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anniejenkinson

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Everything posted by anniejenkinson

  1. That is correct. The only possible correct response. Ask any qualitative or quantitative research agency senior and you will be given the answer carineb has given, which is that there must be options offering strict polarity. The way Fiverr is designing the satisfaction scores is gravely flawed and as such, has introduced a strong bias before the 'survey' even begins. This means buyers have no chance to give an accurate response even if they wish to. Now, it's all mixed up and a nonsense. The second vital element of any well-designed survey is that each respondent comprehends the survey in exactly the same way, i.e. that it cannot be misinterpreted, taking into account linguistic nuances, ethnicity, age, social grade. There are so many variants of the new surveys and the levels that everyone is confused and we are far from all understanding things the same way. The surveys work against both buyers and sellers. It defeats me how such a huge organisation can get aspects as basic as a five-scale survey so fundamentally wrong. Should Fiverr not have the budget to hire the appropriate advisors from research agencies? Ask Ipsos, MORI, Kantar, Market Probe, Gartner, any of those. Ask even a one-man qualitative or quantitative consultant; you'll get the same answer from all of them. None would come up with satisfaction surveys offering rating scales like Fiverr's unless they had all been on an all-weekend drinking session and were having a laugh. These satisfaction surveys would make them feel profoundly irritated. These are the very low-level basics we learn in the first weeks of being trainee qual or quant researchers. If Fiverr is not even getting the low-level basics correct, what the (insert rude word of choice) are they doing to everything else behind the scenes? It's risible.
  2. A good point. Buyers are usually horrified when they see I end up with only 75% of my stated fee, and a few are insulted that they think *I* add buyer fees on top; they don't even understand how the fees side of things works. Fiverr, be transparent and show the buyers exactly how much a seller will receive because it's way off what the buyers think we receive. The exchange rate 'or something' (who knows what?) takes way more than the site even says to me it will at the point of drawing down earnings. I get shown a certain figure in GBP for my Fiverr balance, when when I draw it down, it's always 5-10% less on top of the 20% fee. The site is one colossal black hole, leaving me guessing how the heck it works or even IF it works.
  3. I agree. I am also a major shareholder and selling my stock. Moreover, a friend owns a huge value in Fiverr stock and she is selling suddenly, definitely not to free up funds as she has several million to invest from the sale of a large UK law firm. I don't know what has prompted her decision as we haven't discussed this change but I wonder if this discontent has been in any magazines/news. I can't imagine why she would do it otherwise but I haven't asked; I have my own concerns to think about!
  4. I'd love to know where, in all the stats, 'order value per annum' is factored in. Does this have any weighting whatsoever? How much a person earns on Fiverr is a massive indicator of 'success' in any commercial context. It speaks for itself when someone starts on $5 and a few years later is taking more than $100k a year. It's extremely hard to argue that these sellers are doing it all appallingly wrong. In fact, Fiverr says so many of those sellers obviously have no clue what they're doing! Obviously, I have earned $330k and been terribly unsuccessful. In that case, why bother? If they (we) were doing it all wrong, the clients would not be investing at this high level. It is indeed going to be fun and games when business buyers come here and see their favorite, best providers so bizarrely downgraded. I think they'll decide the site has no clue what it is doing in performance analytics.
  5. This is apparently a system on which the top earners must be doing the worst jobs, Katherina! I don't think they employ any senior statisticians, just a bunch of young folks programming AI to do the jobs that ought to be done by humans, and AI carries bias due to poor abilities to determine 'human factors'. Any business consultant knows this. There's no way this flawed ststem has been achieved based on carefully constructed bases; the design is based on inconsistency and a lack of insight. It seems to me to be an impossibility and a gross contradiction in terms that people like you, who have earned high, are the low performers. In any other field, those businesses that earn most tend to be seen as successful. Here, we crawl on the ground to be trodden on and insulted. In five years here, not once has anyone from Fiverr sent out a brand image and performance survey to top sellers; if they did, the results would be shocking.
  6. Totally agree with every word. This is a shambles. I just sent this to my SM! I have to correct the long email I sent to you after your reply. I think you can see in it the effect of not sleeping since these metrics broke, because the email was in two parts I did not manage to bring together due to exhaustion. The email reads better as: Hi, With respect, I feel your reply has missed the key points I am making which is that only two areas are flagged and both of these, I perceive, are Fiverr glitches. I know you do mention no-fault cancellations being something Fiverr is looking at but I am distressed that you're asserting I can 'make improvements' myself to either of those metrics. How? I do not cancel out of desire; clients make booking errors. And I communicate fast and in depth each time I see an incoming message, but Fiverr doesn't send notifications to tell me new messages have come to the Dashboard. ISSUE 1. Communications - I get no notifications when new messages come to the Orders Dashboard, and you know this. This has gone on for over a year and I made a specific effort to contact you and clarify it. I told you of the problem with this a few months back when I received that odd email from Fiverr saying I needed to improve communication and you said, there is nothing showing any issues about communication in my stats. I had 'nothing to worry about', you said, 'it must be a mistake'. I asked several times on this and said, well, I sure hope it IS a mistake as I have a feeling this will come back and revisit me, and Fiverr won't have done anything. I could seek out and send to you screenshots from months ago where I have been asking clients to please not just message the job dash because if they do, I won't know. Indeed, I have sent you six comms threads in which I and clients discussed our lack of system notifications for new messages. But it applies on every job; no job produces any dashboard notifications. You asked for a report; I provided it. You flagged it to 'the relevant team' and nothing has improved. Many sellers have the same issue, see attached. I do not believe I have any other communications problems but the effect of this one major flaw should be self-evident, and now it's being passed on to me, like passing the buck, a metric I can do nothing about. It seems clear that if I do not know there are messages, I cannot go opening every job in the dash once an hour, can I, just to see if there happens to be a message? If i did that, I'd have no work time. How can I 'improve' what is a Fiverr glitch? I used to get notifications until about a year ago, and they simply stopped. There's also no visual dropdown anymore in the dashboard, saying that 'X has been waiting for a reply'. I have been telling clients for over a year that if they message only in the orders dash, I will not know until I happen to open the job file. They often respond that they also get none and are left guessing. Some get no notification even when I make a final job delivery. 2. Cancellations: I do not cancel on clients because I wish to. Cancellations are caused by client booking errors, and in each case, customer support took action after the cancellation to rectify the OCR. I have, as have all sellers, been told that these do not affect our stats at all. Now, they have done. How can I improve on cancellations when these are non-fault? I am utterly perplexed, still, and suffering an inability to focus, sleep, and work because of the stress this 'transparent' system causes. The fact is I have no control over either of the above points; Fiverr needs to fix its own internal mess-ups and adhere to its promises, and not take the effects out on sellers who work as hard as I do; I even answer clients at 3am, daily, I am that dedicated. I work around the clock for them. This is like airlines cancelling flights, and then telling me I need to do better to get to destinations on time. There is also the fact that any changes effected do not have an immediate visual effect on the success score, ie, we cannot see if what we are doing has any effect at all since the metric won't change daily. Given 30 days to alter something I believe comes about due to Fiverr's system and not me, even if I take on 100 new jobs and complete them in a month (impossible to do more jobs as they are high value tasks requiring weeks each) then I still cannot see if anything has changed until after it is too late. How, specifically, can I change this when it's 'stab in the dark', when I am operating against two major Fiverr issues, when there's a ridiculously short timeframe (stats don't change that fast on jobs of $3k each as I can only complete two between now and the review) and there are Fiverr discrepancies on both issues? To put pressure on vendors to 'improve' within 30 days, then a daily, constantly changing metric should be given, changing fast according to alterations we make. We should make a change and then see an immediate effect, thus knowing if what we are doing is the correct thing. It is just impossible to do more on metrics outside my control, and the system has caused so much feeling of being blindsided that this shows how badly it's been introduced and researched. I never saw this mayhem and lack of transparency in 25+ years of being a corporate strategist for Bernstein Research Inc, and there, I was hire to look at corporate miscommunications and bad, clumsy roll-outs across the globe. I've never seen any company go from 'Hey, you are doing great! Keep it up! All your metrics are 100%!' one day to, 'we will remove your TRS status in 30 days if you do not correct our own colossal mismanagement and miscalculations mess.' I am now not taking new orders out of cold fear and misery, and have about 10k of orders for which I have not sent the Custom Offers. i don't see a point when the system is so unpredictable and unfairly weighted, and staffed by AI-driven cut-and-pasters. Humans, board member inputs and far better stats, put in place by statistical agencies and consultants, not AI data scrapings, are needed. As for communications also, I send clients massive long messages helping them to do just about everything; if I added up my advice, it would come to reams per most clients. My messages are in great depth and address every single thing they ask. They send me a short question and I give them my full knowledge to ensure they have all the detail and help, and I am paid for none of that. So, I may lose TRS based on two Fiverr glitches? Fiverr is relying on the unreliable systems it has put in place through misguidance. Best, Annie
  7. Except that for many of us, the notifications system is long since malfunctioning . It has been failing to send me Order Dashboard new message notifications for more than a year and I have so many orders, it's impossible to check manually every day as I'd have to open every job just to see if 'by chance' I have a message. So I and the other sellers who get no notifications (despite all settings ticked, to ask for notifications) would be punished for yet another Fiverr glitch thay're failing to rectify. Love the other thoughts though! Full thumbs up!
  8. Bravo, @emmatopping. Same. A system should never, ever, leave so many senior, experienced people feeling blindsided, upset and confused. Especially not a system boasting about its transparency! To make this live is disastrous when we have so little comprehension of it. Nobody should be 'top performing' one day, and then the next day, they hear of performance issues and are given 30 days to address something they're hearing for the first time, despite regular check-ins on stats. It feels as though Fiverr is implementing increasingly shaky, inexperienced and ill-conceived decisions, often rushed through to implementation at our expense. I feel very vulnerable here. A general brand survey has never come my way in the 5 years of being here, yet most progressive large firms do one when major changes are introduced (before and after). A site-wide survey, quantitative but with a second-stage smaller qual element to underpin trends in views, would pinpoint who among the sellers, cross-tabulated by sector, level, earnings and time since joining site, feels scared, vulnerable, ill-informed, confused, unfairly treated and so on, also showing the shifts in feelings according to each measure. A quant questionnaire really ought to be distributed as a startpoint to get a full measure of at least 15% of active sellers.
  9. I'd honestly risk the war; Fiverr feels like a greater risk to my wellbeing just now. My partner is a bodyguard and EOD expert so he can get good body armor for us all and a 'fixer' to get us from A to B!
  10. You may be kidding but tbh., I did think of flying to Tel Aviv! Where should we meet? And the other serious point here is that we are operating 'blind' within this 'transparent system', attempting to make changes without any availability of immediate data on the outcomes. If I now take on and complete 20 low-value jobs in the one gig that's supposedly got a cancellations issue, I cannot see whether this (or any other step) has an immediate effect or not. That's because I do believe the success score thingy does not immediately update. I like the kind of data provision that runs like Facebook ads; make one tiny tweak, and I can see the impact within minutes. So, how can we be driven to effect what could be major and consequence-bearing, possibly life-altering changes, with no indicators of efficacy or failure for each thing we try out on our individual profiles and gigs, before the changes we implement (if wrong choices) reach a dangerous level? For example, I could change the wrong thing and only find that out when I get demoted in a month? Meanwhile, I wasted that month because I didn't hit on what my performance truly needed? It seems that what we need is to pile it high and sell it cheap. let's each sell 500 gubbins a month at $10 and to hell with the two 12k orders. At least with the already poor cancellations system, if we get a cancellation, we see immediately what score the OCR has dropped to, and those of us who love stats can soon work out how many 'happy completions' we require before the next month's evaluation. Then we set about getting that extra work in and doing it. But in a 'stab in the dark' scenario? It's insanity to even try. Here, we are hazarding blind guesses at what the problems really are, also being led astray, and in a month, in lottery fashion, we find out whether we identified the correct thing to change or not. Or maybe there is nothing to change, as I had already been told before this rolled out. That is not satisfactory or ethical to let us experiment at the risk of our incomes, homes, and dependents, when the site does not give immediacy of resultant data against which we can see the effect of the changes we implement. I have not done any work today because I have no time because I am too busy trying to comprehend this blundering system. So then, I get the backlash for not delivering my usual standard next month, obviously. Fiverr, you are ripping good sellers from their usually high performance standards, risking the fast undoing of your own brand.
  11. And a company that introduces changes this sweeping and drastic, affecting so many indices at once, with the outcome of so many good sellers feeling blindsided, is doing something gravely amiss and unethical. I don't object to change, but it needs to be clear and justified, as well as extremely well thought out. This feels like when my mother used to say, 'they couldn't organize a p*** up in a brewery'. I have never seen this kind of confusion, mayhem and devastation in all those years of working for blue chips, implementing global roll-outs and similar. I doubt any strategic consultancy will have seen this kind of upset from a significant number of (what were) top performers in a business of this magnitude. The only big corporate blunder that's occurred to me recently was when P&O cruises sacked all their staff on a whim. The devastation here in Fiverr is because the transparency is NOT there, and we are being told to improve without any clarity of (or chance of clarity of) the issues, and there is a lot of obfuscation going on to hide Fiverr's multiple blunders. They are measuring US on communications? Try looking at yourselves, Fiverr management. This is appallingly introduced. Its shady and suspicious. A company that has done its qualitative and quantitative analysis prior to making major changes will never have customers or providers feeling blindsided, scared, upset, tearful, and repulsed. I've spoken to sellers under each of those emotional headers. I don't mind @emmaki if you pass my comments along! I am only glad they are getting seen! Incidentally, after just waiting all day for anything but a cut-and-paste, pointless response from Support, a shift manager just wrote to me saying, 'I hear you are concerned about your customer satisfaction'. And gave me the usual scripted, non-bespoke hogwash, again cut and paste type, only I suspect she actually knows it by heart. I replied, 'er, no, never mentioned that! I have already been told that my customer satisfaction is excellent! It's cancellations I asked about, i.e. the fact that they are all non-fault, instigated due to buyer error, and now, they bite me in the buttocks despite years of being told if CS revert my OCR, buyer-fault cancellations 'will have no impact!' So I will probably wait another day, and get someone else writing, 'I hear you are worried about (insert any other irrelevant issue). What then? Concerned about yogurt? About global warming? About a plague of locusts? About losing sleep and appetite due to stress? (Pick which one is true). Dear CS, try reading what I actually say before filling a page with stuff that doesn't remotely address the query. It would be so nice if the ones purporting to assist us actually read our messages, wouldn't it? Whatever happened to the satisfaction surveys we used to get, asking us how Customer Support had performed on our queries? Right now, the score for this entire roll-out, on every index, would be 0. i.e., a demotion!
  12. I feel Fiverr needs its sellers to do well and tries to help us toward that, but that they are misinterpreting data left, right and center. They need to create a proper research and statistics department drawing from client satisfaction and global data agency leaders. Clearly, they have not the first clue on how to conduct and evaluate research and then to extrapolate findings and implement solutions. It's a hellish mess of bad judgement, random ideas and mismanaged data. I do not think anyone will be passing an MBA based on Fiverr's 'success' metrics... unless it's a paper on how to get it wrong.
  13. I would have liked to think that me earning $300k over 3.5 years of putting in effort here (as I joined earlier but did nothing until I resigned my consulting role) could be considered a success, without needing to be fed an insulting score to tell me otherwise. They gave me TRS and Pro. Now, they insult me and give no details for how to 'improve'? It's pushing water uphill. I've made a shift from selling $5 gigs four years ago, to selling $3,500 - $6,500 projects now. I am lost. Utterly lost. Any requests for elucidation have brought cut-and-paste responses with low relevance. I can see this wonderfully encouraging 'success' system having a few issues retaining high-revenue sellers.
  14. I had only just been told there was nothing I could improve on and that private reviews are excellent. I have a score 8 due to 'cancellations' which were all non-fault (buyer fault) and low impact on one gig, just saying communication could improve slightly but Fiverr fails to send me any notifications for new messages incoming, which I see is a major issue for many sellers. This whole thing is guesswork. How we can 'improve' when the system has caused untold unfathomable mess-ups, I do not know.
  15. I could not agree more with everything you say. This is shady, disgusting behavior on Fiverr's part to say this is in the interest of 'transparency' and 'fairness' when there are sellers about to lose their homes over sudden, unfathomable actions by Fiverr and no true indication of the actions people should take, all because their 'how to improve' messages and statistics simply do not add up. Something certainly stinks; in 25+ years of being a large corporate brands' strategic consultant and a director with Bernstein Research Inc., never did I see anything as appallingly mismanaged and secretive as this. I feel revolted by even the brand of Fiverr just now; it has lost its good reputation in my eyes.
  16. I was so sorry and sad to hear about what these shameful people were doing to you. This sounds like the best move, and you have got what it takes to succeed, so I wish you the absolute best in freelancing.
  17. Exactly the same issue. I have 23 cancellations out of 350 all-time orders, and only one was my fault, right back in 2018. All others were cancelled by customer support or (since receiving a Fiverr email memo that directly said sellers must cancel their own orders and then ask CS to revert the stats on non-fault cancellations!) I cancelled them, then customer support reverted my Order Completion Rate (OCR) to 100%. Yet I have a success score of 8 based on cancellation rate? Eh? What? Less pressure? More transparency? Not from where I am standing. I spent years running quantitative and qualitative strategic analysis projects for blue-chips before going freelance as an editor; the numbers around these latest moves stink. Someone has made a mess of things. Even if the cancellations were to be factored in, (ignoring the ever-on-repeat "don't worry, this won't affect your stats" message that we are all given when cancellation is the buyer's fault), the calculations makes no sense. The gig on which cancellations were *not* flagged as an issue had more cancellations (all time as well as in the last 24 months) than the one on which it's flagged. The most popular gig is the one with more cancellations too, so even the 'it's weighted' argument does not add up statistically. The sales of each gig are about even. Private reviews are all good according to my success manager. Obviously, if my order values are now between $3k and $6.5k, I can only do two jobs a month, and this means one cancellation would then give me a cancellation rate of 50% for the month (even though I never cancel unless the buyer has made a mistake). So, I was given TRS, then given Pro without me applying, was recently told by my success manager that there was nothing I could improve performance wise, I get tips of $500 and zero complaints or even minor gripes, and yet this happens? And gracefully, Fiverr gives me 30 days to improve what is beyond my control? How kind! How well-planned and intelligent! The other gig also scoring 8 says 'communication: room for growth'. Oh, I wonder why? It is because several months back, I said to my success manager that despite having all notifications switched on, they had ceased to come. I now have to open my 16 bookings manually, once an hour, to see if there happen to be any messages waiting! And that is impossible to do. My success manager passed on this matter to the appropriate team ... and not a thing happened, and I still get no Dashboard notifications and no visual drop-downs in the order dashboard to alert me to 'X client has been waiting for a reply'... I used to get all these. They just stopped about a year ago but every box is ticked to receive emails and sms, and on-screen notifications. This place feels as if it is run by people implementing a lot of 'secret' steps based on very poor and flawed decision making and an absence of consultation with experts. They don't know how to manage their system. It feels like being in kindergarten, with zero respect for earned skills, high-value projects, expertise, and client management. We're treated like kiddies, patted on the head and told that the secrets make sense but we are not grown-up enough to know how this works (or should work). Feels like, 'let's revert to pile it high and sell it cheap'. Let's get hundreds of orders at five dollars so that 23 client-fault cancellations have no impact! Have we not been here before? In what language is this 'greater transparency?' It feels juvenile in its treatment of good, solid and reliable sellers, also insulting and appallingly planned and executed. And as usual, announced with great enthusiasm and an air of 'couldn't care less who suffers' and 'ooh, we must keep all our workings a big secret so you cannot possibly uncover our internal programming and planning blunders'!
  18. Best news I have seen today for sure! So happy for you!
  19. Hi @kerlynn7 I am also in the copy-editing field and things changed dramatically for me lately too. I don't feel I saw a huge drop in the volume of inquiries, however. What I saw was that either the new inquiries were poorly tailored or had no correlation to my products (something I've never experienced before) or they were from brand-new Fiverr buyers without a clue as to what they were really doing on the site! Something had drawn them in, but they were eons away from having any material ready to edit. After squeezing me for hours of chat about everything under the sun, they would then tell me they were thinking of buying in a few years' time! Oh, great! This all left me feeling that Fiverr has been doing a lot of poorly targeted marketing or advertising, bringing in 'interested parties' who don't really have a drive to buy my type of product. Often, this has been at my expense as some of these ill-fitting contacts came in under promotions for which I am paying. Never before have I felt so frustrated by so many irrelevant messages landing in my Fiverr inbox. I also wonder whether Fiverr's shift to more profile-driven (rather than product-led) aesthetics has something to do with it. Clients may be struggling to 'see' the products over and above seeing the seller profiles. Add to this the many new features and changes on seller profiles themselves, and it's all combining into a confusing buyer experience as too much is occurring at once. It's hard to keep up. The good news is that after months of poorly-targeted messages coming my way, the last two days have seen a turnaround and I have managed to quote for around $15k of credible, well-targeted work. Something has improved the inquiries in the last 48 hours. I so hope the same happens for you! Now, I cannot get the time to do any editing because of the constant need to answer messages! But it's a good problem to have! Best, Annie
  20. Hi @domenikbrenner I'm so sorry to hear this has happened to you; many of Fiverr's moves lately have been something of a mystery. May I ask, to how many projects does this apply? I mean if it's just a couple, could it be that the buyers did not manually sign off the projects and that they auto-completed? Or is there a Fiverr message somewhere, to the effect that *you* are not eligible, rather than an individual project not being eligible? In my case, as a Pro seller and TRS, not every project is eligible for early payout; the eligible ones are those the buyer manually accepts (signs off) before auto-completion. Any auto-completed ones are never eligible, and that's the same for everyone. Best wishes, Annie.
  21. My understanding is that we must answer even if it is spam. I always answer, then report the post and block. Otherwise, if we don't answer, our response rate is affected despite the message Fiverr gives out to the contrary. The only instance in which I have seen the response rate stay unaffected is when Fiverr blocks the person (bans them) before I get chance to respond.
  22. I find it is a peculiar question. The question itself needs to be clearer! I find 1, 2 and Top-Rated not 'imprecise!' However, I am unsure what clients understand by TRS versus Pro.
  23. Hi @exdesigns Fastadking is correct; you should write to Customer Support and ask for this to be considered for compensation. Attach proof of your delivery and send screenshots of your communications with CS about the buyer removing himself from the platform. It sounds as if he may have taken himself off the platform just in time to try and use your work for free. In any case, the order was complete and delivered, and you should receive compensation for it. The fact that the buyer requested a revision and then disappeared is beyond your control; you did the work so Fiverr will not be surprised when you ask to be remunerated. This is normal practice and requesting compensation is something Customer Support will expect.
  24. I have also just come across this issue; it is not a very helpful message from Fiverr, is it? 🙂 I will remove two questions and see if that sorts it out, then I'll report back. ANSWER: It worked. Removing one of the FAQs left only ten, and that went through fine. What a relief! Thank you, @optinmagnets. You are my angel of the day!
  25. This Neo is highly irritating, being in an overwhelming black box, dominating the messages when all I wish to do is interface with my buyers; why the heck do I need a huge Neo sign to assist me to do what I have successfully done alone for my whole professional life? Can we turn this wretched thing off? It assumes we need hand-holding and spoon-feeding from AI at every opportunity. It's like some kind of buzzword each site feels it cannot survive without. Why? Are we advocating for the increasingly brain-dead user? Fiverr is throwing in regular pointless changes for its most experienced sellers who really only want to be aleft alone to get on with the generation and turnaround of business without all these 'helpful' diversions at every turn these days. Honestly, it feels as if people with no business acumen are making many of the decisions.
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