Ratings and reviews

[jkeith]

I posted this in response to another seller’s enquiry, but I think it deserves a thread of its own.



Fiverr uses a broken system to calculate ratings on gigs that determine “stars”. From what I can work out they use a really simple calculation: Positive reviews / total reviews = percentage to two decimal places. If that two decimal places puts you over 99.50%, it rounds up to 100% and there’s your five star review.



Sounds simple but the problem is that there’s no weighting applied. So, in fact, the more jobs you have completed, the harder it becomes to positively affect your percentage.



Example: Seller A has 10 reviewed jobs: 9 positive, 1 negative. Her percentage is 90%. She does two more positively reviewed jobs, her percentage increases to 92% (rounded to two decimal places).



So far so good. Two jobs has made a significant impact on her rating.



But what if Seller B has hundreds of completed jobs?



Say he’s completed 500 jobs, 495 positively reviewed, 5 negatively. That gives him a 99.00% rating. Not enough for 5 stars, even though a huge number of customers are happy.



If he wants to get his percentage above 99.5% to get his 5 star rating back, using this method of calculating ratings, he has to get his numbers up to 1020 positive reviews. That’s 525 more completed, positively reviewed jobs, without a single extra negative review.



Which is insane.



Paradoxically, the more jobs a seller completes, the more damaging each negative review becomes.

This really isn’t a sensible way to rate gigs. So what changes can Fiverr make to fix this broken system?