Anna E.

Fiverr has given me both some good experiences, and some bad experiences. My industry is book publishing, so I mainly deal with editing, proofreading, artwork and translations. I will list the good and bad and let you make your own opinion.

THE GOOD:

-the way gigs are set up, you have an idea, before you inquire, how much your job might cost.

-the star-ratings give you an idea if other buyers had a good experience.

-easy payment options through your credit card or Paypal.

-transfers the payments automatically into foreign currencies so you don't have to walk around with a calculator or deal with the daily currency fluctuations around the globe.

-I've had some really positive experiences on Fiverr and met some great, hard-working sellers.

THE NEUTRAL:

-Fiverr doesn't hire or screen their sellers. The rating system is crowd-sourced by other buyers. It's possible to game the system with reviews.

-You get what you pay for. Seriously! If somebody is charging far less than others for the same job and isn't a brand-new seller, it should send up a red flag. On the other hand, if somebody is brand-new, you may or may not want to take a chance on them. Give them a SMALL job, see how well they do, before you hire them for something more important.

-There is a 5% processing fee on top of whatever you gig-cost is which is not clearly spelled out. Once you get bitten, you learn to incorporate it in when bidding on an offer. It's not an unreasonable fee, especially since you are often dealing with credit card merchant fees or foreign currency conversion fees. It's the lack of transparency to spell it out beforehand which makes this 'meh.'

-Fiverr doesn't differentiate between 'quickies' and professional-grade work. For example, if I need ad-copy quickly translated for a quick $5 gig, that work is different from a job where the translator converted a 150,000 word novel. And yet both count as a single rating with the same weight. That could be improved so the truly great sellers rise to the top. It would also help me, as a buyer, because when I contract for a big job, I want to know the person did similar work. I dunno... maybe REQUIRE a longer survey for bigger jobs, send a 'REVIEW THIS' email followup with specific questions?

THE BAD:

-sellers are heavily skewed toward people who want to make a quick buck doing lots of quick $5 gigs, so if you have a larger job, you might end up with a lot of people who are flaky.

-You get a lot of amateurs on Fiverr, people who bid on a big job, and bit off more than they can chew. But that doesn't show up in the ratings except you may notice lots of 'not delivered on time - cancelled.' Always look through the reviews, try to discern what kinds of jobs people did before you buy.

-If you cancel your order, Fiverr keeps the money in your 'account.' They don't refund the money. You have to use it for another gig. Now this isn't necessarily a deal-buster for a small job, but when you work like I do with larger scale translations totaling hundreds or thousands of dollars, it's a bad business policy. It discourages me, as a buyer, from bidding out larger jobs on Fiverr.

-For a job such as translations, where the buyer is completely at the mercy of the translator to do an accurate job, there are a LOT of shysters on Fiverr who simply cut-and-paste your document into GoogleTranslate or BabelCube and you have no way to know unless you hire an independent editor to do a second pass-through. Again, for me, as somebody who would LIKE to bring bigger jobs to Fiverr (totaling thousands of dollars per job), it gives me pause in using them for the bigger jobs.

-Due to the quick timeframe when you are expected to pay the seller after delivery and then rate them, by the time you realize you've found a second set of eyeballs to proofread your work and realized you've gotten a translation that is so bad you cannot use it at all, there is no way to go back and make it known in the crowd-sourced ratings.

-What gets RATED is essentially 'did this seller deliver on time' and not QUALITY of the job.

-If the seller needs more time to finish the job for a legitimate reason and you want to GIVE them that time to extend the deadline, Fiverr doesn't have a way to create a mutually extended deadline. It's either cancel the job (in which case the seller gets dinged on their reviews) or hold your breath and hope they deliver it after you've already paid for it.

-For translation and editing, MOST sellers advertise they'll give up to 'x-number of revisions' for a writing/translation gig. However, for the most part, when I've gone back to these sellers to get the revisions (usually simple stuff, the proofreader spotted some typos or grammatical errors) they essentially disappear. There is no way to rate the 'follow up' rate or enforce it.

-Fiverr sellers have an unofficial 'blacklist' for buyers who leave a negative review for shoddy work. So you will find, after leaving a negative review, no matter how shoddy the work was, that all of a sudden your quote-inquiries don't get answered, or they'll get answered, but then a few hours later the seller will back out of the work. As a businesswoman, I expect to get what I paid for. I am very flexible and reasonable.

THE SUPER-INEXCUSABLY BAD:

-If you have money leftover in your account, you can only USE that money if you hire a gig for the EXACT SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY OR LESS. So if you cancelled a gig for $45 because the seller failed to deliver, but the more competent guy you hire to replace him wants $50 to do the job, you have to PAY ANOTHER $50 FROM SCRATCH and can't use that $45 sitting in your account, which you already paid the fees for, plus $5. This is outright stupid bad business policy. Seriously?