Fiverr Forum

You Work For Fiverr

#21

How is this any different to Google algorithm? You try to game the system and your website will be taken down.

I think either you don’t fully understand what employment means or you don’t know what Fiverr is. Just because your use Fiverr and have to follow its TOS doesn’t mean you work for Fiverr. It’s just a platform, not your employer. Freelancers can market their services through online platforms, yellow pages, websites, radio commercials etc. There are always rules and it doesn’t make you an employee of the platform you use.

I can see that others have tried to explain the same thing so if you believe you work for Fiverr then there’s no point arguing.

#22

Your working for yourself on Fiverr’s platform. You are not getting a salary, you’re not guaranteed anything. You work ON Fiverr, just like a blogger blogs ON Wordpress, not for Wordpress.

#23

I don’t have an employer. I work as much or as little as I want and set my own hours. Because I’m a night person I begin working in the evenings and work until dawn usually. What employer will let me do that?

Also they don’t even have jobs anywhere that hire people to do what I do on fiverr.

#24

That’s one of the beauties, I have to say! You can invent your own job here. Theoretically, you could also have gigs in many categories. An employer might hire someone to do one of the things they do well, but where could you get a job where you could be a logo designer who also sings to the bagpipes and can tell people about their past lives. :smiley:

#25

Sure!
You work for Fiverr.com
If you begin to think you work for yourself, there is likelihood that you’ll begin to break rules and actually get suspended

#26

Out of over 100 sellers I know pretty well or have worked with and befriended, not one has just randomly started to break platform rules even though all of them are aware they own their own businesses here. The chances of breaking enough rules to get suspended just because you “work for yourself” is even less. That doesn’t make any sense. If the seller is new and a young child, perhaps, but Fiverr requires unsupervised sellers to be over 13 and most 13-year-olds know they have to obey rules on all websites.

#27

I totally agree with you @fonthaunt
However, come to think about it this way.

If you own a business, you set rules for yourself in the most “profitable” way. And whenever there are outlier cases, you simply adjust these rules to suit your profit needs without going overboard. In some cases when you disobey the rules you call it adaptation or flexibility (not a violation that deserves punishment) and you hardly see this as a reason to discipline yourself. However, on a platform like this you are not allowed to bend rules and call it " circumstance" or “flexibility”. At least you will need to request for permission.

While working for your self, if a buyer totally over steps his boundary. Sometimes you might need to put the buyer undercheck by yourself.
Here, no!!
You need to report to someone!

If I may ask you ,
On this site how many times have you read the TOS?
.
.
.

.
.
Several times

Even when your business has a TOS page on your site, do you read it that often?

I don’t know if these evidences sound dumb but I somehow feel that I work for fiverr.

I guess the person that started fiverr would have said something like.

Fiver creator:
“Hey guy, I thought about something last night, let us create a platform where we hire sellers and gain a whooping 20% of their earnings”

Friend::

"Great idea, do you mean they will work for us and their clients concurrently?"

Fiverr creator: “yes! exactly!”

Friend: “you are smart”

Friend: I think you will need to make rules

Fiverr creator: sure! I will

Friend: "what happens when they break your rules?

Fiverr Creator: I will warn them.

Friend: Do you think people just obey rules?
What if they continue to disobey your rules?

Fiverr creator: I’ll sack them by suspending their account"

I totally agree with you, but the fact that you can actually get dismissed points to the fact that you work for someone.

Generally, people don’t dismiss themselves.

Now , let me ask you,

If the owner of fiverr has an account here where he/she sells services.

If a buyer annoys him and he becomes overly rude.

Can anyone suspend him?
No

So I think that owners is the only one working for himself here!

There are various potent rebuttals for all these. And I think this topic is always arguable.

Opinion on this is subjective.

#28

I getcha, but it just doesn’t work that way. Sure, you can get “dismissed” by any platform or site but you don’t work for that site. If you run your own business as a blogger and you use Adsense, Google can dismiss you for breaking the rules. You don’t work for Google. If you have a site on the GoDaddy platform and you own a business in Colorado selling cannabis, you can be dismissed when GoDaddy shuts your site down for selling a product that is not legal everywhere. You don’t work for GoDaddy. My best friend owns a local business and she rents the building. She could be kicked out of the building, she could be shut down by a tax official, she could be dismissed by other legal entities - there are many ways she could lose her business without working for anyone else.

I’m not going to keep going back and forth but it is incorrect to tell sellers that they work for Fiverr. It is not true officially or legally, so it’s not good to spread that misinformation.

As to this, the answer is actually YES and it happens all the time. If a buyer is rude to a seller in a way that violates ToS, Fiverr can decide to suspend that buyer. The buyer does not work for Fiverr either. The seller can also block a buyer and refuse to work with them again after a bad experience, so yes, the seller and Fiverr can refuse services to a buyer.

#29

[quote=“silberma1976, post:19, topic:304419”]
iend do it and got booted. Now she is scrambling to find a source of income. I think people need to realize that they do indeed work for the platform if they decide to sell through it, and be aware of the consequences of th
[/quot

Thanks for great advice

#30

You can still do the one thing you are good at on other platforms.

#31

Not necessarily. On other platforms I see jobs for people who want to write articles, landing pages, entire websites, books. That’s not what I want to do, that’s not what I do here.

I know one competitor that has a flat fee of $99 to join, no commissions, but I’m not comfortable spending money before I make money. To me that sounds like a scam.

#32

That’s a very good point! It can be quite frustrating to constantly feel like all of your income is dependent on someone else’s whims, but when it works out, Fiverr can be very rewarding. Thank you for the solid advice!

#33

Thanks : that is very interesting and helpful for me

#34

That’s not fiverr’s fault. I have no problem following the rules here for the past six years.

Don’t make empty deliveries and deliver on time— no problem.
Don’t communicate outside of fiverr or take money outside of fiverr— no problem.
Don’t be abusive to customers— no problem.
Answer questions from clients and do the jobs promptly— no problem.
Don’t send spam— no problem.
Just have one account— no problem.

How hard is that? Come on if someone is banned it’s not fiverr’s fault.

#35

Disagree. It is not that black and white. And I am not placing blame on Fiverr. I am stating they make the rules, and as their employees we must follow, and you listed some of the rules well.

#36

I’m not anyone’s employee. I’m self employed. If I was an employee I would have half of my FICA tax paid by fiverr and owe much less income taxes.

It’s ridiculous that someone can’t possibly follow the rules here. The rules are very easy to follow.

Sellers need to place the blame for being banned where it belongs: on themselves.

#37

By that logic, I’m the employee of the supermarket I use to shop at because I need to follow their house rules.

Last time I checked, Fiverr neither paid half of my health insurance nor did they expect me to sit at my desk from 9-5, I can’t send them a sick-note and sleep instead of working while they pay me just for being employed, or anything like that. I can block buyers, work when I want to, or not when I don’t want to, I can even take as much time off as I want to without needing to schedule my holidays with other people or to Fiverr’s needs, I can even just close my account right now if I feel like it.

One can argue that they have too many house rules or that their house rules are too strict or that they are too fond of ratings or stuff but no, we are not Fiverr’s employees, I do not work for Fiverr. I do business with a lot of very diverse individuals and companies via Fiverr’s platform and pay 20% of my earnings to Fiverr to use their platform, features and benefit from their ability to bring clients in.

If Fiverr were considered an employer and sellers employees, it would look very different; for example, at least in my country, it’s not as easy to sack an employee as it is for Fiverr to ban a seller from using their platform or for my supermarket to ban me from the house if I steal or misbehave in some way.

I’m very sorry for your friend, I’m sure she is an awesome person, but that she was banned doesn’t mean we’re Fiverr employees. If she was banned without any good reason, which none of us know, then that’s a shame, if she fully relied on Fiverr as her means of income, then that’s unfortunate, but neither of that means that we work for Fiverr, it just means that if we want to use Fiverr as a platform, we must stick to its rules.

Whether companies like Fiverr should be regarded as a kind of employer is another question but obviously there is a lot that speaks against it, else it would be regarded as one. Things do, can and might sometimes change (see the Uber case) but fact as of now is that we don’t work for Fiverr and aren’t Fiverr’s employees.

#38

Thank you for your helpful post.

#39

We are not literally employees. Figuratively we are employees. All that nice stuff about being able to holiday, take time off, delete your account is nonsense. Many part time workers not salaried in school systems or for other companies can do the same thing without concern. You still have to adhere to the rules of the organization and work to stay in tune so your account is in good standing. While Fiverr may not pay your health insurance, as I imagine you may be under a national system, for many the money earned her covers vital things just like that, and to those who choose this in a larger sense this is a job for them, and they choose to work through Fiverr and thus follow fiverrs house rules which makes them figurative employees.

Your supermarket analogy is way off on this one.

#40

Following the site’s rules has nothing to do with being an employee. Do you expect to find a site to work on without any rules at all? Good luck.

Whether you have a website you want listed on Google, or have some videos you want posted on Youtube, the sites have rules.

If you post ads to sell things on Amazon, you have rules to follow. Does that make you an employee of Amazon? If you sell a car on Craigslist you have rules to follow. Does that make you an employee of Craigslist?

It seems like you cannot imagine working on your own and earning money unless you are employed by some company. It’s like there is some kind of mental block, like this can’t really be happening.

Every internet company has rules for the use of their site. Have you noticed that every site that people can post ads on has terms of service? Those are their rules for the use of the site and if you violate them you get banned.