A message to owners of micro jobbing sites (fiverr style sites)

In the past few months, I have used alot of different services on fiverr. Fiverr though, has alot of different issues and so far all the other micro jobbing sites all seem to be the same as fiverr. While I have not tried fiverr clone sites, if the layout, look and feel and even the colours are the same as fiverr, then I am certain that under the hood they have the same issues.

I realise that people will say "contact fiverr direct" but this isnt meant just for fiverr, its meant for all micro jobbing sites and there seems to be more and more of these sites popping up daily. This thread is meant to be constructive criticism for the people who own fiverr style sites, as well as the programmers who create such scripts.
Site owners (or site users) this is your chance to argue and promote why your micro jobbing site is superior - maybe your network has already solved these issues? Or maybe your site is truly unique, so post here and tell us about what makes your site better.
Users of such sites are welcome to post here their thoughts and comments on how fiverr style sites can be improved.

First issue -> communication breakdown part 1 - the inbox.
The inbox in fiverr sucks. When a new message is received from someone who has already sent an email, the email is not listed at the top of the inbox, but rather in the order of who sent you a message first. Yes there is a "star" or favorites system, but this doesnt help.
What is needed is a ticketing style system. New messages should appear as new messages, as well as an open ticket. This way someone can read the message, and when they are able to reply, they could then click on a message filter such as "open tickets" to view all tickets awaiting response.
Additionally, the current system records all conversation, which is annoying when you have extensive dialogue and rapport with other fiverr users. Yet there is no ability to delete or archive older messages.
It would be great if a message could be also be marked as "closed" and then able to be archived. You could then send a new "clean" message to a fiver user and have the older ticket still available in the archives if it is needed.

This might not be practical, however any improvement at all would be a benefit to both buyers and sellers.

communication breakdown part 2 - the multiple gig dilemma
Fiverr has a restriction on how many gigs you can purchase in one time with a seller. This usually means that buyers end up buying multiple gigs. Now I have purchased 20 gigs in one go from a new seller on fiverr, and each gig needed to have a message. Each gig needed to be delivered, and each gig needed to be closed off. Now that was ridiculous. The multiple gig issue has for in several instances created unusual communication issues, as the seller left messages and notes across different gigs (instead of the first gig)

So what is needed is:
1. the ability for any experienced user (like a buyer with 10 trades or more) to buy as many gigs as they feel like. its their money, let them spend it how they want.
2. The ability to group gigs together. Like the way that add ons work, where its attached, you should be able to open the first gig and click on "buy additional gig" and that gig becomes attached to the first. This way you could order multiple projects (like 10 gigs for 1 development project, 10 gigs for another and as the sub-gigs are grouped they wouldnt be confused together)
3. the ability to tip should sellers should be an option on ALL gigs, but only after the gig has been delivered. this way your not creating an extra gig that needs to be closed off, you just leave feedback, and have the option of sending them a tip. Official tip system would be a major benefit to sellers (i think fiverr shouldnt take commission from an official and legitimate tip, but thats just my opinion)

Buyers and sellers would benefit, there would be one message panel then for all the gigs, and this would not clog the buyers control panel as much (20 gigs from 1 seller really clogs my screen)

communication breakdown part 3 - slow to respond clients
Several times I have purchased gigs where the seller needed to me to approve something , or others required additional information or something in order to deliver the gig. Now for the seller, if they have a 24hour deadline, or 3 days (or whatever), then every hour they wait for me to reply eats into THEIR delivery times.
So if I am slow to respond, they cannot complete ontime and the buyers can then cancel.
What is needed is that when a message is sent via the gig (not the inbox) the seller should be able to mark it as "awaiting response" so until a response is sent in, the delivery dates and deadline is paused.
So if someone buys a 24 hour gig, and the seller sends a question and marks it as awaiting reply, and doesnt get a reply to a message for 3 days, then the timer of the gig should be paused for those 3 days.
I would even suggest that if there is no reply for 7 days, that the gig be closed, and cash given to the seller as the system wont know how much work the seller did on the gig, and if a buyer cant respond to critical questions within 7 days then it should be closed off.

This concept could be abused by sellers continously trying to pause gigs to extend times so perhaps a limit on how many pauses can be given per gig or per seller per week (such as awaiting for a draft design to be approved), but while i admit that i can see that this has the potential to be abused, i think this would be a useful benifit. The real winners here would be sellers.

second issue - the dead seller network.
I want you to have a think about how much it costs to get traffic, and buyers to the fiverr marketplace? And first time buyers come and try a gig. That gig will determine their opinion of fiverr. That seller, effectively becomes the representative of fiverr.
But fiverr has no quality control over its sellers. What if i told you that dead sellers (or shit sellers) were costing fiverr itself alot of money each week. Not only that, dead or shit sellers reduces the income that could go to the hard working sellers.
But who are these sellers? there are alot of sellers with identical gigs, that clogs up the search screen. I am certain that some sellers have 5-10 accounts, do they plan to work on all of them? what if these accounts are from competitors simply to create spam gigs, where users will buy them, waste time and walk away from fiverr?
Ok maybe your thinking it doesnt matter as someone buying gigs from a dead seller still locks money into the fiverr network? well your wrong. Each time a gig is ordered from a seller that doesnt respond, or do the gig it wastes time, it means that other sellers lose that income, buyers walk off and can do charge backs AND if the gig had been done in the first place, they might have taken more. I am pretty poor, and I am not exactly a big user, but I have over 100 gigs worth of work waiting that I cant assign on fiverr. 100 gigs isnt much in the grand scheme of things, but losing 100 gigs from me, just how much revenue are you losing overall from dodgy sellers?
so dead sellers costs fiverr, annoys the fuck out of buyers, and legitimate sellers lose revenue that would have been theirs if the dodgy dead sellers had been removed.

It would take a while for me to explain all my experience on this issue, however, here are some simple ways to improve the fiverr marketplace:
1. Any seller that is not online for 7 days should have all gigs paused.
2. Any gig that has exact text and title to another sellers gig should be flagged for investigation. The duplicate gig should be removed and if its a duplicate user, both users should be suspended.
3. Any seller that has a gig late, gets all gigs paused. Think about it, If they cant handle their current workload, allowing them to sell more gigs simply means they have more users that they will be late to. I have seen many cases of sellers who refused to add more days to the gigs, refused to pause the gigs, but then had 20 cancellations. Doing this will be a big improvement.
4. New sellers should be on probation. Out of the first 5 (or 10) gigs they do, they should not have more then 1 or 2 negatives. More then this, and they should be punished, either with a higher minimum withdrawal amount, OR a short ban from the network.
5. Sellers that repeatedly dont respond to emails, should be investigated. While they might get some spam, a response rate of (for example) 80% should be expected. Sellers that cant respond to 80% of all messages received within a timeframe should be suspended. Of course, new buyers should also have some restrictions, perhaps a limit of max messages sent in a day will reduce spam sent to sellers in the first place! But just remember that its the sellers response (or lack thereof) that will determine a users experience on fiverr. So if they repeatedly fail to respond to messages, boot them out.
6. sellers that i have canceled gigs on, i dont want to see them or their gigs. I want some way of ignoring all of their gigs from displaying -> they dont want me to see their gigs anyway.

If we did the above, the real winners would be fiverr, the legitimate hard working sellers AND the buyers. Basically everyone would benefit.

third issue - the dodgy rating system.
The current rating system is very primitive. If a seller works hard, spends the time to do a draft and is awaiting for the client to approve it, then 3 days later the buyer cancels the gig because its late... now the sellers rating drops. But is that fair?
Any rating system is easy to influence, but i think it can be improved. Lets look at ebay. They have a rating of positive feedback (like fiverr has now) in addition there is a star rating system.
Many times i have sellers deliver jobs late, while I will always try to wait for them, (so they get positive rating) it should be reflected elsewhere. Like there should be a rating where out of 10 jobs, how many were delivered on or before the deadline. (this would be a system statistic) as well as allow buyers to rate out of 5 things such as the sellers communication and the overall result. There are several sellers that have very high positive feedback yet consistently are late to deliver work. This new system would better reflect what buyers can expect from using that seller.

On the other hand, i think that sellers should be able to rate buyers. Buyers that dont cancel the first second that a gig is late should be reflected in a way that sellers can see. Buyers that respond to all gig questions within 24hours should also have some kind of statistic, and also, sellers should be able to rate buyers for communication and overall experience. I even want statistics to reflect the number of gigs used and number of tips used.
Im not saying that rating buyers is critical, but if a seller has a lousy experience with one buyer, and many others have the same thing, then it might be better if that buyer is removed from the fiverr community - but only if they do more harm then good. Or in the very least, a buyer rating system might help solve disputes as fiverr can then view the experiences of others and judge accordingly.

fourth issue - overloading sellers and gig delievery times.
lets say a seller puts 3 days to do a gig, lets say that someone buys 1000 gigs. Can the seller deliver all on time? The system is flawed by design.
Ever used microsoft project or similar project software? With that I can put in the hours per day and days that i work. Example maybe i work 2 hours daily monday to friday, and 8 hours on saturday, (or maybe i am taking 2-3 days off but want my gigs delivery dates to take this into account)
In a practical example, lets say that someone does 1 hour of php for $5, they should be able to put into the system the amount of time per gig (ie 1 hour) with the days they work. This would meant that if i buy 10 gigs on sunday, the due date would be friday (2 gigs daily x 5 days) if another 8 people then buys the same gig, the due date should be saturday, if another 2 gigs is purchased on top of this, the due date should then be moved to monday.
Now ok, this wont solve all the issues (takes time to ask and wait for replies from clients etc) but I am trying to say that the due date for gigs should have the option of being fixed OR change based on the number of gigs. I have purchased 20 gigs from someone with "3 days delivery" but lucky for them i was not a dick and was happy to wait a week or two for delivery.
Maybe a system like microsoft project is too difficult or complicated to implement, but a simple basic system such as this formula: "(minimum time + (gigs ordered / max gigs daily))" and this would give the seller enough time to do the gig (without it being canceled) and on the gig itself, for new buyers it would show the realistic delivery dates based on the current workload so as to give other buyers an accurate time of when to expect their order.
Say a seller has 100 gigs on order, the due date might show up as 60 days, so the next buyer know that they need to wait or find someone else. Having the option of flexible delivery dates based on number of orders might sound strange, but it will benefit both buyers and sellers.

Final suggestion - fiverr affiliate system.
I have seen alot of ads for fiverr recently, (even on digital point) and there has to be a cost involved for getting traffic and buyers like that. Why not have an affiliate system where 30 days after a sale has been made from a new member that say 50cents goes to the affiliate? You might only pay 50cents max for new members that signup and purchase gigs.
In addition to this, I have seen a few fiverr sellers that work hard at the gigs they do, but also struggle to get enough people to buy their gigs, they might be happy to offer up to 50cents commission per gig. (like if they agree to be an affiliate, then on their gig would be an affiliate link)
So an affiliate could then promote a gig, and if the gig is purchased from an existing fiverr user, they get 50 cents commission 30days AFTER the gig has been delivered. But if they sign up a new user, they would get $1 commission (50 cents from fiverr, 50 cents from the gig seller)

 

Good to know about these stuffs. Thank you for your message.

 

I agree it can get annoying on Fiverr. But that's the price you pay for trying to get work done super cheap. It's like buying from a warehouse in a back alley instead of a main street boutique.

 

True, but to be honest, on the interent there is hardly such a thing as a "main street boutique". Like I have done it before, hiring expensive programmers from flashy websites and your money goes down the drain and they dont do any work just take your money and run.
One of the advantages of fiverr style sites (over hiring from flashy websites, or forums) is the user only gets paid when they complete the work -> theres many disputes on this forum of people either not doing the work, or not being paid for work done.

I have tried freelancer, (i have tried hiring from here and a few good people here, but also money lost with nothing to show for it) so i really am looking for another place where I can try and hire people.

 

Oh, they do exist, you just need an $xxx,xxx.xx budget to work with them!

 

I have a lot of respect for people like yourself that take the time to analyse things like this. I'm in the process of adding a microJob section to my Forums (checkthisup[dot]com) I tried to code it myself but it's taking me ages to get it done because of all the work I have.

Thank you for such a great thread.

 

Some highly valuable suggestions there!

I'm working on a niche related site, will definitely keep your suggestions in mind...

 

Sorry, but you are overlooking things. Fiverr is meant to be a primitive marketplace for simple services.

Just like craiglist is meant to be a sketchy classifieds. CAN ebay spend 10million and reinvent Craigslist? SURE....do they want to? NO.

 

I can see the awesome potiential that fiverr has, which i guess is why it has had millions invested into it:
http://fiverr.com/news/private-equity-hub (they got over 15million in one single grant)

While i can see the sites potiential, the site, and platform which there entire bussiness resides upon is shaky. They got $15million in addition to all the other funding they have had so i expect they have *some* funds for improving the site.

i just today cancelled yet another fiverr job. Bit hard to do a chargeback on funds from 10months ago, and fiverr will surely fight tooth and nail to prevent me from getting my funds back. Thing is after 10 months of trying to get a simple gig done, after hiring soo many different idiots, i really dont want to have to try again.

i would have saved 10 months of my life if i had just thrown my money in a bin 10months ago, rather then trying to hire on fiverr, although I still rank hiring on fiverr as being better then hiring on digital point.