Fiverr Community Forum

It is OK to Hire Other Sellers If You Are a Seller Yourself

Fiverr Tips Tips for Sellers
#1

I noticed a lot of “How can I do X?”, “How can I improve X?” questions while reading this forum and figured I’d use the opportunity to give some free tips.

It is ok to hire other sellers to do some work for you. It’s business. It’s normal.

What I mean by that is the following:

Say you are offering a gig, but your first language isn’t English. You can understand it well enough to complete orders, but your description/gigs have a lot of typos/bad grammar.

What you can do in this case is to hire someone else who is offering a gig that does exactly that: proofreading. It’s totally ethical and a common business practice.

Consider it a one-time investment in your business.

You want to attract customers? You want to look the part? You can deliver professional work?

Hire someone who can help you achieve that.

Another example would be:

Say you are someone who does professional proofreading work, but you absolutely suck at design and cannot manage to make your gigs look appealing.

What do you do?

You hire someone who will make the desired thumbnails and graphics for you.

I’m not sure if it’s allowed on Fiverr per sé, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t (never hurts to check, though). It’s totally normal and common business practice.

If you suck at something, get someone to do it for you.

I’m not a seller on here, but I do have a YouTube channel where I make ad-revenue and have subscriptions. I’ve also worked in IT and TV entertainment business. It’s just how it’s done.

Hope it helps. Cheers.

Flip Side

There is, of course, the other side of things, where a seller is hiring someone else to then resell their work. That is something entirely different and for a lot of people it’s considered unethical, but that is not what this post is about.

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#2

I definitely agree that if you want to improve your chances you should definitely invest into your business, but from what I see on this forum, a lot of freelancers don’t consider themselves a business, which means they don’t treat it as such.

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#3

Well, I’d say they are wrong. My YT channel is also just a hobby of mine, yet I have to treat it like a business with revenue expenditure. I buy stuff and I earn some money. If I buy more than I make, I’m losing money. But since it’s a hobby and personal investment, it’s not that big of a deal. If it were a professional channel connected to a network, profit margins very much would be a critical factor.

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#4

Oh it’s totally fine for a seller to ask another seller for help.
I’ve drawn profiles images for several sellers here. :smiley:
(and I’m quite honored that they have asked me for help! :relaxed:)

Here’s the problem I see a lot though, you see those “How do I ABC?” posts a lot here, and many people have responded to them saying that they should hire a proofreader, hire a graphic designer for their sample images, or a voice over artist to do a nice narrative for a video, etc.

Sadly, they usually just say “Thank you for your advice” and never make those changes.

Many sellers don’t. They want to make money as quickly as possible with the
minimum amount of effort and investment. :tired_face: :tired_face: :tired_face:

(and in their gig description it says they are experienced professionals…)

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#5

I have noticed, yes, so I figured it might prove useful to give them another perspective in a completely different environment, as someone “seeking advice” is already emotionally biased and likely to ignore actual help (unintentionally).

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#6

It is also because many of them have been told by “YouTube Fiverr gurus” that they can earn easy money on Fiverr without any skills. They come to see it as a get-rich-quick scheme. Many of these sellers really have no professional skills in the gigs that they offer - they simply offer them because anyone can do it, or because they are told that these services are in high demand, so it will be easy to sell regardless of your skills.

Therefore, they are always surprised when they do not get orders right away, and that is why we see so many of the same questions. Here on the forum, we often tell them to approach it as they would any other business by using effective marketing techniques to attract clients, analyze their target buyers, make an eye-catching thumbnail, a selling gig description, and to consider the actual demand and supply for their services. It usually falls on deaf ears, though. I suspect that they do not understand or that it is simply too much effort.

They reject this advice to instead go with the advice that sounds like something that can game the system and is easy to implement. This is usually “stay online 24/7/” (which does not help if your gig is not up to par, and is also physically impossible) and “promote your gigs on social media” (which for them just means spamming it over and over without any thought to time and place). Many of these sellers also steal gig descriptions, thumbnails, and even logo designs.

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#7

I have noticed, yes. But I’ve also noticed that they have exactly 0 orders. For, uh, obvious reasons.

A good example would be someone offering voiceovers with listed samples that have terrible audio quality.

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#8

I’m not sure that it would be allowed to hire a proofreader on Fiverr to proofread someone’s gig description.

Back in the day it was allowed, it was even advised to hire a copywriter to write the whole description. The trouble with that is that it was misleading to buyers, they’d place an order thinking that the seller’s English is great, and end up struggling to communicate with someone who can barely type “yes”, “no” and “order plz”.

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#9

I see what you are saying, that’s why I have that little spoiler section in the OP.

However, to add to your argument: Why should someone not be allowed to do professional work just because of language barriers? If it’s too much, the buyer will look for someone else. And this also isn’t as much of an issue anymore as it was in perhaps the 90s, as we now have several reliable tools that can help us translate back-and-forth. I have done that on occasions myself, for example in Hungarian (which I do not speak).

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#10

They should be allowed, but why mislead the buyers? Why wouldn’t the seller write the description the best they can, and the buyer can decide whether they want to hire someone with that level of English or not?

And possibly cancel the order, which would affect that seller, or leave a bad review, which would also affect that seller. And the buyer would have every right to be angry, because they were led to believe that the seller speaks great English.

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#11

They can. It is just misleading to have a description in perfect English if your communication is barely legible. Some buyers prefer to order from buyers with decent English, while others do not mind so much. It is completely fine to have that preference.

Many misunderstandings can happen like this. Translations tools can be especially faulty when language pairs are from vastly different language families, which is often the case when it comes to communication on Fiverr.

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#12

It is not misleading if you openly state that in the description. Also, it can happen that a seller let a family member or friend write it who speaks much better English, at which point your argument would also label it as misleading.

You get bad buyers either way. Someone with common sense and a bit of decency does not act this way. You are labeling every buyer for cases that usually only make up a very low percentage of sales.

Edit: To add to that, I just want to mention that it is a proven fact that we perceive negative feedback much more strongly than what reality actually looks like. I can attest to that from my own personal experience. I might have tons of positive comments under my videos, but the bad ones affect me the most. Same for likes and dislikes, even though reality is different. For example, I have a video with 1123 likes and 34 dislikes. It looks a lot worse to me than it actually is, as the percentage of positive ratio is actually 97.1%.

I’m not saying they are not faulty, I’m saying they are a useful resource. If the language barrier is so bad that a translator is of no help, then said seller wouldn’t even be able to hire someone to write their gigs, unless they have a local translator that they hired. Which is something the average seller will not do.

It’s not unusual to hire people from overseas to do work only they can do. Language barriers pop up. If it’s a hiring done by a company, they will invest into a translator to help get the work done. Entirely different concept, though.

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Client is betraying
#13

Of course, they have the right to leave a bad review if the description is misleading regarding the seller’s English level. The Terms of Service directly states that your Fiverr profile must be accurate and may not be misleading.

As a YouTuber myself, this example does not really apply to Fiverr. Dislikes on a YouTube video does not hurt you as much as a bad review or a cancellation on Fiverr. On Fiverr, we are required to keep our ratings above 4.7 and our Order Completion Rate above 90% for the past 60 days at all times. Otherwise, we will be demoted and lose our level. It is not just about whether our feelings were hurt or not. A single negative review can badly hurt our business if we are not high-frequency sellers but instead sell at a higher average price per order.

I have a quite unique perspective as I have experienced most things from both a buyer’s and a seller’s perspective. During my first 18 months on Fiverr, I was only a buyer. I have spent thousands of dollars on Fiverr. My experience is that I have often been surprised by the English levels of people I have ordered from. They had very well-written gig descriptions, but it was challenging to explain even the most simple concepts to them. Now, I am a very patient person, so it does not affect me too much. I will find a solution, so we will both understand, but I know from experience that not all buyers are this patient.

Also, a seller can still hire a copywriter or steal a gig description if their English is terrible. Usually, it is the latter that happens. If a buyer is not proficient in using plagiarism checkers or is simply too trusting, then they can easily be led to believe that a seller’s English level is better than it actually is.

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#14

True, true. In most cases it doesn’t. I was merely trying to give an example. And dislikes can have a negative impact. Not so much when you are not very popular, but it can have serious repercussions in some cases. E.g. losing a current sponsor/future sponsor or having the algorithm completely remove you from Recommended.

I’ve done sales on ebay and on other [local] sites before. Both as buyer and seller. That includes products as well as services. If you are getting a lot of 5 star reviews, the occasional 1 star review shouldn’t exactly have much impact on your total rating (from a percentage point of view). Can’t speak for this site, as I haven’t done any sales on here as of yet. You are ahead of me on this one, so feel free to elaborate if you want.

Uhm, that’d be criminal. Which is an entirely different topic, even if faintly connected. Paying someone for their services to increase your own business is far from being the same as stealing from others.

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#15

Yes, sorry, that was a bad example. I just wanted to mention that it happens. I should not have related it. :slight_smile:

Yes, absolutely. I simply said that the impact was not as big as a negative review or a cancellation on Fiverr. In my experience, though, it is usually engagement that decides if your video takes off or not. If I have a video with low engagement per viewer, then the video will stop being recommended even if the view-count is at 30,000+ and the like-to-dislike ratio is high.

On the other hand, I have a video with more than a million views with a like-to-dislike ratio of 91%, which was pretty low for my channel when it was released. It has a decent engagement rate, though, so it kept being recommended until the topic was no longer relevant to the target viewer, and the engagement rate started decreasing.

Sure, that is true if you get a lot of orders. A 1-star review or a cancellation will not matter much then. The problem is if you, for example, sell a service at a high, premium price-point, which attract a lower number of buyers. You still earn a decent amount of money. However, you only get around four orders each month. Over 60 days, this will be eight orders.

If you get one single buyer, who is difficult, or who claims that they ordered by mistake and therefore wants to cancel, your Order Completion Rate will drop below 90%, and you will be demoted. You may also be placed lower in search, though the ranking changes all the time. CS will sometimes help you in these cases, but you cannot rely on that. In my opinion, Fiverr punishes you much harder for a negative rating or cancellation than YouTube does for a dislike.

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#17

Yes, I am not saying that your business is not your own responsibility. It is. I am merely responding to the discussion about whether the example from your YouTube career was relevant to the Fiverr experience or not because of the above-mentioned difference between a dislike and a negative review or a cancellation. Nothing else.

Now, I am going to give someone else a chance to talk. It was nice talking to you. :slight_smile:

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#18

I totally agree with what you have said.

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#19

Good information really helpful