Are Buyer Requests A Good Thing For Sellers Or Not?

[smiler3d]

Please discuss whether you’ve found responding to buyer requests to be good for you as a seller or not.

All discussions about BR welcome! 🙂

[visualstudios]

As I said in the other thread, not useful for me. Low budgets and very low reply rate, not worth the time it takes to read and try to understand what the client wants (if it is even understandable). Just a sample, opened them right now:

None of these people will pay anywhere near enough, half are scams or other sellers, and at least 1 in 5 is utterly incomprehensible. You can get the very occasional great deal, but it’s usually a time waste. And don’t forget, the great deal will be FLOODED with competition.

Think about it - to get a good, “savvy” client, you need to take some time to write a proposal, go over materials, etc - otherwise you probably won’t get the job. This is only worth to do in orders well above $100, and even then it’s a tossup, since there’s a good chance you will spend an hour of work for literally nothing. To compensate for this, you can increase prices on your proposals to make it up when you do get an order, but this will make it increasingly difficult to win any proposals, negating any positive effect.

Finally, there are better alternatives. You go to buyer requests on Fiverr, you are competing with all the other sellers there. You go to craigslist, reddit, facebook, your local paper, and you can find people that need your services with a fraction of the direct competition, that you can then redirect here. And guess what, no limit of 10 per day.

All in all, not recommended vs just setting up the best shopfront you can and waiting for the customers to go by.

[maitasun]

As I said in the other thread, not useful for me. Low budgets and very low reply rate, not worth the time it takes to read and try to understand what the client wants (if it is even understandable). Just a sample, opened them right now:

Captura de ecrã 2019-03-31, às 20.43.53.png2666×2372 481 KB

None of these people will pay anywhere near enough, half are scams or other sellers, and at least 1 in 5 is utterly incomprehensible. You can get the very occasional great deal, but it’s usually a time waste. And don’t forget, the great deal will be FLOODED with competition.

Think about it - to get a good, “savvy” client, you need to take some time to write a proposal, go over materials, etc - otherwise you probably won’t get the job. This is only worth to do in orders well above $100, and even then it’s a tossup, since there’s a good chance you will spend an hour of work for literally nothing. To compensate for this, you can increase prices on your proposals to make it up when you do get an order, but this will make it increasingly difficult to win any proposals, negating any positive effect.

Finally, there are better alternatives. You go to buyer requests on Fiverr, you are competing with all the other sellers there. You go to craigslist, reddit, facebook, your local paper, and you can find people that need your services with a fraction of the direct competition, that you can then redirect here. And guess what, no limit of 10 per day.

All in all, not recommended vs just setting up the best shopfront you can and waiting for the customers to go by.

As I said in the other thread, not useful for me. Low budgets and very low reply rate, not worth the time it takes to read and try to understand what the client wants

None of these people will pay anywhere near enough,

I think that in honor to people reading and interacting in this thread, you should have said in first place that you’re a Pro before giving your opinion which is respected BTW.

[visualstudios]

As I said in the other thread, not useful for me. Low budgets and very low reply rate, not worth the time it takes to read and try to understand what the client wants

None of these people will pay anywhere near enough,

I think that in honor to people reading and interacting in this thread, you should have said in first place that you’re a Pro before giving your opinion which is respected BTW.

I’m a pro now, but this applied before. I didn’t get a single BR on this account, and it only became pro about 8 months into it, when I was already a level 2 seller (you can check on my profile that my number of reviews is much higher than the reviews I have on active gigs, since all non-pro gigs have been paused).

And while my prices increased as a pro, they were already too high for most BR’s and they would keep increasing anyway - price for the value of what you provide, not based on some artificial level or badge.

[hanshuber16]

So far, I have had a wonderful experience with buyer requests. In fact, I have found many regular buyers from the BR section. Contrary to what a lot of people say about BRs, I’ve come across several sensible buyers who were willing to pay my quoted price.

In fact, I was able to land a couple of “big” projects ($500+) directly from the BR section (the reason why I took on such big projects without worrying about the possibility of a CB was that these buyers were established authors who already had several published books to their name 😉 ).

I sure do come across several BRs that ask for a piece of the moon to be delivered to their doorstep for just $5. But, I just ignore such requests and only focus on the sensible ones. I am also sure that the BR experience varies greatly across the various categories/sub-categories on Fiverr. Some sub-categories might have more reasonable/sensible offers than the others. 🙂

[resdevpro]

As a buyer and new to fiverr, I can give you a reason why I switched to creating requests.

1. Sifting through a category takes more time, and becomes disconcerting seeing repeated identical work done by different artists.

2. Personaly I keep my request low to find the hungry, but talented. And once they show they have talent I open the project to them. Or I then increase the budget on the next gig.

3. However with that said I still 10-15 artist applying for a gig they have no qualifications in. And personally I have yet to figure out the levels/pro and everyone gets 5 stars thing.

However occasionally, and most recently I find a seller that hits the mark and does the system justice.

Example you have a budget for 500 to get some work done, and with all the copying and generating programs out there you cant afford to bet on the wrong horse.

With that said I have read the horror stories of bad buyers out there with the countless revisions or not paying for work they saw already. Wish there was a way to vet both sides of the house.

• Cheers

[wooden_fish]

As a buyer and new to fiverr, I can give you a reason why I switched to creating requests.

1. Sifting through a category takes more time, and becomes disconcerting seeing repeated identical work done by different artists.

2. Personaly I keep my request low to find the hungry, but talented. And once they show they have talent I open the project to them. Or I then increase the budget on the next gig.

3. However with that said I still 10-15 artist applying for a gig they have no qualifications in. And personally I have yet to figure out the levels/pro and everyone gets 5 stars thing.

However occasionally, and most recently I find a seller that hits the mark and does the system justice.

Example you have a budget for 500 to get some work done, and with all the copying and generating programs out there you cant afford to bet on the wrong horse.

With that said I have read the horror stories of bad buyers out there with the countless revisions or not paying for work they saw already. Wish there was a way to vet both sides of the house.

• Cheers

everyone gets 5 stars thing.

You can blame Fiverr for creating a system where anything less is punishable.

[resdevpro]

everyone gets 5 stars thing.

You can blame Fiverr for creating a system where anything less is punishable.

I figured that out, was even going to make a suggestion on making the stars more of an automated procees so its less damaging and even less inflating.