Fiverr's Blackhole & How Scammers Exploit It

Let's assume for just a second that you are a great professional. That you always deliver your best, that you go the extra mile to keep your customers satisfied in every order. No matter if it's a $5 dollars one or a $1,500 order.

In the end, everything in Fiverr is ruled by terms and conditions. As everything in the digital realm that involves people -clients / buyers- , a profiting business and a platform. As many people mention, and I also heard Alex Fasulo state it, and I couldn't agree more:

But what does this actually mean? As far as I understand, and in my half-year experience in the platform, it means that the company is going to have the client's back a little bit more than yours, as a seller. There are two solid verticals within the ToS (terms of service) that basically rule

🧑‍⚖️ a buyer cannot be forced to accept a delivery

👨‍⚖️ a seller cannot be forced to accept a cancellation

There's a third understanding that also says that a buyer cannot request cancellation without calling for revision and giving the seller the chance to correct the delivery. Of course, along with providing proper, professional and constructive feedback.

But there is catch, this combo of rules creates a blackhole that many scammy buyers exploit to their favor. I've had cases where the scammyness was so obvious that I ended up receiving the money for my delivered work, but that's less than 3% of the total cases.

This exploit works perfectly and beautifully to the buyer, since it will get away with it almost always when the order is about creative work.

Creative work falls into a confusing subjective line where the buyer has to decide whether he or she likes it or not, and there is no measuring mechanism the seller can leverage to back up and defend his delivery.

Yes... I mean, if you were going to provide 3 logo mock-ups, and you provide 1, you are falling short. But if you provide 3, and follow all the directions your client provided, they can still claim "none works for me", and they saw the logo, they saw the idea and they can easily get their money back after a few come and goes with support

For creative works such as video editing, music or voice production, images and logos, a smart seller will watermark every delivery and send it even in LQ (low quality). That should be enough for the buyer to see if he or she is satisfied with it and then after accepting delivery, the seller will send the HD unwatermarked version.

Most of my income comes from creative work, but sadly work that is impossible to watermark. In a nutshell, I create business names for a living. So how could I watermark them? Should I deliver half a name? Redact some characters?

Basically when I deliver, my whole creation goes down my drain into the buyer's brain. And the way Fiverr offers to protect the seller if these orders go sideways is that

Okay, sounds fair. But even though it is legally correct it is practically legal inapplicable romanticism. Am I supposed to keep track of every single name I came up with and search the web and every social media platform just to see if anyone ended up using them? The names are lost, so is the order profit and the time you put in brainstorming the brand.

So be sure to ALWAYS watermark your creative work. Be sure to work with vetted buyers, not people that just opened an account. And request all the specs you really need, and even examples from other companies the buyer might like. Everything will help building up the defense case in the worst case scenario.

Raising prices also helped me avoid these cases, but they never truly go away. You can detect a scammer (even though it may be too late) when they reject a delivery and the response is

or

or they just go for a straight cancellation. And after requesting feedback or chance to revise, they just refuse to provide the feedback.

In those cases you are surely in front of a scam expert that has probably done this several times and knows how to get freebies.

The true sadness is that Fiverr's support can't do much in these cases. I had one customer that ordered 3 names from me. I ended up providing more than 60!!!

But his replies and refusal for feedback was accompanied by politely written sentences, that dude was a pro! And he ended up getting away with it.

Try not to waste time, since probably the order's money is lost, and time is more valuable than money. Try to wrap up these cases as fast as possible. Of course, as an obvious measure, avoid them in the first place!

If the case gets into the rude or unresponsive area, be always polite. This will help your case with support. And also, ask for a refund to Fiverr. Sometimes they can truly see your hard work and the injustice and are able to intervene favorably for the seller. In the end, and in real life -outside Fiverr-, creative services always charge an upfront free and a retainer, since you are also paying for the professional's time and not only the time it takes to create a name, a slogan, a perfect cut for a video!

I hope this could change sometime in the future, and creative services that cannot be protected by watermarking can have a slight different treatment in the platform. Or, thinking out loud, being able to reject orders from newly created accounts or low rated buyers would also do the trick. In fact, I believe UpWork does this.