ahunyady

Unless they decided to give the portfolio to everyone or you qualified for a special invite (possible), it’s because of the level system change. They must be using a new variable in the website code for levels and not all the website is updated yet. It’s probably just an oversight—they didn’t do a whole lot of testing to prepare for this major change. The app front page is broken too (at least for me).

I don’t like to push buyers to leave reviews. Fiverr’s review process is long and confusing, and as a seller I’m not allowed to educate buyers on the review process and how impactful it is on my ability to remain active on the platform. However, since Fiverr does not effectively communicate to new buyers 1) how Fiverr works, 2) what “reject delivery” means, and 3) how reviews work, for quite a while now I’ve included this message in deliveries to buyers that appear new to the platform (or occasionally, older buyers who are repeat clients and never seem to leave reviews or complete their orders): (paraphrased) Fiverr will automatically close this order after three days if you don’t request revisions. If you’re happy with the results, go ahead and accept the delivery and then leave a review if you wish. If there are any issues, feel free to request revisions (the button may say “reject delivery”) and I’ll be happy to revise so you can get exactly what you need. @Kesha is that acceptable? I’m not pushing them to leave a positive review but educating them what to do if the delivery is perfect vs revisions are needed. If I don’t coach new buyers on what to do, they will sometimes leave half-satisfied, without ever requesting revisions—even though their order clearly says free revisions are included. (Revisions are often required for this type of work.) This is because Fiverr actively pushes buyers away from requesting revisions by labeling the button “reject delivery”, which is a very strong negative term. After I direct them to the button, they say, "Oh yeah, I saw that button but I was afraid to click it."

Yes, it’s very rare for me to see a buyer who’s hidden stats. Hiding stats is in itself is a big red flag, so that’s an easy no from me.

In terms of vetting clients, the Seller Plus program allows you to see “buyer activity insights”, which includes the average star rating given by anyone who contacts you in chat, along with a few other of their buying stats (the average order amount is a complete fiction though so ignore that one). This in combination with turning on request to order, will be very helpful in filtering out low-raters. If I see a buyer gives 5-star reviews, I’ll work with them. If they give lower than 5-star reviews (especially with positively worded reviews), I’ll simply refuse to work with them. They can go destroy someone else’s gig. This info alone is not enough to make a final determination (e.g., for buyers with no history), but it’s crucial info for the vetting process. I don’t want to tell anyone to give Fiverr even more money but if you’re already planning to get Seller Plus, this is one big benefit.

It's going to depend on how many automatic orders you get. I get fewer than 5% of my orders that way (and they’re generally not the good customers either) so it won’t make a difference for me. I turned it on all my gigs a few days ago because with the new system, we have to do extreme vetting on prospective clients.

I have a gig with one pre-requirements cancellation (the only cancellation). It says the gig is strongly negatively affected by cancellations even though there's still a message on the gig that the cancellation doesn't affect my metrics. It dropped from 8 to 7 today, despite having several 5-star reviews and no other negative issues since last week. So, despite what Fiverr says publicly, the success score counts all cancellations. Success score is complete BS, and solely designed to stress out users by demoting them.

Nobody's looking at your gig’s extensions and revisions manually, so don't expect them to differentiate between positive and negative delivery extensions and revisions. If they attempt to do this, it’s going to be AI assessing your messages which will be a disaster. If your score is well above the cutoff for where you want to be, most likely you can just keep doing what you’re doing. If your score is lower than you like or on the border, you should reduce revisions and especially extensions. If that means setting longer delivery times up front, even if it risks turning away buyers, do it. I’ve learned that the best clients are the ones who plan ahead and are easygoing—not the “I NEED IT IN 6 HOURS!!!” ones. Of course there’s a balance but depending on the type of projects, shorter delivery time does not necessarily mean you’ll get a larger number of clients. But too long and you’ll definitely reduce buyer satisfaction and/or they won’t return. For some categories 3 days might be too long. For others, 2 weeks is no problem at all. The best thing you can do is communicate with buyers about timing issues. Get a sense for how desperate they are to get it back within a certain time. Let them know when you’ll actually be starting their project then give them delivery updates periodically esp. if they’re a new client and it’s a bit of a long delivery. If they spend 2 weeks freaking out that you’ve forgotten about their project, they’re not going to appreciate that, so send them an update when you start working on their project and reconfirm whether that going to make the deadline. Some buyers do expect to have all revisions done by the “delivery date” but others understand revisions can go on longer, so you want to specify this up front. Personally, I’ll be setting slightly longer delivery times and encouraging buyers when applicable to process revisions through chat rather than the revision system. Previously, I’ve always pushed them toward using the revision button as it puts their revision into my queue where I won’t forget it. That said, I can’t say that revisions are having a strong negative effect, probably because everyone else in my category, copyediting & proofreading, has to use them often as well. I’d estimate about 30-40% of my orders get revisions (I may be way off on this number as I’ve never thought about it before and not done a tally), but virtually all of these revisions extend into the “late” zone as I almost always deliver right before the delivery deadline (I’ve never had a late delivery, though I’ve had to extend delivery date on ~1.5% of orders usually due to buyer issues). I used to deliver early, then I discovered this is a great way to give false expectations to repeat buyers. Now I always deliver an hour or two before the deadline unless I know they need it ASAP. For my main gigs, I don’t have any delivery time issues noted in the success score breakdown. Other categories might be stricter with revisions.

These are better than Fiverr’s system, but would have the same ultimate effect. The only transparent way to do it is to educate the buyer on what different ratings mean. 4.7 stars is the cutoff for “acceptability” (at the TRS level) so that needs to be communicated to the buyer at the time of leaving feedback. If they rate below 4.7 stars, then they’re saying that you, as seller, should be removed from the platform if you don’t start delivering better. The same for private feedback. It’s worded in a way that makes the buyer think they’re rating FIVERR not the seller. That’s the reason for such low recent private feedback.

Revisions and extended delivery may not be impacting success score directly today, but what’s to say they won’t change their minds next month or next year? If the scoring window is a rolling 60 days, changing rules isn’t as big of a deal, but when they retrospectively penalize us for actions they previously encouraged, how can we interpret that as anything but incompetent, insensitive, or outright malicious? When corporate leadership forces through a highly unpopular or misguided change, it is usually a sign of an impending change in leadership or a restructuring. That tension we feel is someone’s fingers on the ripcord of their golden parachute about to deploy. Value for money—I’m considering including an itemized bill with deliveries so my clients can see that I make a lot less per hour than they do. Reps have consistently said that mutual cancellations don’t affect our ratings. However, cancellations have also consistently affected our ratings. In the past, the effect could apparently be removed on a manual basis if CS was feeling honest or generous at the moment, but they wouldn’t do it automatically. Now that they’re allowing buyer feedback after cancellations, I can’t see them ever removing the effect of cancellations automatically. Maybe they’ll still do it manually if you complain enough. But as we know, they’re openly violating their own TOS at will now (for example, admitting they allow buyer cancellations for any reason even when the order was delivered on time and as described), so we can’t really trust that they are following any of their stated “policies” anymore—at least ones that protect sellers.

This is an indication these scores are indeed being done by AI. It's giving different evaluations at different times. Super-transparent, super-reliable.

Maybe TRS are supposed to use those 30 gigs to vet buyers. Unsure of a buyer? Create a brand new gig just for them. Were they one of those satisfied buyers who gives 4 stars publicly, and privately says the delivery was “as expected” (i.e., negative), or maybe they utilized one of your free revisions, or *gasp* asked to extend the delivery time? No problem! Gigs with only a few orders don’t count against your success score, and when you’ve used the gig a few times and it starts dragging down your success score, just delete it. No muss, no fuss.

This is so deceptive that it feels like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Your feedback “helps us improve the experience on Fiverr”? Uh, no. This penalizes repeat sellers so buyers have to find new sellers. I’m assuming (the transparency is so blinding I can’t tell) that a 4-star private review negatively impacts our gigs. My clients who I’ve worked with 20, 30 times... none of them are going to say “exceeded expectations” because they’re highly advanced humans and can remember things. They know exactly what they’re getting and that’s why they use me.

The changes seem designed to reduce the seller base. This can only mean they are reacting to fewer buyers or they are projecting fewer buyers in the coming year. I would not be surprised if they are preparing for international sanctions as well once more news starts to come out. Re: all the locked accounts—they retain these funds, though this seems like it would be a very short-sighted cash grab. But maybe they know something we don’t know.

That doesn’t make sense either as a $5 review has the same weight as a $2500 review.

Not sure why only Pro sellers should be able to contest reviews. Fiverr also seems to be removing our responses to negative reviews. If a seller gives you a bad review and you reply telling the world what actually went down in the order, Fiverr removes that. It’s like Fiverr is letting monkeys make the policy decisions... then firing the monkeys and having ChatGPT do it.