Dealing with Uncompromising and Exploitation-oriented Customers on Fiverr

Although you will face no problem handling 9 out of 10 customers on Fiverr, there will always be one customer (most often from one of the less developed areas of the world), who will ask for much more than what they paid for, annoy you with repeated requests for comprehensive and time-consuming revisions/redo, insult you and your skills by scorning your work, and try to boss you around as if you are their subordinate.

Meeting the expectations of such customers can be very difficult as they have created their own, personal perception of quality work and will not accept anything you give them. By the time you realize that they have zero intentions to accept your work and will just keep having you redo it over and over and finally cancel the order itself to get a refund, you will have already spent thrice the average time required on that order.

At that point, a cancellation and revision both look like unacceptable and unfair options for the seller. You would want to get compensated for what you did, but there is only one loophole in Fiverr’s TOS that can allow you to deal with that order in a way that does not let the buyer exploit you further or get away with a refund. Have them request a modification for the order – if they already have, and the order is in “revision” mode, you’re all set.

As revisions on Fiverr virtually have no time limit and don’t come with an “obligation to deliver” for the seller, you can just let the order stay there. Don’t deliver a revision and do NOT agree to cancel the order whenever they request a cancellation. When they ask for “updates on the progress of the order,” you can just brush them off with the response that “I am completing it.”

Months will pass, and the buyer will drift away from Fiverr at some point – 99% of them do. That is when you can take the chance to deliver the order and have it marked as complete in three days of unresponsiveness from the buyer. That is, only if you are willing to risk a lousy rating for the money – you have enough 5 stars to cover it, the amount of money you will get is worth it, etc.

Even if you don’t want to risk it, you can just let the order stay in your backlog – Fiverr will never do anything about it and the buyer will never get their money back. Order cancellations done by customer support are valid only if you have been careless enough to:

·         Send them an empty delivery, an incomplete delivery, a late ‘initial’ delivery (not a late revision as no deadline has been decided for the revision mutually)

·         Misbehave with the buyer in your anger and challenge their right to cancellation

·         And other things that give off a bad impression of you to the viewer of the order’s proceedings.

They will not do anything if you have delivered what you promised already, the buyer has an option to leave a bad review but that’s all – and you have already taken that option away by keeping the order in revision mode. Even if you haven’t delivered anything at all except a text asking for more information to which the buyer responds with a “request for modification”, the customer support cannot intervene in an order that is in progress in revision mode.

Thus, this loophole will trap any customers who wrong you and make you much safer and independent as a seller on Fiverr. Remember receiving the response from Fiverr’s customer support that “Fiverr cannot force a buyer to accept a delivery?” That goes both ways – it will also not force a seller to deliver a revision after they have delivered the promised work once or if they say that they are in the process of completing the work that the revision demands.

Being a seller on Fiverr, I know that the worst feeling on Earth is having customer support cancel an order and give your money to your buyer after you have spent hours on it. Unpaid work feels worse when the exploiting buyer gets away with a refund for no reason at all. You can use this revision backlog trick for all such buyers as I have been doing for years. It always works. If Fiverr isn’t going to protect us, we are going to find the TOS loophole that does.