Fiverr is a very popular platform for Freelancers that can significantly increase your business if it’s used properly as we saw in our Ultimate Guide To Fiverr.  However, there’re a few things that we wished would have been done differently. These remarks came from both our personal experiences and stories we’ve read from other Sellers. The goal of this post is to raise awareness of these problems with Fiverr so they can get addressed in the near future 🙂

5 Problems with Fiverr

1. Sellers Are Under a “Magnifying Glass”

If you have used Fiverr, you have probably noticed how every time you write some keywords (e.g., Payment, Skype) or characters (e.g., @) you get a visual warning letting you know that violating the Terms and Conditions can get your account restricted.

I mean, we get it, Fiverr wants to make sure that nobody “breaks the rules”, that’s perfectly fine. However, showing that warning somehow makes us, Sellers, feel that we can get expelled from the platform at any moment. It doesn’t make us trust the platform more. On the contrary, It makes us feel expendable.

Our solution to mitigate this would be to remove any real-time visual indication while writing, and only after sending the message, show a warning to the user letting him/her know that sharing contact details are not allowed.

Finally, before send it, give the user the chance to remove the message or move forward.

2. All Cancellations Affect Sellers

Cancellations are inevitable (e.g., change of requirements, different expectations, GIG ordered twice by mistake). Sometimes it’s Buyer’s fault and other times is Seller’s fault. In most ocassions though, they are handled quite professionally for both parts.

Our biggest gripe with this though, it’s the fact that all cancellations affect Sellers in the Fiverr’s “Level System”. If you have used Fiverr as a Seller you have probably seen how you need to meet certain requirements to progress to the next level, which gives you better benefits (e.g., more active GIGs, better exposure in the ranking)

Well, the sad part is that every cancellation affects your “Task Completion Rate”, which we find incredibly unfair as the cancellation can happen for a Buyers’ mistake, like ordering the same GIG twice (it happens quite a bit). In our eyes, this is wrong. Cancellations should only affect Sellers if it’s the result of subpar service.

3. Partial Refunds (or the lack of)

This one might not be one of the most critical problems with Fiverr, but we find it really annoying.

Receiving a “request for refund” is one of the worst moments for every Freelancer, we all know that. One problem that Refunds have in Fiverr is the fact that you cannot partially refund a Task.

For example, let’s say that you have completed 80% of the task and the Buyer, suddently, tells you that he/she is unhappy with the speed things are moving and wants to cancel it. After this, he/she opens a dispute and asks you to accept the cancellation.

When you have this situation, you can either “Accept the cancellation” and refund the 100% of the order, or “Reject the cancellation” and involve Fiverr as a moderator. This honestly sucks, because you might have done most things right during the order, and now you are going to get nothing for all the work you have done.

In my opinion, the better approach for these cases (when the job is already really advanced), would be to automatically refund the 50% of the GIG to the Buyer. This way, the Seller goes away with at least some money to pay for all his/her time, and the Buyer gets back a significant percentage.

4. No Real-time Chat

Guys, it’s 2018. It doesn’t make sense to wait 24-48 hours for an answer from support. As of today, there’re literally hundreds of Live Chat platforms in the market at a really low cost. So it shouldn’t cost a fortune to integrate one in the marketplace. Alright, it’s not one of the biggest problems with Fiverr, but it’s really annoying.

We understand that this would also increase the cost in relation with support agents. However, we would argue that being Fiverr a really social marketplace with constant communication between Buyers and Sellers, this extra cost would dramatically increase the trust in the platform, making it a really worthy expenditure.

Imagine if conflicts between Buyers and Sellers could be solved in a “3-way” chat with a Fiverr moderator? That would solve so many misunderstandings and complains! We believe that this should be the way to go in the future.

5. Insufficient Sellers Protection

In our eyes, this is one of the biggest problems with Fiverr. You would get nightmares if you read some of the stories that are written in the Fiverr Forums. One that shocked us was about a Buyer who complained 2 months after the GIG was completed, so Fiverr took the money back from the Seller and cancelled the order (which was already “completed”).

Here are some other cases to keep you awake at night:

• They took my work… and my money (2018)
• Buyer Took the Delivery and Also the Money (2018)
• A really bad week (2018)
• Fiverr ignores rules and cancels orders (2018)

We have no way to know if these stories are real (it seems so based on the number of users who shared their experiences in the threads), but the fact that nobody is surprised that this might have happened speaks volumes. Fiverr needs to step up the game by giving Sellers more protection against abuse. It’s not unheard off cases where the Buyer threats with bad reviews if the Seller doesn’t deliver extra work for free. This is unacceptable and should trigger an immediate ban from the platform.

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Did you experience any problems with Fiverr?. Please share them in the comments section! We are eager to learn about stories that can help our community to work more efficiently with the platform 🙂