How do you deal with late orders when offering services?

[alex_brown]

Most of my service-offering orders end up as very late orders because I need more details about the service, need their opinion or should ask them between 2 choices. The buyer takes his/her time to respond, and I end up having an extremely late order which messes up my rank.

If I put a somewhat longer time to calculate the buyer’s answering delay in, I would decrease my sales since they would purchase a 1-day delivery instead of 5. If I keep it as is, it will hurt my late deliveries rank. If I pretend to deliver the order to stop the timer, it will be bad for me and for the buyer.

What can I do?/What do you do?

[torrelles]

I’d personally increase my deliver time. If your content and final delivery is good enough, they’ll keep coming. I could personally deliver my VOs in 2 hours if necessary, yet I’ve configured my gigs for 3 a days delivery. Just to keep things safe.

I’ve been lucky enough to have buyers answer rather quickly to my doubts, but pretty please, if the buyer doesn’t answer within a reasonable time period (24 hours), you should totally reflect that in the final rating.

[mariokluser]

I don’t offer 1-day-deliver. I always set the delivery time higher than it actually will be. I’m always much faster. Never got any problems.

Most important: I don’t begin on any order if I don’t have all the information.

[josephinegold]

Increase your delivery time.

[reskiyoer]

Use the requirements section. You can configure it in a way that the client must provide you all informations you need. Try to cover everything from previous work and from your mind to request everything you need in advance. If you do this, the counter will only start when the buyer has provided all informations requested. Sadly, some buyers don’t get it. In these cases you should be quite quickly available to help them.

[darshanc]

extract information as much as possible initially only, according that set the delivery time and for safer side add 1 extra day always. after getting order update partial work within few hours and customer will be impressed and give you more time for work.

[grattifix]

Getting all the information from the buyer immediately they order is what I advise so that you can get to work immediately. And deliver on time

[spears22]

always keep an extra 1 day when you create a gig.and if you fail to deliver on time you can extend the delivery time using 'Resolve now" …once buyer accept your request to extend the delivery time…you done!!

[capitalquality]

If it’s not a basic gig, I go through buyer requirements in the message system before sending a custom offer. I lose potential buyers this way as some get fed up with all the questions but if they don’t know or can’t articulate what they want I don’t want to do their gig anyway.
All my gigs have a mandatory requirements section and this means that for about 80-90% of the gigs I get all the information I need up front before the gig starts.
None of my gigs are 24 hours any more, even though for basic 30 min gigs I often complete in that time. I’m sure I lose sales that way but it’s better than failing to deliver in the timeframe for any reason. I play around with the delivery times based on what else I’ve got on. Sometimes it’s 2 days, sometimes 4.
If I am running out of time and I’m not getting a response from the buyer, I either deliver the gig to my best guess if the buyer seems reasonable. I put a message in saying I wasn’t sure about something so I’ll change it for free if I got it wrong. Or if the buyer’s a pain, I cancel.