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2 Years Fiverr - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Brief Buyers Review)


tomconti

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I love numbers, so here we go: 53 orders, 9 cancellations, currently 2 very promising ongoing orders and 1 I am ready to kick to the curb. All of those cancellations were pretty exhausting except the few that were “not delivered on time”.

Some of the sellers who delivered outstanding and unique jobs (manual sand animation being at my very top of the list), are not on fiverr anymore, so are the majority of sellers resulting in cancelled orders, all gone for good?

Let’s dive in and start with THE GOOD

There are MANY gold nuggets in the marketplace. Often, I find that the very best (I know, it’s subjective) are not necessarily listed as the very first within search results. The marketplace seems to be a little “cleaner” now compared to how it used to be when I first signed up but, even back then, it was always possible to find quality gigs from sellers who actually cared about their profession and on top of that, the pricing is and was more than fair.

Good, I find that I can contact each seller individually to discuss my projects vs having an open chat with multiple “sellers” as I know it from another platform.

Enough with good, now comes the bad, Bad, BAD

As stated above, there are many good sellers on here BUT; someone can have a giant PRO badge, be promoted to the sky by fiverr and still, I find many new and lower ranked sellers to have lot’s of potential and it is a pity that, I need to dig so deep into the marketplace just to find them.

Also worth to mention: the vetting process of sellers can be very time-consuming. The marketplace is much cleaner now but I wish, at some point, someone would just grab a broom and start filtering out all of the sellers that are pretty much guaranteed to deliver poor work.

The Ugly

This is something that really gets to me. It is one thing to risk a poor experience with a seller on here and as one can tell by my stats, cancellations are not really rare. It is not like I like cancelling orders. I’d rather have useable results in the end but, some of the experiences I had were simply beyond bad, involving scam, stolen work and when someone delivers such work, there is no way I could possibly accept it, for so many reasons.

There are currently two categories in particular within the marketplace, I’d call very scammy. According to what I can see, roughly 90% of those sellers declare to help you but in reality, using their services will potentially punish you and your business permanently. The cake goes to SEO-related-work. Once buyers find out what those services do to their business, they will not only doubt the quality of that particular categoriy but, chances are they will question fiverr as a professional platform altogether. Sure, you can blame the buyer for buying such services but generally, wouldn’t it be much better and easier to get rid of such scams in the first place?

These are my two cents. Not really expecting a reply on this but, feel free to share your own thoughts and stats as I am curious to see if you’ve had similar experiences.

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I love numbers, so here we go: 53 orders, 9 cancellations, currently 2 very promising ongoing orders and 1 I am ready to kick to the curb. All of those cancellations were pretty exhausting except the few that were “not delivered on time”.

Some of the sellers who delivered outstanding and unique jobs (manual sand animation being at my very top of the list), are not on fiverr anymore, so are the majority of sellers resulting in cancelled orders, all gone for good?

Let’s dive in and start with THE GOOD

There are MANY gold nuggets in the marketplace. Often, I find that the very best (I know, it’s subjective) are not necessarily listed as the very first within search results. The marketplace seems to be a little “cleaner” now compared to how it used to be when I first signed up but, even back then, it was always possible to find quality gigs from sellers who actually cared about their profession and on top of that, the pricing is and was more than fair.

Good, I find that I can contact each seller individually to discuss my projects vs having an open chat with multiple “sellers” as I know it from another platform.

Enough with good, now comes the bad, Bad, BAD

As stated above, there are many good sellers on here BUT; someone can have a giant PRO badge, be promoted to the sky by fiverr and still, I find many new and lower ranked sellers to have lot’s of potential and it is a pity that, I need to dig so deep into the marketplace just to find them.

Also worth to mention: the vetting process of sellers can be very time-consuming. The marketplace is much cleaner now but I wish, at some point, someone would just grab a broom and start filtering out all of the sellers that are pretty much guaranteed to deliver poor work.

The Ugly

This is something that really gets to me. It is one thing to risk a poor experience with a seller on here and as one can tell by my stats, cancellations are not really rare. It is not like I like cancelling orders. I’d rather have useable results in the end but, some of the experiences I had were simply beyond bad, involving scam, stolen work and when someone delivers such work, there is no way I could possibly accept it, for so many reasons.

There are currently two categories in particular within the marketplace, I’d call very scammy. According to what I can see, roughly 90% of those sellers declare to help you but in reality, using their services will potentially punish you and your business permanently. The cake goes to SEO-related-work. Once buyers find out what those services do to their business, they will not only doubt the quality of that particular categoriy but, chances are they will question fiverr as a professional platform altogether. Sure, you can blame the buyer for buying such services but generally, wouldn’t it be much better and easier to get rid of such scams in the first place?

These are my two cents. Not really expecting a reply on this but, feel free to share your own thoughts and stats as I am curious to see if you’ve had similar experiences.

The cake goes to SEO-related-work.

I think that calling out an entire category as being ‘scams’ might be a little unfair on the sellers who are offering genuine services. 😉

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I love numbers, so here we go: 53 orders, 9 cancellations, currently 2 very promising ongoing orders and 1 I am ready to kick to the curb. All of those cancellations were pretty exhausting except the few that were “not delivered on time”.

Some of the sellers who delivered outstanding and unique jobs (manual sand animation being at my very top of the list), are not on fiverr anymore, so are the majority of sellers resulting in cancelled orders, all gone for good?

Let’s dive in and start with THE GOOD

There are MANY gold nuggets in the marketplace. Often, I find that the very best (I know, it’s subjective) are not necessarily listed as the very first within search results. The marketplace seems to be a little “cleaner” now compared to how it used to be when I first signed up but, even back then, it was always possible to find quality gigs from sellers who actually cared about their profession and on top of that, the pricing is and was more than fair.

Good, I find that I can contact each seller individually to discuss my projects vs having an open chat with multiple “sellers” as I know it from another platform.

Enough with good, now comes the bad, Bad, BAD

As stated above, there are many good sellers on here BUT; someone can have a giant PRO badge, be promoted to the sky by fiverr and still, I find many new and lower ranked sellers to have lot’s of potential and it is a pity that, I need to dig so deep into the marketplace just to find them.

Also worth to mention: the vetting process of sellers can be very time-consuming. The marketplace is much cleaner now but I wish, at some point, someone would just grab a broom and start filtering out all of the sellers that are pretty much guaranteed to deliver poor work.

The Ugly

This is something that really gets to me. It is one thing to risk a poor experience with a seller on here and as one can tell by my stats, cancellations are not really rare. It is not like I like cancelling orders. I’d rather have useable results in the end but, some of the experiences I had were simply beyond bad, involving scam, stolen work and when someone delivers such work, there is no way I could possibly accept it, for so many reasons.

There are currently two categories in particular within the marketplace, I’d call very scammy. According to what I can see, roughly 90% of those sellers declare to help you but in reality, using their services will potentially punish you and your business permanently. The cake goes to SEO-related-work. Once buyers find out what those services do to their business, they will not only doubt the quality of that particular categoriy but, chances are they will question fiverr as a professional platform altogether. Sure, you can blame the buyer for buying such services but generally, wouldn’t it be much better and easier to get rid of such scams in the first place?

These are my two cents. Not really expecting a reply on this but, feel free to share your own thoughts and stats as I am curious to see if you’ve had similar experiences.

According to what I can see, roughly 90% of those sellers

I think that calling out an entire category as being ‘scams’ might be a little unfair on the sellers who are offering genuine services. 😉

Yes, that is why I do not call out the entire category.😏 But just yesterday I discovered and reported a network that was probably using proxies and a bot to create 4000+ scammy SEO gigs here on fiverr with different profiles. Sure, there are a few that provide a good service but I hope you get the picture.

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It’s difficult to say what is scammy and what is not. Your opinion (and mine) of what is good for SEO and bad for SEO is just that - opinion. Some things are more obvious of course but many are not.
Is a guest post ok? Usually yes.
What if that site then posts tons of them or the owner decides to buy a million links? This may destroy the site’s SEO value affecting your guest post too.
What if the site was built on a black-listed domain?
Etc.

Is getting 10 profile backlinks going to have any effect? On a new site it might be a little positive or a little negative. On an established site it’s likely to have a negligible effect either way.

Anyway, so many possibilities and while I agree with most of your post, with 53 purchases, I think you are stretching it a bit with an assertion about 90% of gigs in a category with over 10,000 gigs.

Edit. Also - while I didn’t look deeply into the details you sent, the gigs you reported could have been placed on that site by someone using Fiverrs referral or affiliate programs and be nothing to do with the sellers themselves.
Edit 2: As you asked in the OP, here are my buying stats. Around half the cancellations happened when I started here and tried out things. 3 of them were for “funny gigs” that I bought without high hopes for or in curiosity.

image.png.8c352365a498e74d9e27eeaff9cf95c1.png
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It’s difficult to say what is scammy and what is not. Your opinion (and mine) of what is good for SEO and bad for SEO is just that - opinion. Some things are more obvious of course but many are not.

Is a guest post ok? Usually yes.

What if that site then posts tons of them or the owner decides to buy a million links? This may destroy the site’s SEO value affecting your guest post too.

What if the site was built on a black-listed domain?

Etc.

Is getting 10 profile backlinks going to have any effect? On a new site it might be a little positive or a little negative. On an established site it’s likely to have a negligible effect either way.

Anyway, so many possibilities and while I agree with most of your post, with 53 purchases, I think you are stretching it a bit with an assertion about 90% of gigs in a category with over 10,000 gigs.

Edit. Also - while I didn’t look deeply into the details you sent, the gigs you reported could have been placed on that site by someone using Fiverrs referral or affiliate programs and be nothing to do with the sellers themselves.

Edit 2: As you asked in the OP, here are my buying stats. Around half the cancellations happened when I started here and tried out things. 3 of them were for “funny gigs” that I bought without high hopes for or in curiosity.

You never know what an owner will do in the future as you can only look at the current PA, DA and stats. It would be nice to be able to predict any websites future, hm? 🙂

But I think we can agree that good SEO services differ from what you generally see within fiverr, I order SEO services every other day for many years now, I always do my own SEO to start out with when I first publish my websites - I believe to know the difference between a good or a very questionable service.

Out of all of my purchases on fiverr, I may only had 2 or 3 SEO gigs to begin with but never for any of my main sites. My conclusion is based upon looking at and analyzing the category and not scaling up any experience I had to summarise an entire category, that would be indeed wrong.

You may notice all of the promises and guaranteed there are to rank your website on fiverr as lots of them do not even hide their technique and mention spammy ways to begin with such as, pushing profile backlinks, using GSA bots, etc…

However, I am not sure if it is in fiverrs interest at all to get rid of such gigs because even though these gigs do not help anyone, they do seem to sell quite well. Example, I was able to prove at least two scams which included pretty severe copyright infringements and up to this day, the seller has multiple profiles and gigs, offering the same “service” and his services do not even have to do anything with SEO BUT he sells good, apparently to people that cannot verify copyright registered work.

The network I reported yesterday is very likely to be very far from being an affiliate but, you are right it cannot be excluded. It is just very unlikely as we are not looking at a few chosen gigs he would promote as an “affiliate” but instead, he “promotes” 4000+ SEO gigs which seem to be VERY alike.

I appreciate your opinion, I don’t really care so much about the SEO aspect here on fiverr but is just something I observed and my writing above is just my observation and experience, hope it does not offend anybody in any way and as I said, there are MANY gold nuggets offering good work and as you can see, I still have good experiences and keep buying here 😀

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You never know what an owner will do in the future as you can only look at the current PA, DA and stats. It would be nice to be able to predict any websites future, hm? 🙂

But I think we can agree that good SEO services differ from what you generally see within fiverr, I order SEO services every other day for many years now, I always do my own SEO to start out with when I first publish my websites - I believe to know the difference between a good or a very questionable service.

Out of all of my purchases on fiverr, I may only had 2 or 3 SEO gigs to begin with but never for any of my main sites. My conclusion is based upon looking at and analyzing the category and not scaling up any experience I had to summarise an entire category, that would be indeed wrong.

You may notice all of the promises and guaranteed there are to rank your website on fiverr as lots of them do not even hide their technique and mention spammy ways to begin with such as, pushing profile backlinks, using GSA bots, etc…

However, I am not sure if it is in fiverrs interest at all to get rid of such gigs because even though these gigs do not help anyone, they do seem to sell quite well. Example, I was able to prove at least two scams which included pretty severe copyright infringements and up to this day, the seller has multiple profiles and gigs, offering the same “service” and his services do not even have to do anything with SEO BUT he sells good, apparently to people that cannot verify copyright registered work.

The network I reported yesterday is very likely to be very far from being an affiliate but, you are right it cannot be excluded. It is just very unlikely as we are not looking at a few chosen gigs he would promote as an “affiliate” but instead, he “promotes” 4000+ SEO gigs which seem to be VERY alike.

I appreciate your opinion, I don’t really care so much about the SEO aspect here on fiverr but is just something I observed and my writing above is just my observation and experience, hope it does not offend anybody in any way and as I said, there are MANY gold nuggets offering good work and as you can see, I still have good experiences and keep buying here 😀

Sigh, just had a quick look at the SEO guy I hired almost 3 years ago and cancelled - he had delivered absolute muck - it was links to a dead site of mine that I used for testing things.

Anyway, it was $50 and I cancelled rather than review although I did report to CS and the seller lost their TRS.

Now ZOOM forward to today and the seller is still operating, has upped his prices 4X and now has 36 orders in queue…

It is definitely not bad for Fiverr from an income perspective but a lot of people are getting pure rubbish.

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According to what I can see, roughly 90% of those sellers

I think that calling out an entire category as being ‘scams’ might be a little unfair on the sellers who are offering genuine services. 😉

Yes, that is why I do not call out the entire category.😏 But just yesterday I discovered and reported a network that was probably using proxies and a bot to create 4000+ scammy SEO gigs here on fiverr with different profiles. Sure, there are a few that provide a good service but I hope you get the picture.

Tom,

TL;DR

I’ll be honest, I didn’t read your entire post. It’s just too early

Plus, I’m enjoying a nice cup of

IYHO do you think it’s worth it to purchase gigs offering SEO reports or SEO action plans?

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Good SEO isn’t cheap and with how complex it is your average buyer would have no idea what is good or bad.

Good SEO isn’t cheap and with how complex it is your average buyer would have no idea what is good or bad.

Yea, that is the thing unfortunately, you often need to learn the hard way. But when you first come in contact with something like “I will do x and x to rank your site which will generate organic traffic” <-- as a business owner with no experience you are inclined to give it a try - after all, these services often only cost a few bucks. What you don’t know is that you are initiating a big mess, it will require lot’s of time to clean it up and sometimes, is not even possible. So you are stuck with a business that is being punished by search engines <-- if that was your main business, good luck - you may as well forget about google and co altogether.

Good SEO is very expensive and it has a lot to do with how competitive your targeted keywords are. I know a few guys that do not even look at your site if your monthly budget is below 10k.

SEO reports

Good Morning, enjoy your coffee 😀 Yes, as long as they do not promise to actually achieve specific ranking or “DO” something it is very safe to say it is fine. They probably use a website to generate your SEO report - these report seem to differ a bit from service to service, but generally, there is nothing to worry about it here and they are good to give you a basic idea how to improve your sites chance to be indexed and ranked properly. SEO action plans are usually the result you get once a report is generated, also fine.

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Sigh, just had a quick look at the SEO guy I hired almost 3 years ago and cancelled - he had delivered absolute muck - it was links to a dead site of mine that I used for testing things.

Anyway, it was $50 and I cancelled rather than review although I did report to CS and the seller lost their TRS.

Now ZOOM forward to today and the seller is still operating, has upped his prices 4X and now has 36 orders in queue…

It is definitely not bad for Fiverr from an income perspective but a lot of people are getting pure rubbish.

Now ZOOM forward to today and the seller is still operating, has upped his prices 4X and now has 36 orders in queue…

This is why Fiverr is becoming a trash heap. Sellers like the one you just described fire of almost automated deliveries which require little to no work. Buyers often don’t know how to judge the quality of what they are buying. The result is a search and monthly review system which is always leveraged in their favor.

On one side you have Fiverr Pro. On the other you have Pro Criminal Negligence & Skulduggery. Meanwhile, the middle ground of sellers whom buyers might benefit from buying from, are thinned out and mixed around every day so they don’t stand a chance in hades.

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Good SEO isn’t cheap and with how complex it is your average buyer would have no idea what is good or bad.

Yea, that is the thing unfortunately, you often need to learn the hard way. But when you first come in contact with something like “I will do x and x to rank your site which will generate organic traffic” <-- as a business owner with no experience you are inclined to give it a try - after all, these services often only cost a few bucks. What you don’t know is that you are initiating a big mess, it will require lot’s of time to clean it up and sometimes, is not even possible. So you are stuck with a business that is being punished by search engines <-- if that was your main business, good luck - you may as well forget about google and co altogether.

Good SEO is very expensive and it has a lot to do with how competitive your targeted keywords are. I know a few guys that do not even look at your site if your monthly budget is below 10k.

SEO reports

Good Morning, enjoy your coffee 😀 Yes, as long as they do not promise to actually achieve specific ranking or “DO” something it is very safe to say it is fine. They probably use a website to generate your SEO report - these report seem to differ a bit from service to service, but generally, there is nothing to worry about it here and they are good to give you a basic idea how to improve your sites chance to be indexed and ranked properly. SEO action plans are usually the result you get once a report is generated, also fine.

I appreciate the feedback. 🙂 You seem like a knowledgeable guy when it comes to SEO. I’m a novice :baby:t4: so when I see topics like yours it intrigues me. Besides, I just don’t want to spend a bunch of money on rubbish. Btw~ I’ve never purchased an SEO gig on 5r. Of course, my expectations wouldn’t be like “hey, can you make my website rank high on 1st page” or something silly LOLz. 😅

I don’t mind spending money on quality albeit realistic work. I’m just scared of buying something that will cause my site to get penalized by Mr. Google.

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Now ZOOM forward to today and the seller is still operating, has upped his prices 4X and now has 36 orders in queue…

This is why Fiverr is becoming a trash heap. Sellers like the one you just described fire of almost automated deliveries which require little to no work. Buyers often don’t know how to judge the quality of what they are buying. The result is a search and monthly review system which is always leveraged in their favor.

On one side you have Fiverr Pro. On the other you have Pro Criminal Negligence & Skulduggery. Meanwhile, the middle ground of sellers whom buyers might benefit from buying from, are thinned out and mixed around every day so they don’t stand a chance in hades.

This is why Fiverr is becoming a trash heap. Sellers like the one you just described fire of almost automated deliveries which require little to no work. Buyers often don’t know how to judge the quality of what they are buying. The result is a search and monthly review system which is always leveraged in their favor.

At the time, I was mildly impressed that Fiverr took my complaint seriously enough to demote him. Looking back, I cannot understand why they would clearly agree with my complaint yet let him continue to operate here. At the time, I wasn’t even a seller, just a buyer with a handful of purchases totaling less than $100.

I guess if Fiverr doesn’t offer these types of gigs, there are dozens of others who will.

Edit: Correction - I was a seller, but very new. Was not involved on the forum at the time.

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I appreciate the feedback. 🙂 You seem like a knowledgeable guy when it comes to SEO. I’m a novice :baby:t4: so when I see topics like yours it intrigues me. Besides, I just don’t want to spend a bunch of money on rubbish. Btw~ I’ve never purchased an SEO gig on 5r. Of course, my expectations wouldn’t be like “hey, can you make my website rank high on 1st page” or something silly LOLz. 😅

I don’t mind spending money on quality albeit realistic work. I’m just scared of buying something that will cause my site to get penalized by Mr. Google.

😀 very welcome

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😀

Yanno, just to hear more about SEO. SEO & Eggs 🍳 yum. OK, I’m a goofball. 😛

Whitehat SEO: This is where you find quality vs quantity and valuable content stands above all. It includes some proper keyword research, creating outstanding content (videos, articles, posts, etc…) Whitehat marketing is very valuable and it mostly requires manual work such as contacting niche-relevant high authority website owners, guest blogging, connecting with others and building relationships.

This is more my cup of 🍵 I was raised to never take shortcuts in life. To work hard for what I want, so the same thing applies to SEO. I want things to grow organically and quality over quantity.

This can literally take forever BUT if you do this with the right amount of effort and investment, it is very promising long-term and search engines love this!

Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day, so yeah. I’m patient! 😉

Another thing I’ve been noticing is Sellers offering so much for $5/$10. To each his own, however, I don’t feel comfortable spending 🥜 peanuts on SEO. I’d much rather spend more on a Seller, who is willing to go about things in a Whitehat way. Maybe a monthly upkeep or something.

I’d rather have useable results in the end but, some of the experiences I had were simply beyond bad, involving scam, stolen work and when someone delivers such work, there is no way I could possibly accept it, for so many reasons.

Recently, I placed an order with a TRS, the content received was awful (there’s no way in hell or heaven I could use the content). The icing on the 🍰 OMG, I was pissed! If I’m pleased with the work I ALWAYS tip generously. Asking me for a tip on a crappy job just infuriates me. I didn’t rate the order, I just marked it complete and was done with it.

At the end of the day, titles are meaningless to me. However, I saved a PRO gig to purchase just to give it a test run and see how it goes. I’m all about quality!

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Oh, my goodness, If I could take you out to have a cup of

Yanno, just to hear more about SEO. SEO & Eggs 🍳 yum. OK, I’m a goofball. 😛

Whitehat SEO: This is where you find quality vs quantity and valuable content stands above all. It includes some proper keyword research, creating outstanding content (videos, articles, posts, etc…) Whitehat marketing is very valuable and it mostly requires manual work such as contacting niche-relevant high authority website owners, guest blogging, connecting with others and building relationships.

This is more my cup of 🍵 I was raised to never take shortcuts in life. To work hard for what I want, so the same thing applies to SEO. I want things to grow organically and quality over quantity.

This can literally take forever BUT if you do this with the right amount of effort and investment, it is very promising long-term and search engines love this!

Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day, so yeah. I’m patient! 😉

Another thing I’ve been noticing is Sellers offering so much for $5/$10. To each his own, however, I don’t feel comfortable spending 🥜 peanuts on SEO. I’d much rather spend more on a Seller, who is willing to go about things in a Whitehat way. Maybe a monthly upkeep or something.

I’d rather have useable results in the end but, some of the experiences I had were simply beyond bad, involving scam, stolen work and when someone delivers such work, there is no way I could possibly accept it, for so many reasons.

Recently, I placed an order with a TRS, the content received was awful (there’s no way in hell or heaven I could use the content). The icing on the 🍰 OMG, I was pissed! If I’m pleased with the work I ALWAYS tip generously. Asking me for a tip on a crappy job just infuriates me. I didn’t rate the order, I just marked it complete and was done with it.

At the end of the day, titles are meaningless to me. However, I saved a PRO gig to purchase just to give it a test run and see how it goes. I’m all about quality!

The icing on the 🍰 was the TRS begged for a tip.

Oh wow 😕 So it is not fine to ask for a specific review but apparently to ask for a tip is okay. Did he mention “how much” of a tip he would like to have? 😂

I usually don’t tip unless I see that someone went that extra mile or really offered a good service way underpriced. But I tend to stick with the same sellers and I think it is rewarding for both sides.

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The icing on the 🍰 was the TRS begged for a tip.

Oh wow 😕 So it is not fine to ask for a specific review but apparently to ask for a tip is okay. Did he mention “how much” of a tip he would like to have? 😂

I usually don’t tip unless I see that someone went that extra mile or really offered a good service way underpriced. But I tend to stick with the same sellers and I think it is rewarding for both sides.

Did he mention “how much” of a tip he would like to have? 😂

The Seller didn’t ask for a 💲 amount.

However, I wouldn’t give this Seller monopoly money.

monopolymoney.png.2cd8722bd45705fe3f8b6ba9e20535e2.png

I’ve worked with some amazing Sellers, coming across a less than amazing Seller is to be expected once in a blue moon. 😃 It screwed up my amazing streak tho, grr!

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