Roger S.

As a buyer, there's so much on offer at fiverr, worth looking around. Message a seller whose gig you like to get an idea as to how quick they respond, and how professional they come across.

As a seller, my advice is to stay away from Fiverr, at least read this and some of the other seller experiences, this way you're familiar with the way fiverr operates, which too often just don't make sense.

It's easy to get carried away with the Fiverr Hype about "doers" and the freedom of your own business, but what people need to realize is that with fiverr, you're not really running your own business as such, you're basically working for fiverr, they call the shots, make the rules, change them at will, have no accountability back to you or any other of the sellers, there is a complete absence of communication, collaboration, aside from the forum full of fiverr shills - don't dare say anything critical about fiverr, your posts are deleted within seconds, and you blocked.

With Fiverr, you are not working for yourself. A buyer places an order with you, makes payment for the order, which is held in escrow by fiverr until you complete and deliver the order, and once accepted as complete by the buyer (or after 3 days if buyers do not respond, and plenty do not), fiverr clears the payment to you, but you need to wait a whopping 14 days to have access to your funds.

If you look at the gigs and people featured on the front page of fiverr now, you'll notice the vast majority of them (including myself) are showing up as "new sellers" whilst a year or two ago, most would be level 2's with a few "Top Rated Sellers", and that's despite many of them (including myself) having been with fiverr for years (I started in 2010).

FIverr do absolutely nothing to help and encourage its sellers to upscale and grow their businesses. In fact they do exactly the opposite, by changing rules that directly impact your earnings, implement systems such as the new ranking system, over which you have absolutely no control over.

If you look at my fiverr page - www.fiverr.com/activerog - been with fiverr since 2010, earnt near $20'000 so far, although the income is now diminishing as a result of fiverr's seller ranking system which is nothing short of bizarre.

In short, fiverr is the only place I've ever heard of where you can work hard, respond quickly to buyer enquiries, deliver quality work on-time all the time, and get review after review that's 5.0, with the occasional 4.9 star reviews like these: (note the common thread, QUICK delivery, QUICK response).

* Very quick to respond, gave me exactly what I wanted and kept it quick and simple. Would recommend!

* Fast service. Ordered before I went to bed and woke up with it complete! Used for an intro to an escape room type lesson for my class. My students are going to love it!

* Simple and fast

* I bought this for a meme video. I'm very happy with the result! Rog created this very quickly and exactly as specified.

* Rog is the king. Delivers 100% accuracy every time, and extremely quick. True professional and top lad.

I was starting out running my own Adwords banner and buying ad space on meme and gaming sites to promote some of my more funny and novelty gigs and to boost my business volume and build my ranking and reviews.

I work in sales and marketing as a marketing consultant to local businesses, and I stress that customer satisfaction is absolutely paramount, they must perceive good value for money, and they must simplify and streamline their business operations to ensure they always deliver on-time.

My fiverr business model is very simple, first thing in the morning, I answer all inbound messages, check my notifications, bring up the jobs to be done and complete them, and if during the day any express orders come in, I shoot them at night, then also check messages and notifications before calling it a night.

This has been my daily business routine except on holiday mode, and as a result, buyers are initially quite surprised as to the speed of delivery of my orders, hence constant raving good reviews.

You'd think fiverr would be right behind me, considering that of every $5 I earn, they take a whopping $1!?!?!?

I invested heavily back into my fiverr business with new LED lighting and semi-professional 4K camera equipment, a $329 Rode noise cancelling, studio microphone, when I reached "Top Level Seller" status. I thought I'd springboard this business, as incoming orders were on the increase after I invested in some more banner advertising to promote my gigs (remember, I'm doing the advertising and promoting whilst fiverr is taking $1 out of every $5 I earn, whilst scheming ways to screw their sellers)...

Which they did, by finishing and disallowing the category "Testimonials & Reviews by Actors", and my income and revenue dropped some 20-25%. Stupid idiots at fiverr aren't realising that I get people asking me in messages "hey do you do testimonials", and I say yes, of course. It's just fiverr has removed that category.

Without those gigs, my revenue dropped, and I was no longer meeting the requirements to be a "Top Rated Seller" anyway. I'm not even sure if that means anything different to being a level 2, you're still being stung for $1 for every $5 you earn, looks cool having that top rated badge though.

Anyways, back to Level 2, and I keep doing the same thing. Shooting videos once or twice a day, responding to messages twice a day, and often in-between using the app, responding quickly, delivering on-time, 100% and getting the reviews to back this up.

Another month passes, no response from customer support, and I'm demoted to Level 1.

Now I'm "No Level" - just like a new person that's just signing up as a seller for the very first time, what's really bizarre and weird is when you look at my fiverr gigs, even though I'm a "New Seller", you can see thousands of 5.0 star reviews, the odd 4.9, and one review after another raving on about how great this guy is, how he responds so quickly, delivers fast, always on-time, and total satisfaction.

It's a similar scenario with other demoted sellers, I don't know what fiverr is trying to achieve on its fiverr.com front page where some gigs are shown and featured. Now it's primarly 'new sellers', most of whom have been here for years, previously being Level 2 and TRS's, now cut back to size with a 7 gigs (services offered) limit (limiting income potential)

All I can say is that it's clear to see fiverr is run by a bunch of complete morons who have absolutely no idea how to grow a business, instead doing precisely the opposite, by complicating things, screwing things around, directly impacting the income of its sellers (and in turn also declining THEIR revenue inflows)

Bizarre! Like i said in the beginning, you're not running your own business by being on fiverr. Now I run a t-shirt business on-line on www.tkshirts.tk - that's running my own business, because nobody can change the rules to reduce my income, my website, my marketing, I actually get some marketing support from PayPal. Fiverr gives the website and app, and the whole thing works well, but until about a year ago, it has becoming more difficult and expensive (as far as my banner ad spend, promoting my gigs), and I haven't done any external advertising for my fiverr gigs aside from my own facebook and instagram pages. Before I'd be earning $400+ per month on fiverr, spending $70 to $100 on google and facebook ads promoting my fiverr services, and getting quite a few click-throughs, fiverr should be supportive towards its active and longest-serving members such as myself, not continually mess things up and make it harder and harder to earn a quid.