any request for customer service results in a fail page
Considering the considerate press fiverr is receiving you’d have to be living under a rock to have not heard of fiverr.com in the last 6 months, but after using the service a few times I can see none of these websites actually bothered to use the site before publishing glowing reviews.
Fiverr.com – Scammer’s Paradise
Let’s start with a brief intro to fiverr. It’s a website where people offer jobs they’re willing to do for $5, similar to ebay if it was all $5 buy-it-now jobs. Jobs like “I will send you a postcard from California” or “I will translate an article from english to french”. Small jobs that take a few minutes.
So what’s wrong with this? The idea is sound but implementation is completely wrong. For example a seller can completely ignore a payment for weeks and the buyer can’t leave negative feedback for that. Or the seller can accept the job, sit on it for weeks and then give it back to the buyer and again they can’t leave feedback. What? Yes, you heard me: sellers can ignore you for weeks and you can’t complain.
Even if the seller does accept the job there is no way to encourage them to actually do the work and no way to dispute it. After a seller says a job is done the buyer is given a box to click positive or negative feedback. Where’s the dispute button? Your money is gone whether you’re satisfied or not.
“But this seller has 99% feedback, must be good, right?” Wrong: sellers create a fake buyer account and buy from themselves and leave positive feedback. Unlike eBay who check personal information and ban people using the same address or credit card, fiverr only requires an email to buy or sell so it only takes a second to create a fake account. Since the feedback is just a percentage you can’t see who gave positive feedback for what, so a seller only needs to create one account and buy a few times from themselves to give themselves a stellar feedback score.
Can you imagine if eBay had a system like that? Would anyone use eBay a second time after paying money for an item, getting no response from the seller for weeks, not getting their money back and not even being able to leave feedback?
So how can you avoid this? Right now all you can do is avoid fiverr, there’s no way around it, their system is broken and until it’s fixed to work more like eBay’s feedback system there’s only one thing I can say about fiverr: they suck.
posted on Saturday, July 03, 2010 1:38 PM
