reply to some questions. There are still a lot of questions and things that didn't and most likely won't get a response. The thing is, the system is still in beta, the new level system is supposed to launch on Friday if I am not mistaken. So, hopefully until then, they can still iron out some things. But it won't be perfect, and obviously not everyone will be satisfied. That has been the case with every Fiverr change, and will continue to be in the future. My issue is with cancellations affecting the success score, even if they are not made by the seller. And that was the case even before I had a buyer place an order, receive their work, ask for a revision without any clear details, and then after me sending multiple messages to come up with stuff to be changed or trying to read minds and revise, I received a reply from the person 3 days later, just to have customer support cancel the order 10 minutes after he replied. Obviously he went to customer support the same day and asked for a refund, but also thought I can modify and he can use the stuff for free. The worst part is, the buyer can still review you, even if you never accepted the cancellation.

I mean, it had to. Otherwise everyone would still have 5 stars. My problem is with people randomly leaving reviews, and while the review interface can be deceiving, I had people that particularly said they made a mistake when placing stars, and there was nothing wrong. I've been here for a decade and honestly in my case, the new level system doesn't seem too bad, at least since its implementation. I just hope they solve the customer support cancellation bug. The problem is.. I am not sure how they can do that, because some CS cancellations are valid and the seller was at fault. I don't think they will just forgive the seller and not have it penalized. But how can you train AI to understand that? Because they won't manually address these things. I just think they might be finding a way to address this going forward.. but for older stuff, I don't know.

Customer support won't get involved and they expect you to cancel the order amiably with the person in question. You should tell them that unfortunately you can't do the job they want, and they should try to find someone else. Apologize for any issue or miscommunication, and share the refund again. There is a transaction, you have an open order...

Upwork also tracks performance for the past 2 years, just saying 😄 It's been doing that for a while...

To be honest.. my main gig sees success. The others barely have an order or so from PG. Even if they have the recommended tag. So it's also buyer preference, niche being too crowded, etc.

I guess there are factors like pricing or how much you allocate per click.. In my case, just for the first week of March, I had a roughly 16x return on what I paid. I do have this under all my promoted gigs though. So I guess when you have that Recommended tag, they push your gig more. So I can only assume they use private reviews and other metrics to determine that, maybe they compare with other gigs in your niche. For me, Promoted Gigs seems to work fine, I don't rely on it, but it's definitely a nice addition and it has brought me some new, return clients since its inception. I always left it active, but had a limited CPC cap. Now I have it on Auto, which means it does spend more than it did, but the return is also better.

I saw a lot of people received that notification/email. I didn't. But I am already promoting a few gigs, not all though.

It seems you misunderstand me. YES, they include that in the success score. Can you actually see the negative private reviews and learn from them. No. And that's the problem. They always remain private, and you can't learn anything from them. Even if they are included in the success score, you won't really know it's due to them. The success score can change from many different things. They need to let us know what went wrong and why we have that bad private review, if there is one. But it will always remain private. It always affected our ranking anyway, now we just see the success score, which was previously the buyer satisfaction rate, and only success managers could see it. I was very adamant on the forum last year that Fiverr should let us see the buyer satisfaction rate, at least a number, so we have an idea where we are and how these private reviews affect us. And you can imagine I was quite happy to see that at least we have such a metric with this new level system. But... it came at a cost, with new rules and AI governing the entire process, which leads to unwanted demotions and other problems, as you can see.

I think I understood correctly. The private reviews will not be made public. Sure, they will include them in the success score, but you can't see what people are rating you privately. And I doubt that's going to change. Which is what a lot of people have trouble with, how can you improve something you don't know you did wrong.

It would be great to see it, I agree. Reality: most likely it won't happen, since Fiverr assures buyers we won't be able to see that rating they leave, and that it's completely private. So.. I really doubt they will change that, unless they remove private ratings and make everything public.

I mean the buyer ratings. Like these That's what matters to me and it's enough to see if a buyer tends to rate people poorly, that's a huge red flag for me.