I’m not sure if I’m the only one that’s experienced this, but I feel like I’m getting punished as a seller when the buyer orders more than they need, and it bugs me to no end that I can only add to an existing order rather than reduce it.
To clarify what I mean, all of my gigs revolve around word count - i.e. “I will proofread/write x number of words for $x”. Recently, I’ve had some buyers submit orders for 5,000 words. Whilst on paper that sounds great, after doing the work and talking to them, we’ve established that actually they only needed 1,500 words. But we can’t reduce the amount of words in their original order request through the resolution centre - instead, we have to cancel the order and then re-submit it with the adjusted word count. And it’s really getting on my nerves.
Why? Because as the seller, I get punished for it! There’s no other option than to cancel, which affects my Order Completion metric, and I worry that it signals to buyers than they should avoid me because I’m prolifically cancelling work without them knowing why. Sure, I can then complete the new order they send me, but that doesn’t really solve the problem.
For example, let’s say I’ve completed 18 out of 20 orders (90%) and I want to work really hard to increase my order completion rate. Someone orders too much, so I now have 21 orders. If we cancel and re-send it for me to complete, my new rate would be (I think - someone please correct me if I’m wrong) 18 out of 21 (86%), rather than 19 out of 21 (91%) if I could just complete the order (i.e. by reducing the scale of the order without cancelling).
If I’m wrong, and it actually would be 19 out of 21, then fine. But I still find it really irritating that we have to go through the unnecessarily long process of cancelling/re-ordering because we can’t reduce the size of the order! Right? Idk!