visualstudios

You didn't address what the problem is. You analogy fails at a critical point - restaurants don't get to leave reviews for their guests. It's not the same. Again, please address this: If a buyer can change their review because they got a bad review from the seller, what will happen is that every seller will either leave them a 5 star review, or no review at all. This is exactly what will happen. If that's what you want, may as well get rid of buyer reviews entirely, as they will be worthless.

No, I'm the one against the edit button. The buyer edited his review after the fact. If a buyer can change their review because they got a bad review from the seller, what will happen is that every seller will either leave them a 5 star review, or no review at all. This is exactly what will happen. If that's what you want, may as well get rid of buyer reviews entirely, as they will be worthless.

Not what I said. Do you think a buyer should be able to change the review they gave a seller after they see the review the seller gave them? Yes or no.

Man, you need to stop with the bad takes. Was he smart in giving the buyer a 1 star review? No, because of what just happened. But that's the point I've always been making - buyer reviews are useless, precisely because of this. Why do you like transparency for sellers, but not for buyers? This buyer deserved the review they got. He should not be allowed to change his review to punish the seller. That's the whole point of the "secret" review system. What we get by the system being as it is, and doing as you say, is that all buyers have perfect 5 star reviews, because sellers are too scared to give them the review they deserve. Do you agree with that? Is that the "transparency and honesty" you claim to want?

That rule has been in place for years. If they were doing it before, they'll keep doing it.

Of course, but they are a big deal because Fiverr made them a big deal, by setting the threshold at 4.7. It was their choice to do that. Of course that heavily incentivises sellers to do anything within their power to avoid any review other than 5 stars. If you had your reviews be public, but that didn't affect your level, etc. then this wouldn't be as much of an issue. The reviews would actually better serve their purpose - let buyers know what they're buying. Like, if you're a level 2 and have a 4.0 average review, buyers will already largely prefer to buy from the level 2 seller next to you with a 4.9 average. Why do they need to take the level away from you on top of that? If they didn't do that, there would be much less manipulation.

No. I want to suppress false information. If a buyer orders a voice over from you, gets it, then demands it be female, or that you read it in a different voice instead of your own, and gets a cancelation out of it, he shouldn't get to leave a 1 star review. Period. He ordered the wrong thing. I don't understand why you seem to think this only applies to meksells, and misleading sellers. Yes, there are a lot of bad sellers on the platform. But there are also a lot of bad buyers. Both should be eliminated. Yet you only focus on the bad sellers.

We've already established that nobody has an issue with this applying to very late orders.

Refer to my other comment on this. My problem here is the double whammy. You don't get paid for your work on a canceled order. And then you get a bad review on top. That's the issue. On other businesses, the client can leave a bad review unfairly, of course. But on other businesses, the client pays.

Disagree. The main reason people are upset with this is that it allows unreasonable buyers to leave unwarranted reviews on services we don't even offer, or that they didn't order. That's the problem.

This is false. They know about it. We've discussed it extensively, and they said, several times, it is fine. My success manager said is fine (4 success managers, actually). CS says it's fine. Several Fiverr employees higher up on the chain say it's fine. When we were invited to be PRO, they said it was fine. But hey, mr. "strategist_ceo" says, if we are "investigated" and "discovered", it's a violation. Ok.

There's no way to officially set up a studio account. I don't work alone. Fiverr knows this, I've discussed it with my SM, on webinars, zoom discussions with Fiverr staff, etc. We are two people, on one account. No outsource, we work in the same office, side by side. Nothing had to be "authorised". There's no form to fill, no box to check. I'd like for there to be one, actually. But there isn't. And because of that, I need to deal with several downsides: I can't put our real names on the new profile name feature, because it's two names, and the system won't accept that. I can't use the intro video feature, since it has to be a video of one person only, and I don't want to do that either, as we're a team. I'd like to have agent accounts in the messages, to mark conversations so the same person does the follow up with a client, or so that I can see the other is responding to a client, so I don't respond as well and get duplicated messages if one happens to be on the phone app when the other is at the office. I can't have the account under both our names, officially - it has to be under one of us only. I can't do any of those things - it's the way the platform works. So I don't know what you mean by "terminating all unapproved accounts operating as "studios", as there's no approval process. Also, "individual account = one individual" is not a rule. The rule is one individual can't have more than one account. The opposite isn't true.

That all lead to the same outcome if the buyer really wants it. That's the point. It's not helpless, it's factual. You can use whatever strategy you'd like, it doesn't make any difference in the end. The only difference is that before the strategy of just letting it go, meant you lost the money, but wouldn't get harmed by a review at least. Now that strategy is just straight up worse than forcing a chargeback or keeping the order in limbo forever (which are the only possible outcomes of denying cancelations again and again). You have fewer viable options now. Fewer options is always bad.

Nobody said anything about caving in the first 5 minutes. This is about there being no protection, ultimately, not about giving up right away. You can take months instead of 5 minutes, doesn't matter if the end result is you don't get paid. It's worse, actually - you make the same, and you spent your time and effort for nothing.

You can. Then the order will remain in limbo forever. What I'm not sure is if CS can't unilaterally cancel it, eventually. If the buyer keeps insisting, I can see that happening. Otherwise, they'll just chargeback, and it will be canceled anyway. Nothing you can do about that.

You can't make a buyer close an order "by yourself". If they don't click that button, the order won't close.

Then get rid of the unskilled ones. Not the people who are skilled and are starting out on Fiverr. Or the people who are not starting out, but are low volume sellers, that don't sell 100 orders a month.

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."