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Revenge feedbacks?


laserlife

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Hi! I run several content-writing gigs here on fiverr, and I am pretty happy about how it is going. Customers seem really happy about my work and leave great feedback, however I recieved a few negative ones. some of them are actually my fault (late delivery, last year I’ve been spending most of my time on the road, with very little internet time and I’ve been stupid enough not to add more days to my deadline) - but I’ve realized that the few other negative feedbacks I had were what I started to refer to as “revenge feedback”, they all sort of happened within the same pattern



Customer orders gig - I do the work, send my first draft for the customer to approve, if they feel they need some changes I make the changes and so on - final work delivered - customer leaves no feedback - i don’t hear from customer for about 3 days / a week - customer suddenly resurfaces and ask for more changes, with the threat of leaving me a bad feedback or the promise of leaving me a good one - The “new” changes asked usually are something completely off the table, nothing included in the services I offer: I had people asking me to post fake reviews on sites, people demanding a 2000 words article when they paid for one up to 600 words (“yeah, but I will refer you to many other customers to do business with”) -

When it comes to another minor change to the text, no problem, but I m not willing to take the abuse or do something against the TOS and taking the risk. So if I don’t comply the end up leaving an untruthful negative feedback, something usually along the same lines all the time: “seller just copied my sample content” or “seller didn’t do the work I asked for” with no other details.



Sorry for the lengthy post, but I am just curious, anybody has any advice? How do you handle similar situations?



Now luckily this doesn’t happen often (let’s say 1 out of 150 buyers?) and Customer Service was great and helped me solve many issues, but sometimes I just don’t have the time or the strength to spend even more energy with this stuff, so I recently stopped trying to reason or arguing with people I think will give me trouble, simply chose to refund their money and move on to something else, but it’s still a lot of time that I lose for actually working on the gigs until it gets a little “too much” for me to be worh it.

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It happens, and it will keep happening. Sucks, but hey unless you’re happy contacting CS every time and dealing with it that way then what can you do?



I certainly do not back down to ANY blackmail or threats, and I don’t refund the work that I have spent time on either. I will try to make them back down at first, and if no result then unfortunately I go through the long process of CS.



You’re not the only person though!

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I have had a similar problem, and I have used the mutual cancellation defense. Honestly, if they don’t get back to you before the deadline for fiverr to mark them paid whether they left feedback or not, then as far as I’m concerned, if the buyer wants something else then it’s a whole new gig. When I turn in my work, whether for the Tarot or for the Gal Friday, WITH THE WORK is the deadline stated for any question or change. So far, no more issues.

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I had another buyer who threatened me with “I’ll be contacting fiverr about this!”…my reply was “feel free. just so you know fiverr has access to EVERY single conversation, whether it’s a message separate from the order, or on the order itself.” Haven’t heard another word.

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Listen to Bachas85. I can’t stress this enough. HAVE A CLEAR REVISION POLICY.



Include this in your gig description, promo video and instructions if possible. Go a step further and include info graphics in the pictures you’re allowed to upload (in addition to your video) for your gig.



You can take this another step further by reminding buyers this after they purchase.



Should a situation like this occur, you can point them to your policies (i.e. "this is stated here, here and here). If you are threatened, screenshot the conversation and screenshot your revision policies. This may help greatly when communicating with CS.



Best of luck!

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Reply to @givemeapps @bachas85: that´s definitely a great way to work, keeping your revision policies clear. It won´t stop some of the disputes (I noticed that most people barely even bother to read, some customers don´t even know how to leave a feedback aha) - but at least keeping clear revision policies should help you get some fair help from the CS

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I have a gig where I’ll do a review of a product or game or write an article on a topic of their choice but, I write the article and use copyscape to prove to them my article is legit and written by me. That way you proved it, then you can prove it to customer service JUST in case they can’t find any proof it’s yours and usually they just refund the buyer and take away your negative feedback. This will help a lot, it has helped me with another gig I had but I took down cause I was offering 1000 words for 5 bucks and everyone wanted 1500 to 2000 haha so I did a redo of my gig. I got like 2/10 buyers who hated what I wrote because I ‘copied it from someone else’ so I proved them wrong and they gave good feedback 🙂 All of them did haha.



Good luck bud, wish you the best.

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I had the same problem with another buyer on my SEO article gig. They wanted me to write two unique articles on the same subject (or 2000 words total, which is basically a term paper), and ended up changing the subject for the 2nd article after I turned the 1st one in to them. I always research my articles before I write (I assume you do the same), and they basically wanted me to write a misinformation article, which is something I specifically state that I don’t do. They decided to give me a negative review as revenge instead of owning up to not following my guidelines. However, in the end, I got the last laugh. I got to keep their money.



I say do what the other sellers her are suggesting: make your gig details as specific as possible so ever the same situation happens to you in the future, they can’t blame you for sticking to your principles. Unwarranted negative feedback will happen once in a blue moon, but the overwhelming positive feedback you get on your gig will quickly put things in perspective.



One more thing: you can also leave feedback in response to your buyer so other potential future buyers can see your side of the story.



I hope this helps you.

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