visualstudios

That doesn't matter. It's not enforced. CS themselves will tell you they can't force a buyer to accept an order. This is fact. Doesn't matter what TOS say. Sure, you can decline the cancelation, buyer will insist, it will go on for a while. Best case scenario, the order will be open forever, under revision. Worst case scenario, CS will eventually cave in and cancel. Or the buyer will chargeback and that will be that.

That's bad, but there's even worse. In that case, at least theoretically, you can do it for free anyway if the cancelation (and now bad review) would screw you too much. What in the case where they ask for something you just aren't qualified to do? If they ask for the impossible? What then? You have absolutely no choice. Nothing you can do. "Hey, can you edit my video? I just need you to cut the pauses, and put a lower third, and improve the audio a bit" You do it and deliver. "Please revise, the actor should be looking at the camera and smiling, what you sent has him reading from the teleprompter and frowning. Ah, and he moves out of frame here and there, I want him in frame all the time. If you can't do it, I have to cancel, this doesn't work". I'm not Gandalf. I can't do magic. And, unlike certain sellers out there, I never claimed I can. What then?

That's not the issue, actually - they can only leave a bad review if the order has a delivery (or is late, etc.). So, for that kind of buyer, just cancel without delivering anything, since you don't even know what to deliver. The real issue is malicious buyers, or buyers who ask for X and when they get X, they say they actually wanted Y. Then what do you do? Either you revise for Y, at your own cost, get them to pay for Y (which they may well refuse), or Y is something you don't offer in the first place. If you don't offer what they actually want (because that's not what they requested initially), the only option is to cancel, you had zero fault, and you get screwed in the review. @newsmike Think of it like this. A buyer orders a voice over from you. He gets it. He then comes back and says "ah, I actually want a female V/O". You can't do that, obviously. It's not something you can offer, even if you wanted to. He refuses to accept the order. You can't make him close it, so he will eventually be able to cancel and leave a review (or you can try to keep the order in limbo, in revision for ever, I guess). Now, this may sound ridiculous to you, but I assure you this happens. Probably not so much in the V/O field, but there are fields of work where this happens quite often, because they aren't as clear cut. Now imagine you have a bad luck streak, and you get a couple of these buyers back to back. It's not your fault. They don't read your gig, they order, you deliver, they want a woman instead. They didn't read your gig, even though they said they did. Or they are lying. Doesn't matter. You're getting screwed. You could have done nothing differently. Is it common? Yeah, sure, it's not. Is it possible? Of course it is. And it shouldn't be. You can say you don't care, and you'll take the 1 star review, you have thousands of reviews per month, it doesn't matter. But what about the guy that has only 10 reviews (as I also did, and you also did at some time, we all start from zero), that is just as professional and as good as us, but has just been at it here for less time. He's screwed. That should never happen. If the buyer ordered X and got X, under no circumstances should he be able to cancel and leave a review because he wanted Y instead. Makes no sense.

Exactly. And since you delivered, under the new rules, it's not one of the exceptions. He would be entitled to a cancelation (yes, you can refuse, but since you can't force the order to close, eventually it would be canceled, you can't make him accept), and he would be allowed to leave a review. That doesn't make any sense. But hey, in this particular case, you could theoretically have done something - refuse to start working until he sent you all the information, and agreed to everything, and don't deliver until you had that in writing. The issue is, even if you did that, he could give you all the info, and just say "This is not what I wanted" after you delivered. Doesn't matter if he's lying. Fiverr wouldn't check. CS would never say "yes, you delivered according to what was agreed, so buyer can't cancel". They have never done that. They never will. So the client, according to the new rules, would still be able to cancel and leave the review. Whereas before he would still be able to cancel, sure, but at least you wouldn't be further penalised.

They could easily accomplish that by making the rule "Orders that are canceled due to being late and/or sellers being unresponsive can get reviewed". They didn't do that. So no, that's not what the measure "clearly" is aimed at. Oh, and btw, if that's what they did, you would have nobody complaining here. No serious seller is gonna have issues with late deliveries / orders where the seller ghosts getting canceled and buyers leaving a review. It's the rest of the rule that is the problem - namely that a buyer can cancel for "not liking it", and leave a review. That is obviously highly exploitable.

Then the reason for order cancelation / review is it being late, unresponsiveness is irrelevant. The fact that they say "late order" and "unresponsiveness" are two different reasons, clearly means that something can be canceled and reviewed due to "unresponsiveness" without being late. What does that mean, exactly. Don't respond to a buyer message within X hours = unresponsive and grounds for cancelation and review? If so, what's X? This must be clear.

Outside the platform I don't need to spend time arguing. They pay upfront. They can argue all by themselves if they want, after they paid me.

No, I mean things much MUCH more subtle than that. Things that I would have no issue working with if I was outside of a platform. That's the problem. The more pressure the platform puts on us, and the less recourse we have, the more paranoid we become. That's just how it is. "This person doesn't sound... nice, even if they said nothing wrong... maybe it's too risky."

We don't know what this means. What's the definition of unresponsive? This does nothing. A buyer wanting to screw over the competition just needs to have a friend make an account, buy something for $5 (so they are not a new buyer any longer) and then nuke their competitors.

I'm also in the video editing field, and I'm able to have no cancelations. How? I'm extremely demanding with my clients. Any red flag - I won't work with them. Is this ideal, in terms of maximising profits? No, I turn down many projects that probably would be fine. But I just can't risk it, due to the way things work. I have to be suspicious of every contact I get. I don't like it to be like that, but it just is.

Well, I didn't get that e-mail. Which begs the question, why do some people get it and others don't? Shouldn't it be equally accessible to everyone? Either way - I see this as an absolute win for the "request to order feature". If you don't have that turned on, you can't vet buyers, and you can't cancel unreasonable people after the fact without getting hit with a review (because they'll say it was not "by mistake").

Yeah, I have this bad habit of getting more ideas after posting lol

Has it? Where? Not necessarily. If you're a high ticket, low volume seller, this impacts you disproportionately. If you sell 1 order a month for $10k, you're in the top 1% of sellers, and yet 1 cancelation screws you.

Yes, but as the store owner it's up to me to refund them or not at MY SOLE DISCRETION. I'll still get paid for my work if I choose to. If we're talking about a product, it makes no difference, I refund, I get the product back, I sell it to someone else. I lost nothing. If It's a service, I did the work, that's it. It has to be paid. That's a key difference. Go to a lawyer, or a psychologist, or a doctor, have a consultation, say "I'm not happy with the service, I don't want to pay" and see if they give you your money back. Lol. You pay for the service, and if you don't like it, you leave the review you want. That's how it works. Also, their yelp review won't tank my business like it can on Fiverr. I won't get a level demotion. Etc. Doesn't matter if it's rare. As I said, didn't happen to me once in over a year. It's still not acceptable design for a system. What Fiverr should do in this case is have arbitration - someone going over the order and the communication, who actually knows something about the field of work, and evaluating if the cancelation is warranted or not. If the service was rendered as described or not. And only cancel based on that. That's fair.

Yep, that's exactly the problem. The quality of buyers on this platform is, unfortunately, not that great. Unreasonable people can't be dealt with. I really dislike this change, and for a very simple reason - if I do work and it's canceled, I make $0 for my efforts. That's already unfair. That on top of it I can get a bad review is just... wrong, sorry. And btw, I have had ZERO cancelations in the past year. I think very few sellers around here can say the same. So no, I'm not "gaming the system". That's not the point. It's a matter of principle. If you don't pay, you're not a client. If you're not a client, you don't get to leave a review. Can sellers use the system to cancel problematic orders and not get a review? Sure, and then they get hit on the order completion metric and be demoted anyway. And that's bad, yeah. Can buyers have someone work for free by canceling (claiming "I didn't like it", which is obviously subjective), and now leave them a bad review on top of that? Apparently yes, and that is much worse. However: If we got fair cancelation policies, and a buyer couldn't cancel an order when the seller delivered what was agreed, then I would have no problem with this. A seller is scamming people, gets their order canceled and a bad review on top? Yes, that will improve the platform - no issues. A seller claims to do X but does Y instead, and cancels to avoid a review? Sure, makes sense not to allow that. A seller fails deadlines, delivers late, and then cancels? Yes, they should still be reviewed. But what about other cases, where the seller does nothing wrong, and the client wants to cancel? This also happens. A buyer can always cancel, if they push it far enough, even if the seller did the actual work. A buyer can always say "I didn't like it", and Fiverr won't force them to accept the order, even if it was according to spec. A seller can never force an order to complete. This is the real problem. Conclusion: What this change will do is that me (and most serious sellers) will be even more strict with the clients they accept. Any red flag at all will mean too big of a risk to work with, since I can't cancel if they turn out to be unreasonable. So those clients will be turned down, and only sellers that just want to make any sale at any cost will be willing to take them - and sellers like that won't be any good. This will be worse for the experience in the platform.

This is a very bad idea. How gets to decide what's eligible for a cancelation, then? Step 1- order something Step 2- get it Step 3- request cancelation and say you are not satisfied. Step 4 - if the seller gives you push back on the cancelation, you can threaten with the review. If they don't, you can give them a bad review anyway, just cause you feel like it. Step 5- profit.

Ahah, no. Not even close. https://www.farandwide.com/s/hardest-languages-learn-c25c2cdffbd247e0 English is very simple as languages go. Very simple and consistent grammar. Simple alphabet. Etc.

Phonetics are one thing, how something is written / read is another. All those sounds are easy to say. Now, as for the relationship between how something is read and how it's written: Eau being pronounced O is normal. Same exact pronunciation in French. TT being pronounced T, also obvious. (it's gazette, not gazett, so TTE is not pronounced T, TT is pronounced T). Eigh being pronounced A is one of those English things, yeah, but when "eight" also has that sound, and it's such a basic word everyone learns it right away, it's trivial for any learner. Phthisis is a very obscure word, and phth being read as T is weird, I'll give you that, but that will never come up organically in every day conversation. I can't think of a single word with that combination of letters outside of technical words (medicine, etc.). So we have the GH situation, pretty much. That one is common, and changed how it's read depending on where it's placed in the word.

Yeah, words ending in e are half masculine and half feminine in portuguese. A árvore, o bosque. Rule? What rule? You just kinda... know lol

Yeah, dearth is pretty rare. Also, not latin based, so that's one I'd actually think is particularly difficult. The bigger ones are usually latin based, therefore easier. Give me "esoteric" (latin based) over "dearth" any day of the week lol.

Yeah, I find it advantageous in a way to learn English as a second language if you come from a latin based language, since you'll get a ton of vocabulary for free - half the words are the same, and often they are the "big words", the intelectual stuff. What sounds posh to Americans, will be just the normal word in your language. In portuguese there is no "watch", but there is "observe", for example - and this applies to a ton of words. English has a ton of these pairs, one with an anglosaxon root, and one with a latin root, and the latin word tends to be less used in every day conversation by native speakers, therefore sounds fancier. Of course you'll always be at a disadvantage in terms of accent and general fluidity for small talk, but it's not hard to beat most native speakers in terms of "number of words known".

Hmm, did I mean to say exactly as precise, or precisely as exact? See, you can do this kind of thing in English. So nice.

Yes, homophones. All romance languages also have them (and I assume pretty much every language). That's easy, they sound different. Homonyms are where it's at, where it's spelled the same and they sound the same as well. That's the real challenge. Nah, it's still easy - context is everything.

Every language has that to an extent. I find English very precise, actually. The structure is simple, but the vocabulary is extensive, since it gets all the latin vocabulary plus all the anglosaxon. I can be exactly as precise as I want in English.

Hmm, that's weird. In portuguese no masculine word would be preceded by "a". The best part is that the latin languages aren't even coherent among themselves. "tree" is feminine in portuguese, and masculine in Spanish. And both make perfect sense, btw, it has to do with the way the word is written in both.