visualstudios

3 and 4 are not mandatory. 5 is not a thing (in europe at least), paypal is free. 7 idem, also free. 6 is a PITA indeed.

You call yourself an "seo expert". Build your website, get traffic there, and sell to clients directly. You don't need Fiverr. Unless, of course, you can't generate traffic. In which case, nobody should hire you.

I don't have 10k reviews though. For low volume sellers, every review matters. In any case, it's clear buyers are leaving ratings by mistake. When that happens, it's a matter of contacting them and they'll fix them - the thing is, some buyers may not care to do so.

I've had 2 4 star reviews that the clients apologised for, and then changed to 5 star reviews. They were "mistakes". Before the new system, I never had "mistake reviews" in over 600 orders. Take that as you will.

This has already been discussed to death in other threads. Besides, if you want to make a poll, make a poll, no need for that emoji reputation farming trick.

Just do the thought experiment I proposed above. Imagine the buyer fee was 10%. 50%. 100%. Wouldn't that make a difference? Would you still say "it makes no difference to me, since that's for the buyer to take care of at the purchase point?" You can argue that 5% is inconsequential because it's a small number, but I don't see how any seller can argue that buyer fees should not be a consideration at all for sellers, in principle.

I've lost orders due to that difference. Buyer has, say, a 10k budget. I price for 10k. Buyer says "Fiverr is showing me 10,550, why? Can you eat the cost difference and make it 10k"? So yes, in that case I have to care about buyer fees. It's a thing. Besides, it makes a difference since I could be dealing with them directly, and pocket that extra 5% myself. It's just extra incentive to try to get direct deals and invest less on the platform. The buyer fees have to do with me, because they are fees they are paying to work with me. Without me (without sellers), there are no fees to be paid. Also, that impacts value for money, funnily enough. I'm 5,5% more expensive (from the buyer's perspective) than what I price for. How big (or little) that effect is, depends on the buyer. It may be small, sure, but it's never zero.

I didn't forget, it just isn't relevant for me, so I don't think about it. And caring about numbers is not pedantry. It's different to be selling a service to the end user where I make 25,5% less than what they paid versus making 20% less than what they paid. Maybe you don't care about that, but I do.

I hope I made my point clear - Fiverr is taking a mandatory 25,5% of order values, not 20%. Now, the rest of the things, that are actually facultative, they can do whatever they want with that.

Buyer fees are not optional, and as I explained, that's something the buyer is paying for your service. So, in practice, for what matters, all of it after 25,5% is optional. "Taking from the buyer / Taking from the seller" is semantics, they are the same exact thing. As for promoted gigs, seller plus, early withdrawal, cash advance, etc, that I agree with, no issues with take rate there.

It's math. If I'm paying 105 for something and the person doing the work gets 80, they didn't pay 20%, they paid 25%. No way around it. You can agree with that cut, that's another story, but the numbers are what they are.

I'm doing just that. 20% fee is ok for that. More than that? Not really. I'm comfortable charging more than I charge on Fiverr outside. It's not like this is a premium market anyway.

Let me take this to the extreme. I want to make 100 with my work. I price it at $125, due to 20% commission. Fiverr charges a crazy 100% buyer fee, so buyer pays $250. (Doesn't matter what the number is, 5% or 100%, it's the principle that matters). I made my $100. Did I pay a 20% commission? Nope. I paid over 60% commission, because there would be no "buyer fees" paid without me. Am I happy with making $100? No, if somebody (Fiverr) made over $100 from the work. I want the $200 instead. That would be Fiverr making 20% out of my work on a $250 buyer purchase.

You're not thinking this through. The buyer is paying more than I get. That money should come to me. If I want $1000, and charge $1050 to get $1000... buyer is paying $1050. If I was dealing directly, I would get an extra $50, at the same price. In other words, if I pay 20% and buyer pays 5%, I'm the one actually paying 25%. Buyer is paying x for my service, I'm making y, Fiverr is making the difference. That difference is 25%. That's what matters. Otherwise, you could also say that the buyer is the one paying the 25%, and I'm paying 0%, since the buyer is the one who puts the money in. In other words - seller commission and buyer fee are the same thing. Makes no difference what you call it.

That's the wrong way to look at it, Emma. The buyers are paying for the service. If they are ok with paying an extra 5% on top of that price, that means if I was dealing with them directly, outside of a platform, I could charge them 5% more, and keep that difference. Or give them a 5% discount and make the exact same. If seller pays 20% and buyer pays 5%, in practice seller is making 25% less than they could. It's always the seller "paying" for it, in a way. On a 10k order, 5% is $500 the buyer is paying to Fiverr directly. Seller is paying 2k. This is just too much - the bigger the orders get, the less attractive the marketplace becomes. I could just charge 10k outside, make 2k more, and the buyer would save $500 on top. Win-win. Good luck getting big contracts here with that attitude. People with big budgets, and sellers selling for high prices will try as much as possible to do business elsewhere, lots of options that charge much less than 30% (or 25%) to handle transactions. That's fine when you're dealing with $5 and $10 orders. Once the values get big, the cut must get smaller. There absolutely no good reason why the 20% fee shouldn't be more than enough to cover everything. Spend less, Fiverr, how about that?

No, you couldn't, and that's probably why they removed it. Buyers made the requests, sellers applied to them. That a ton of sellers were using the system to request work was the problem.

One of the buyers sent us a message saying they went to CS to get it fixed. The other rating just changed on my end so I have no idea. Our Success Manager told us there was an increase of buyers contacting CS to get their ratings fixed with the new review system, so it's probably CS.

Guess what? My second 4 star review since the new system... was also changed by the client to a 5 star review. And all the things that could improve were, after all, things that went well. This never happened before, in over 6 years I never had clients changing their review, now in less than a month I have two. The system is clearly not working well.

Just wow. I'm absolutely tired of this platform. This is ridiculous, people do not understand the rating system. The boxes make absolutely no sense, they clearly wanted to say the opposite. Everything went perfectly with this order. People assume very good is a good review, they don't get the emoji c**p. 4 stars on communication level can't be correct, for example, it goes against what the review itself says. "Communication was excellent". 4 stars on communication. How could I get 5, then? Do I have to be "better than excellent"?

But you do have to be one to know if it will crash tomorrow or not. So, will it? We need to know!

This is a truly excellent post, one of the best i've seen in these forums. Fiverr should take notes, that is a very fair proposal, that would refresh the rating system while keeping it accurate, truthful and, above all, easy to understand for both buyers and sellers. I see absolutely no drawbacks in your proposed solution. The only reason not to implement it, exactly as stated in your post, is if by design Fiverr wants lower ratings, on purpose, even if that is not how buyers feel.

This is an excellent post. Great analysis, and good suggestions.

Oh, I get that. I'm not punishing anyone either - not leaving a review is not "punishing", imo. Hell, I'd much rather not get reviews now, given the way the system works. But having to click "exceeded expectations", when it didn't, doesn't sit right with me either. Nor does rating people with emojis. The system is just broken and unfair. Besides, If Fiverr sees that the rate of orders with reviews drops precipitously with this new system, maybe they'll wake up to the need to change it. I mean, what's the point of making a review system like this if nobody uses it? That would be even more useful than a "strike" imo.

I've gotten 1 or 2 buyers from them. I've also gotten tens of spammers and scammers, that I was paying for, and Fiverr refused to refund what I paid for those clicks. So no, thanks.

If you don't value yourself, then who will?