donnovan86

Exactly. What happens here is that legit sellers suffer from bad sellers that overpromise and underdeliver, then they throw buyers under the bus and either cancel and waste their time or even take the money and run. Since there were many forum posts from buyers and maybe even more complains to customer support, I can see why Fiverr did this. I am sure they didn't do this to anger sellers, obviously. Everyone has to gain, but then again there will also be unreasonable buyers that are hard to work with and which take advantage of people. If Fiverr has the seller's back in those situations, then hopefully it's ok.

A Fiverr representative said that buyers which also sell here won't be able to leave a review if the order is canceled.

Well as a professional freelancer you should know that yourself. You vet your buyers, see what they want and what you can offer them. Sometimes it's better to say NO instead of taking every order and dealing with "nutso" buyers.

That's the thing, a lot of people either harass buyers to get paid or they offer a cancellation to protect a high rating they have for their gigs. That leads to some buyers missing deadlines and losing way more money. So I am sure many buyers complained to Fiverr, and they are taking action. If you offer great service, there's nothing to worry. Of course there can be times when this might backfire even for the best sellers. But in the end, it will weed out a lot of bad sellers for sure. I am not sure when this new measure starts, most likely Monday or so, which means we are just a few days away from seeing cancellation reviews on the platform. Apparently these cancellations will have their own tag, so people know it's from canceled orders.

It's a manual process. If your gigs impress Fiverr staff, most likely. But keep in mind that there are people who work on the platform for close to 10 years and never became TRS even if they went way behind that $20k treshold.

The main focus I think is to improve buyer experience. Some buyers were left hanging dry, with deadlines and the seller just canceled to stop dealing with the buyer. In that case, I can see this as a good thing since it offers more transparency. Of course everything is prone to abuse. For example, if they stop taking 20% from tips, then buyers would take the smallest offer and promise the remaining stuff as a tip. So yeah, no matter the situation there will be people that abuse every feature. In theory this is a great idea, however it will affect some users. Then again, we will have way less people with a 4.9 and 5.0 score, which I guess is important, because it will differentiate sellers quite a lot more. That also means we need to focus more on quality rather than quantity. I for one focus on raising my prices sooner rather than later.

I am not sure if you guys saw this post, but it does have some new info regarding this and it's coming from Fiverr themselves. I didn't know how to share it with you, so I just quoted 😄

Fiverr's system automatically marks them as spam and disables the accounts.

Why are you quoting stuff that's more than a day old. At that time there was no clarification, it arrived hours after that... Yes, it's only people that are new to Fiverr. That being said, buyers that are also sellers can't leave a review even if they cancel, so that's a positive.

Yeah, unless you come up with something new that people never saw before. Same with Fiverr, everyone copies succesful gigs but you rarely find someone that tries new things.

Don't even get me started on writers.. I had a "writer" that came to me only to insult me because I drag the writing section down. He had tons of grammar mistakes and after insulting me he set up a gig randomly, without meaning, but priced it at $50. That's aside from thousands and thousands of sellers that never wrote anything in their life, but all of a sudden because a random dude on YouTube told them they can earn money via writing on Fiverr, they become experts (and they also copy successful gigs)...

The Seller Plus thing is definitely helpful, I see why they didn't offer that to everyone, so the program has some incentive to make people pay. That being said, it did help me identify some really bad buyers that were leaving bad reviews left and right to people, regardless of the work quality.

It was in the past, I don't think that's the case anymore.

Yesm they confirmed to me yesterday, after those posts.

That text is for sellers "solicit reviews from buyers in exchange for refunds, etc". Some sellers were doing this, and now they won't 🙂

True. But that also leaves room for unscrupulous buyers to abuse the system. They can threaten sellers with a bad review if they don't agree to a lower price, or many other things. After all, if the order is delivered, a buyer can easily write any review they want and that will be permanently on your account. Which is extremely bad, hence the reason a lot of people are unhappy. Sure, bad sellers will suffer, but along with them good sellers will end up affected too.

That's IF the buyer cancels themselves. Once there is a delivery on the order, then a buyer (unless they are a first time buyer to Fiverr) will be able to leave a review on the canceled order.

Fiverr started focusing more on first time buyer reviews. So if someone is new to Fiverr or they buy from you for the first time, their private review weighs a lot more than a regular review. I am with you on this.. since February I've had the worst year on Fiverr. I am sure AI has a role to play here, but even then there are sellers with a dozen or dozens of orders in queue.

Well it does work like that because if you cancel, in 2 months it will be counted out of your stats. Maybe 3 months if we talk about the buyer satisfaction rate. Some sellers prefer to do that instead of getting a bad review that stays there forever. Now they can't escape it. And yes, Fiverr wants to purge this type of people faster. Also, a TON of people have 4.9 reviews on the platform, maybe 4.6+ is the norm. This way Fiverr will actually have much better, more accurate stats..

It's already going to be implemented starting next week, as they said.

Some people are not responsive and they end up delivering random stuff, buyers are unhappy and they don't come back to the platform. Sellers can easily cancel the order to avoid any repercussions, it's like the order never happened. And even the cancellation penalty goes away after a month or two. So yeah, I am certain that Fiverr wants to penalize sellers that barely respond and which try to manipulate the system to avoid getting a bad review. I think that's the whole point.

And they can review you too!

I mean.. I sleep 7-8 hours a night and I always kept the 1 hour response time. I guess it depends on how many messages you receive. Regardless, I think every responsible seller enters Fiverr once a day to see if they have any messages, not to mention they even send you an email. If you reply pretty fast and within a day for everything it should be fine. Even with Spam, I ended up just saying Hi and marking as Spam. It doesn't affect the response rate nor do you have to deal with spammers. I can see how someone that doesn't work solely on Fiverr might have a slightly higher response time but honestly as a buyer, I wouldn't have an issue unless the response time is a day or more. Then you know the person takes at least a day to respond. There are people that expect immediate replies, but those are usually the persons you want to stay away from. I had a person send me 20 messages within the span of 5 minutes, I was delivering something and their last message is that I was not worthy, that level 2 badge requires people to reply immediately. So yeah, there are many different people you can deal with as a seller.

There are some very specific situations when buyers can leave a review. From what I saw, lateness and a lack of responsiveness are the main things that Fiverr wants to tackle here. I will see how this affects me, I assume I should be the most affected, because people with a very low price tend to attract demanding buyers... So yeah, that's why I said time to increase prices 🙂 But even so, you can't be fully protected, because there will always be people that want more than what they paid.

You have 24 hours to reply, I think you are a bit too harsh. I mean, I am happy, I am not a huge fan of this change, but I don't know how much it will affect me, if at all. It will start weeding out some of the bad sellers though, which is a plus. I've been here for a decade at this point and there have always been people that just set up a gig to deliver random stuff and earn money. Then they block the buyer and try to find other people to scam. By the time Fiverr finds out about them, they already made thousands upon thousands. So in some ways, this measure is a good thing. The downside is that it will affect genuine sellers due to things beyond our control, like buyers ordering without consent. I have Seller Plus but didn't include Request to Order until now, but I might at least for some gigs.