After a mutual cancellation, my orders have screeched to a halt

[katiekoschalk]

I offer writing gigs. I had a mutual cancellation on March 24th because the buyer didn’t read my gig description and was requesting something I don’t offer. This cancellation brought my completion rate down to 96%. No big deal, I thought. However, ever since then, my orders and messages have essentially stopped. I’m getting 1-2 orders every few days (if that), whereas before I was getting around 10 orders a day and numerous messages. I had been making $4k for the last few months steadily, so I quit my full-time job to do Fiverr full-time. Now, I’ve barely made $500 so far this month.

Does anyone know how long my profile will be affected due to this cancellation? Has anyone experienced this before and did your business eventually recover? After how long? I contacted CS about it and they told me that they regularly rotate profiles to give everyone a chance. Not quite sure I’m buying that that’s what’s happening though. Pretty bummed right now, especially since this cancellation wasn’t my fault and I literally depend on this money to pay my bills. Ugh. Advice? Stories? Encouragement? Thank you!

[looseink]

I am also a writer on Fiverr.

I’ve been a full-time freelancer since 2016.

That’s because I use Fiverr as just one of several streams of income.

What you may have encountered is partly due to the Gig Rotation that Fiverr CS mentioned. Plus, in the past few months there have been in the neighbourhood of 50 new Fiverr Sellers joining the platform daily.

You and I are dealing with an ever-growing pond of competition.

Good luck.

[katiekoschalk]

I am also a writer on Fiverr.

I’ve been a full-time freelancer since 2016.

That’s because I use Fiverr as just one of several streams of income.

What you may have encountered is partly due to the Gig Rotation that Fiverr CS mentioned. Plus, in the past few months there have been in the neighbourhood of 50 new Fiverr Sellers joining the platform daily.

You and I are dealing with an ever-growing pond of competition.

Good luck.

Thank you for your insight. This is definitely a lesson not to put all my eggs in one basket!

Wow, that’s a lot of new sellers every day. It’s hard to compete with the low prices of new sellers.

[benedictrm]

Thank you for your insight. This is definitely a lesson not to put all my eggs in one basket!

Wow, that’s a lot of new sellers every day. It’s hard to compete with the low prices of new sellers.

Don’t compete with the stupidly low prices of even more stupid new sellers.

If you were looking to buy a used car for your daughter, would you be looking for the very cheapest car you could find? Or would there be several other factors more important than price alone that led you to the right outcome?

Price fairly for what it takes for you to do a great job. If the client cannot understand that, they are not your type of buyer. This I part of how you differentiate yourself from all those who do their best to look exactly like each other.

🙂

[zeus777]

Hi there,
I would have stopped you if you had posted a “I’m thinking of quitting my job and going full time on Fiverr” post before this, and from my personal experience 99% of the replies to posts like that is “Don’t do it!!”

I’m sorry you got caught up in the gig-rotation thingy here, but I checked your gigs and it seems like you are doing very well, I think your prices are good ( please don’t lower them!), so I’d like to believe you will bounce back eventually.

Since I am no marketing expert I can’t tell you how to do it ( just posting it on Twitter/Facebook isn’t enough for sure…), but maybe you should use this extra time and figure out how to promote your gigs.
Do you have any friends around you who might know that kind of stuff?

Good luck!

[teachernita]

This gig rotation is due to this: If there are as many as 50 new sellers joining Fiverr per day, this stands to reason why they are rotating gigs.

When you are new on Fiverr, they give you about 3 months to feature on the front pages. This means, imagine 50 new sellers every day, this explains why other sellers (sellers who have been here for years, and have a good standing with Fiverr), are not featuring.

Most, not all, but most of these buyers post their gigs here, and I read them. The English is incredibly poor, their service is over ‘populated’, so basically Fiverr is not keeping the good sellers happy, but accommodating the new sellers, whether good or not. Eventually buyers will go elsewhere because of a poor service. I am genuinely concerned.

I run my business like this, service top quality and do away with poor quality. Any business should do this.

[katiekoschalk]

Hi there,

I would have stopped you if you had posted a “I’m thinking of quitting my job and going full time on Fiverr” post before this, and from my personal experience 99% of the replies to posts like that is “Don’t do it!!”

I’m sorry you got caught up in the gig-rotation thingy here, but I checked your gigs and it seems like you are doing very well, I think your prices are good ( please don’t lower them!), so I’d like to believe you will bounce back eventually.

Since I am no marketing expert I can’t tell you how to do it ( just posting it on Twitter/Facebook isn’t enough for sure…), but maybe you should use this extra time and figure out how to promote your gigs.

Do you have any friends around you who might know that kind of stuff?

Good luck!

Thanks for your reply. Ha, yeah. I think I jumped the gun on quitting my job, but hopefully things will pick back up soon. I’m going to keep my prices as they are because I think they’re fair for the amount of time and effort I put in.

I’ll look into promoting my gigs. I haven’t tried that yet.