charlsmcfarlane

So would I. To me, getting a tip implies that the buyer valued the work higher than they paid, so to get a tip and 4/5 seems to indicate the value question is broken somehow.

I worry that the value for money question will result only in a “race to the bottom” on pricing. Here’s a possible, scenario (and I hope I’m wrong on this). Decent sellers (who charge appropriately) will start getting bad ratings because, when prompted with a question on value for money, many buyers (even after agreeing to a price and being very happy with the result) will simply think, “well, it could have been cheaper”. This is a natural thought that most rational people will have. Of course it could be cheaper. However, that doesn’t mean it should be cheaper. So decent sellers will start to lose business as their ratings steadily fall, so then they’ll be forced to lower their prices. Then what? They’ll get more orders, at a lower rate and deliver work worth much more than they’re charging. However, many buyers, when asked about the value for money will still think, “well, it could have been cheaper”, because of course it could! Now the cycle repeats and everyone’s prices are forced lower and lower. It used to be that decent services cost more, but now decent sellers will have to undercharge or take a hit on orders as their ratings drop. This could be even more pronounced for Pro and Top Rated Sellers, seeing as buyer expectations will be even higher for them (understandably). I do think there are times that one can get a perfect score for value for money. Getting tipped is a good indicator that a buyer thinks the service was worth more than they paid. However, this might indicate that the seller should be raising their prices, putting them at more risk of getting poorer scores for “value for money”. I hope I’m wrong on this but I think it’s a reasonable concern. I just hope in two years time we’re not going to be in a place where everyone charges $5 for everything and has a 3.5 star average. I think the quality of the delivery and the cost of delivery are very important measures, but they should not be measured in one rating. These should be two separate questions as they are both variables in their own right.

That makes sense. Expecting someone to review a 60 second voice over in 3 days is totally reasonable. Equally, I think it’s reasonable to allow 7-10 days for reviewing a 3 hour audiobook. I agree that different jobs require different amounts I’d time for review. I just think these differences should be represented in the gig offering, and therefore part of the agreement from the start. If a seller wants to extend the delivery time (adjust the agreement), they must ask the buyer. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to make the process the same for buyers requesting more time.

Indeed. I understand the need for some way to make the 3 days more flexible. I just don’t think the execution is great.

…or better yet, remove the option entirely! The process by which a buyer can, without request or conversation, extend their review time on a delivery should be either completely redesigned or removed. Sellers commit to a delivery deadline. Buyers should commit to a reasonable amount of time to review the work. I understand that some complex work and complex team structures and/or approval chains require more time. However, I can think of many ways to achieve this goal without taking all agency away from the seller. One option would be that extensions must be agreed upon with the seller, in the same way that sellers must request an extension for the delivery deadline. Another option is to have the delivery review time as an editable duration by the seller in their gig offerings and custom offers. That way, a seller and buyer can agree upon a longer review period before commencing the order and there are no surprises for the seller waiting to be paid for their work. There should still be a minimum review period to avoid abuse I think 3 days is a good minimum amount There are probably many other ways to achieve this result but the current process is not good. Thanks,.

Many of my gigs are for training, which I deliver within the Fiverr zoom integration, so there is proof the session happened because it is automatically recorded. As such, any person reviewing the order will see very clearly that the session was conducted, even if the recording isn't in the delivery. Will there always be a human checking these, in order to apply common sense to these situations or are they going to be automatically flagged? If it's automated, I guess I'll have to wait for the recording to process, download it from the Fiverr zoom only to then re-attach it in the deliver window. However, this would seem like a bit of an unnecessary step, seeing as all parties (buyer, seller and Fiverr) can refer back to the recording and see that the work was done.

I don’t think these are always scammers. I’ve had buyers just innocently trying to help by setting up a call. I have a ready-made response to this, which has helped me a lot in the past. “Thank you for offering to set up a call. I appreciate the offer. However, Fiverr requires all communications to go through them. Using services like zoom or Google meet is against the terms of service Luckily there is a Fiverr zoom integration, which we can use. The call will be automatically recorded and accessible, upon its conclusion. In case you’d like to find out more, here’s a link to Fiverr’s documentation regarding the zoom call feature – https://help.fiverr.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011062838-Video-calls-Zoom-calls-“ Hope this helps.

Awesome. Thanks. For whatever reason I couldn’t find this 😅

I can’t seem to find a concrete answer to what seems like a simple question. Once the transition to the new rating system is complete, will the historical reviews and ratings of a seller still be visible/counted? I guess I want to know if all the ratings from previous orders just disappear and are no longer considered by either the algorithm or by potential customers. Or more simply, is this a complete reset for sellers?

I agree with this in principle, but only really for new gigs/sellers. For example, I have a gig that has 124 reviews and 98% of them are 5 star reviews. The other 2% are 4.7 I think when you get to those kinds of numbers, no reasonable buyer is going to think that that is fabricated.

It would be great to have the option to offer multiple fast delivery options as extras. For example, if the standard delivery time is ten days, having the option to shorten it to five days for a charge or one day for a bigger fee. This would give buyers more flexibility and choice, and allow sellers to increase the chances of having an extra that will suit the buyer, increasing upsell opportunities. Thanks

I agree that some of the labels and levels are a little unclear. Level 1 sounds like a new seller, not someone at the second level. Top rated also implies that it correlates to ratings but someone can be a level one seller with better ratings than a top rated seller.

This is a fantastic suggestion. So simple, but would totally fix this problem.

When combined with other extras, the fast delivery option makes no sense. I had someone place an order the other day with a 30 day delivery. They also ordered two extras that added another 3 days to the delivery. Then, they added fast delivery, which brought the whole order down to 24 hours. 24 hours is fine for the base order but the extras shouldn’t be reduced to nothing. It would be great if a seller could exclude order extra delivery times from being reduced by the fast delivery option, or maybe even allow sellers to specify a separate fast delivery time per extra. Here’s a simple example: Let’s say I offer copywriting for 1000 words and can deliver that in a day if the buyer pays extra, but I also want to offer an extra for another 1000 words but can not deliver 2000 words in a day. In this situation, there’s no way to offer both extras without the chance of a buyer purchasing both and then the seller not being able to deliver on time. In this situation, either the seller needs to offer a fast delivery extra that accommodates enough time to deliver the order, if the buyer purchases every extra at the same time, or they offer it and hope the buyer buys less (which seems a bit silly). Basically, there isn’t enough nuance in the fast delivery options for sellers. Thanks

Makes sense. I do hope they make some improvements to it because I do think, even at the moment, there are some very small advantages. For example, it’s a better seller and buyer experience having all the milestone notes, revisions and deliveries in one order chain. However, that really isn’t enough of an advantage to outweigh the disadvantages.

Thanks. I thought I wasn’t making sense but it seems you get my point. I can’t see any value in using milestones until these points are addressed, which is a shame, as the milestones process seems, on the surface, to be a decent idea.

Agreed. I am very similar. I charge more and very rarely have cancellations. It just seems that I need to stop using milestones if I want to safeguard my seller level until fiverr make the metric representative of “work” completed, rather than only “orders” completed.

This is true, but why would I not just create multiple orders to achieve the same result? This is my point. There isn’t an advantage to the seller using milestones over simply creating multiple orders, so why does it exist? I know it helps to keep multiple milestones contained within one order but that’s just a convenience thing. There does, however, seem to be disadvantages, such as the one I originally mentioned. I have done lots of work, which has been approved by customers, but my cancellation metric still doesn’t look great because the milestones I’ve completed don’t contribute towards it. Surely, the point of an order completion metric is to demonstrate to customers that the seller is reliable and completes, all or almost all of the work that they are commissioned to do. If that’s the case, then a completed milestone should count towards that because it is completed work. That completed milestone shows a level of reliability in the same way that a completed order does. I completely understand how the system actually works right now. I am simply suggesting a way that would make the system work better.

I understand what you mean, but I think that would be too inconsistent a metric. It would mean that someone could cancel 10 $5 orders and complete 1 $1000 order and still have a really good cancellation metric, which would then imply to customers that the person is reliable and completes most of their orders, even though that’s not true.

So I’m being penalised for taking advantage a Fiverr feature that benefits the customer and seller? A milestone could be a significant amount of time and money. There’s nothing stopping an individual milestone being much bigger than an entire order, so why should it be considered less important than an order? For example, one of the milestones I completed recently was for hundreds of dollars and took a long time to compete. You’re right that I could have just sent multiple offers, but offering a milestones order keeps things organised and logical. What I’m proposing is that fiverr needs to change the metric to reflect completed “work”, vs. cancelled “work”. This would actually be a more accurate measure in other ways too. For example, if a seller creates a milestones order with 4 milestones, completes 3 of them and then the buyer cancels the 4th one, the seller’s metrics will count that as a completed order. This isn’t really accurate as the cancelled milestone isn’t measured at all. Basically the order completion metric only really means anything if you never use milestones. Every milestone needs to be approved by the buyer so what difference does it make? If I hadn’t chosen to create a milestones order, like you suggested, each one would be a separate order anyway. So if there are ten orders or ten milestones, what is the practical difference? Now I’m aware buyer metrics don’t benefit from completing milestones, I probably will stop using them until Fiverr fixes this. I’m just highlighting that it needs to be fixed, otherwise there’s little incentive for sellers to use the feature. Really, that’s a shame and quite counterintuitive because I use milestones to improve the customer experience, even though in several ways, it doesn’t really benefit sellers: – sellers have to wait an extra 5 days before auto completion on milestones. – sellers can’t get tips or reviews on milestones. – completed milestones don’t count towards metrics measuring a seller’s completed work.

In terms of orders, December was the slowest month I’ve had on Fiverr ever. Then, unfortunately, I had a cancellation. I’ve had very few cancellations, but this one came at the worst possible time. My work has picked up loads — in fact January is now looking to be one of my best months ever. However, this has flagged up a weird issue. Due to my low number of orders and the one cancellation, I have been fighting to keep my completed orders above 90% and avoid a level demotion. However a lot of the orders I have right now are milestones orders. I completed several milestones and then realised these don’t have any bearing on the order completion metric. This seems very strange. I am completing work, getting paid and getting fiverr paid but it doesn’t contribute to the levels system. In a way, this incentivises prioritising non-milestone orders. It would seem to make sense that the “completed orders” metric should really be completed orders/milestones. If not, someone could be completing hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of work and still get demoted for not completing orders. Thanks

It would be great to be able to see the status of a custom offer without having to go into a chat thread. Currently, the conversation previews show that a custom offer was sent but it could have been accepted or rejected, and there’s no way to see without opening the conversation. This is less of an issue when an offer is accepted because the seller receives a notification and/or email to inform them they have a new order, but there’s no notification of a rejected offer. Two possible enhancements could be as follows: 1. Notify a seller when an offer is rejected 2. Update the conversation preview to show the status of the offer. Currently it just says “[seller] sent you a custom offer” (see attached image). If the system were to append “Accepted”, “Pending”, “Rejected” or “Expired”, then a seller would be able to see the status at a glance. Either that or the message could be replaced with, “[buyer] accepted/rejected your order” Thanks

Love this idea. There have been many occasions when I need to refer back to an old order or conversation but can’t remember who it was with.

Agreed. When creating a custom offer, the form should show what the amount will be in the buyer’s currency as well as USD.

I have had many situations where I have submitted a delivery and then got a revision request – only to then, shortly after, get a message from the buyer saying that they made a mistake or didn’t quite understand how to use the delivery and that they are happy to accept the previous delivery submission. In this situation, it would be fantastic to have a simple way to resubmit a previous delivery without having to re-populate the delivery notes and upload the files a second time. Now, rather than just quickly resending the delivery for the customer to accept, I need to go back to my computer and re-upload everything. Thanks