itaiyasur

Allowing for tips is important. It’s pretty clear that Fiverr fosters a culture of underbidding to get work. Most of the gigs on Fiverr are way undercharging what the same service would go for outside of Fiverr and there’s a cost/benefit to that, you might get less per order than you usually would but hopefully you’re more than making up for that in amount of orders. So if a buyer pays less than what they would have if they were dealing with you directly they’re probably also willing to settle for a lower grade of work, if you absolutely blow them away with the quality of the delivery then of course they should be able to tip – you probably undercharged out of necessity and now they want to compensate you for that. Now, of course tips should go entirely to the seller. Fiverr facilitates me receiving orders so it’s sensible for them to take a cut of those – it’s what pays for the site (I’d still argue that charging the buyer more than the official price while also giving the seller less than the official price is convoluted double-dipping and should be handled better.) But a seller earning a tip has nothing to do with Fiverr – it’s entirely up to our own professionalism, skill and time and just like in any other industry it’s bad form to take any part of peoples’ tips away from them. As far as the service charge being there to prevent abuse of the tipping system – that argument simply doesn’t hold water. First, there’s nothing a seller can do to require a tip from a buyer. I’m not going to undercharge massively for my gig in the hopes that buyers will agree to tip afterwards, and even in a custom offer scenario any seller trying to pre-negotiate tips is just looking to get burned and they’re probably better off just pulling the same trick but with extras. Second, it’s easy enough to just solve the issue by capping the tips at a reasonable percentage of the overall order, or simply limiting them to predetermined options. If a buyer just had the option to tip something like 10, 20 or 30% at the end of the order, like plenty of freelance services have done for years, there wouldn’t be the option for a seller to try and get the majority of their payment through the tip. And yeah, the wording is bad and clearly there because Fiverr wants that service charge. If Fiverr wasn’t triple-dipping with the tip service fee they’d probably be wording it better.