Redd: Hello and welcome to Fiverrcast, the official Fiverr podcast for sellers by sellers. My name is Redd AKA Reddhorrocks.Adam: And I’m Adam AKA Twistedweb123. Today we’re joined by special guest host Mary AKA Uniquefivex. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself today Mary?Mary: Hey guys. My name is Mary also known as “Uniquefivex” on Fiverr. I’m a top-rated seller. I live in New York. I have a background in computer graphics and graphic design. I’ve been on Fiverr for over four years now and I actually started – I got my start on Fiverr by making video advertisements with my bird and eventually I started creating more and more video production Gigs like whiteboard animation, kinetic typography and hand-drawn logo speed color styled Gig that’s now featured on Fiverr.Redd: Well, all your stuff looks so cool Mary. Thank you very much for joining us today. So with the holidays coming up, we figured now would be a really good time to talk about how to take time off, which is always a challenge for freelancers because if we’re not working, we’re not making money. So there’s a lot of different ways that you can handle taking time off. Adam, what are some of the ways that you deal with having to take a break from working?Adam: So there are two ways that I deal with taking time off in Fiverr and it depends on just how busy I am or what I’m taking time off for. So if I’m taking time off for a short while, let’s say two or three days, what I will often do is I will extend my lead time so I’m never actually pausing my Gigs or stop my orders coming in. I’m just creating a buffer to hopefully cover me for those days that I will be away and then where we’ve got the Fiverr app, I can maybe just keep up to date with messages on the go and not need to worry about it too much.If I’m away for longer than that or if I’m going through a very busy period where I need to kind of pause the orders, rather than suspend, I will often go into the vacation mode and use that and set a time to try and create myself a bit of a slowdown whilst I’m on holiday or over-busy.Redd: So when you – if you know that you’re going on vacation as opposed to like taking the time off, when you extend your lead time, do you give your clients warning that you’re doing that?Adam: Not so much, to be honest with you, because what I will often do is the orders received before I extended my lead time will be delivered on date and what I will often find is where I actually got that buffer, I may have a day or two before I actually go on vacation mode and I’m actually able to work on those orders faster.What I’ve often noticed is when I increase my lead time, I often don’t hear from buyers at all until maybe the last two or three days. So I know there are some people out there who are a bit worried about extending their lead times and thinking, “Well what if the buyer messages me and I haven’t got internet or what if they can’t – I’m not as much as I usually am. How am I going to communicate with them?”In all honesty I will say when you’re on vacation mode or when you’ve extended your lead time, the buyer doesn’t expect you to be there every second of the day. So you do have a lot of room for that.Redd: So Mary, how do you handle things in this situation. Are you a vacation mode person or a lead time person or is it the same for you or it varies?Mary: Yeah, it definitely varies. If I feel like I’m going on a longer vacation, I will use vacation mode but I feel like if it’s just going to be maybe a couple of days that I’m going to be away, then I will increase the turnaround time on my Gigs.Redd: So I know for me, I’ve used vacation mode more predominantly than not because generally whenever I take time off or I travel, I take my work with me. But I know that coming up here, I’m going to be taking a few days off and I’m going to actually do the whole extending my lead time thing. Have you guys ever – I know your lead times are a little longer than mine. Have you ever had any clients come back to you and be frustrated that maybe extra fast isn’t available right now or do you – how do you handle clients who are having some kind of like major emergency and just won’t leave you be?Adam: For me in that situation, it’s all about the reason why I’m on vacation mode. If I am on vacation mode because I’m going on holiday and I can’t really meet their needs if they’re under a very tight deadline and it just is impossible, what I will often do there is I will reply quite quickly and swiftly to the buyer and explain to them that I’m working different hours at the moment. I’m not really available and unfortunately maybe if their lead time is that kind of strict, that maybe I can’t help them right now and I will offer maybe a refund in that situation.But the whole idea behind explaining that and kind of talking to them is to one, let them know that it’s not normal. I am on vacation mode or something is different here and the other reason behind that is to kind of keep the communication open. So in the future, if they want a Gig like mine again, maybe they will come back to me at a time where I am more available as opposed to just canceling it or maybe getting into a bit of a hoo-hah about having to wait the full lead time stated on the Gig.Redd: Now is “hoo-hah” a technical term?[Laughter]Adam: No. No, it is not.Redd: So what about you Mary? How do you handle those clients?Mary: I try to give people more of a heads up that I’m going on vacation rather than dealing with it right when I’m about to go on vacation. So about two weeks before my vacation, I will personally message some of my repeat buyers and tell them that hey, I’m going to be going away for vacation and here are the dates that I will be away. The other thing I do is I also put up a message in the text of my profile page that I’m going to be going on vacation and what those dates are.Since your profile text shows up on all of your Gigs on the right hand side of the Gig pages, I know that all of my Gig pages will have that message on there and so everybody will be able to see the dates that I will be away for vacation.Redd: That’s a really good idea, yes, because I imagine that people – you have a lot of Gigs, so going through and putting them into every Gig description would be so tedious and time-consuming.Mary: Right, exactly, yes. I used to do that but now that the Gig profile shows up on all of the Gig pages, I just change it in one place and I know that it’s going to be on all of my Gigs.Redd: Got you. So Adam, what do you do if you have a regular client and you are on one of your vacation modes where you’re still working? You just kind of need a little extra breathing room and you have a client that just absolutely has to have something. There’s nothing you can do. There’s no way around it. How do you deal with those?Adam: So there’s – I have a few clients who I work with quite often and I often have arrangement with these clients where they will receive the order faster than the Gig stated and we’ve worked together for so long that it’s a case of when they message me normally, I send through a custom offer and we go ahead and proceed with that.So what I go ahead and do on vacation mode is actually I do do something similar to Mary where I write on my profile stating the dates I’m going to be away. But what I will also state is for any previous customer, say someone who hasn’t – who has ordered from me before, any previous customer to send me a message and to see if we can organize a custom quote.So in that scenario, if I have someone come to me when I’m on vacation mode and they’re a good buyer who I want to be there for, I can send them a custom quote through based on any kind of lead time. Maybe it might even be a lead time after I come back from vacation. But just the fact that I can secure them in my queue and secure that order so the buyer knows that I’m retaining their custom as opposed to potentially them going to another freelancer, finding their work just as good and not coming back to me.So I’m always open to still helping the returning buyers who need me when I’m on the vacation mode or when I’m quite busy. So Redd, you’ve got quite a short lead time yourself. I believe your main Gig is about two days at the moment.Redd: Yes, my main Gig is two days and has always been two days.Adam: So one question I’ve got to ask you then because based on the way the Gig delivery system works, it states on your Gig your average delivery day. So if you were to extend your lead time to say a week if you’re going to wait for longer, and that had the potential to affect your average delivery time for when you came back, how would you kind of work with that?Redd: Well, for me, I feel like extending to one week just for a very short period of time probably wouldn’t impact my average too greatly and the thing with my particular business is over 50 percent of my clients are return clients. So they’re very, very used to my turnaround times.The bigger issue that I face when dealing with things like going on vacation mode or extending my lead time is that my clients are so very used to my turnaround that they have a harder time understanding why they haven’t received their order and a lot of my clients also use the “reorder now” button. So they might not actually check to see whether or not I’m actually there.The other problem that I also have is a lot of my clients use my extra fast delivery and when I don’t have that available, they will add in Gig extras and say, “I want it in 24 hours,” in a message in the order. I’m like, “Well, there’s a slight problem there. I’m not actually accepting 24-hour delivery right now,” and then I always get people asking me where it has gone and if it’s coming back.So my bigger issue is to deal with the level of expectation that I have built for my clients and managing that as a different thing. What I generally do is a similar thing to Mary where I try and give as much notice as possible. So what I do is when I’m about to take a break or if I’m extending my lead time which is one of the things I’m going to be doing coming up here shortly, I have to put a message in my Gig description that says I will not be in the studio from this date to this date.Then for about four or five days prior, anytime I deliver an order, in my delivery message, I inform my clients that I will be out of the studio from this date to this date. So if they have any new orders or revisions, they need to get them to me by two days before.That has always been very, very helpful and that sort of minimized the impact there. So a lot of it is making sure that you are aware of what your client’s standard expectation is and how to manage that in a way that works for both you and the client because I’ve got a lot of clients that really do rely on me to get work to them quickly because they may be working for other clients that have certain deadlines.So yeah, it has my old adage again, “Communication is key.” I think it’s a really important thing to make sure you let people know what you’re doing and try and give them as much notice that they won’t be dissuaded from your service in the future. So that’s what I do.Adam: I think preplanning is very important. You touched upon it slightly there. I think preplan is very important as well because when the – the way the vacation mode works at the moment, if I wanted to go on vacation tomorrow, I couldn’t just kind of turn it on and instantly go on vacation because the likelihood is that I will actually have some queue or some sort of orders to do before tomorrow.So you kind of have to schedule yourself to be ready to actually take time to go on vacation mode. So what I will often do is when I pre-warn my buyers is I will often actually go on vacation mode maybe a week before I actually leave just to make sure that when I do leave, that I can leave freely or comfortably with everything being cleared.However that being said, do either of you ever have the temptation to kind of take any of your work with you if you’re going anywhere? So for example for you Redd, do you have the temptation to pack a microphone and for you Mary, do you have the temptation to kind of maybe pack a whiteboard and a video camera? Is there any kind of temptation with that?Redd: Yeah, I mean I travel about 10 or 11 times a year. I have a fantastic portable studio that is extremely high quality. So I’m able to deliver work to my clients when I’m on the road. Honestly, I really, really like working out of hotel rooms. I’m the only person I think who the second that I walk into a hotel room, the first thing that I do is rearrange the furniture.So I do that frequently and then the other thing that I do is I always keep up with my messages. So even if for some reason, if I’m just taking like a day, I will still usually take my laptop with me and respond to clients. The only time that I don’t do that is if I’m taking an honest to God actual vacation where I’m having time to recuperate or rest.I took a two-week trip to go visit family back in the summer and I didn’t take my work with me. I really, really needed to take a break. So for the most part, I would say 90 percent of the time I take my studio with me because I don’t like missing out on work personally and I can generally squeeze in a fair amount of recording around whatever things that I am doing when I’m traveling. How about you Mary? How do you handle that?Mary: I’m like you. I definitely don’t like to miss out on orders and work. But at the same time, I do recognize the value of not having all of your laptop and everything you need to work with you while you’re on vacation. This way you can relax because that is the point of a vacation in the end.But I do bring my tablet and obviously my phone everywhere I go on vacation because I like to look at them and respond to buyers and people that are asking me questions or maybe I can make a custom quote even when I’m on vacation. I can’t really do much work because I didn’t bring my laptop and I don’t have my computer with me, but at least I can communicate to buyers and say, “Hey, I’m on vacation but I can take an order,” and then this way when I return, I can do that order.Adam: I love the fact that when we’re all packing our bags to go on vacation, we’re all probably going, “Toothbrush, toiletries, stuff for Fiverr.”Redd: Yeah.Mary: Right.Adam: Just to make sure that – almost like a Fiverr go-bag to make sure that in some way, we can still communicate or stay responsive on the platform.Redd: Yeah, the really funny thing about my portable studio is my portable studio packs up into a bag that is a carry-on size for planes and I literally have it standing by at all times. So it really is – it’s like a go-bag, like I’m going on some kind – like I call it my go-bag. It’s like I’m going on some kind of like crazy assignment immediately and I must get – it makes me happy.Adam: I do the same when I often go on vacation when I go traveling because I have a lot of down time in between because I usually take the train. I will often go into the train, find a table seat, set up my laptop, my portable Wi-Fi, my phone for the apps to notify me and just basically work until I get to where I’m going so I don’t have any downtime on the travel and then use that to hopefully take the whole time off wherever I’m traveling to.So the fact that Fiverr has got stuff like the app at the moment allows you to be so portable that you can kind of dip in and dip out depending on how busy you are when you’re on vacation or when you’re trying to take time off in the platform.Redd: Yeah, exactly and then – I mean one of the things that personally I kind of really like about vacation mode when I do use it though is I like the email notification that tells you how many of your customers are waiting for you when you get back. It’s like my favorite email. I check it every day when I’m on vacation and it’s just kind of nice to see that there are still people that are like, “Hey, I’m just going to chill. I will be here when you get back,” and then you go on vacation mode and the orders come in and it just makes me happy.Adam: So talking about going off vacation mode, I’ve heard a few people say when you go on your vacation and you come back, if you’ve used vacation mode, sometimes it can be a little bit slow or it can be a little bit drift bed for orders coming through from that compared to what it might have been like before your vacation. Have either of you experienced that kind of scenario?Mary: I look at it sort of like a clean slate for me which is great because then when I come back, I’m not overwhelmed. But then if I took some orders on vacation, maybe some custom quotes, I will have them to look forward to, to start, and then after that, yes, the orders start to eventually trickle in and at a certain point, I will start to be back up and running at the point that I was previously before vacation.Redd: See for me it’s actually the opposite because I have such a high volume. I do such a high volume of orders generally when I come back from vacation mode. I think there was one time where I took a five-day break and I came off vacation mode and I reactivated. I was sitting in the airport in LA waiting for a connecting flight and I reactivated it and I think within an hour, I had something like 20 orders because of all the people that had been notified that I was going to be away and then as soon as I came back, they placed their orders.So generally what happens with me is, yeah, the day after I come back, I usually have one of my highest record order days and then it goes back to normal. It usually takes – I will usually have a really crazy week the first few days I come back and then the next week is normally a little on the slow side and then after that it’s just – it’s my standard Fiverr ebbs and flows that are unpredictable and wild and crazy.So yeah, for me, it kind of goes the other way but again, that’s – a lot of that is because I have a lot of repeat clients that are waiting on me. I do find though that if I take a shorter vacation, I have more orders when I return than if I take a longer vacation. So a two-week vacation, I might have less people coming to me the next day whereas a four or five-day vacation, I usually get inundated.Adam: Yeah, I think that’s maybe because they might sign up to be kind of notified but after a certain while, they may kind of look around and maybe find someone that will just do it in that timeframe where they may think, “Oh, I will leave that for a couple of days.” When they come back in a couple of days and you’re still on vacation, maybe they end up going elsewhere.So what I usually experienced was the same as Mary where I would come off vacation mode and it would be quite slow and I could kind of lead into it quite nicely and kind of still be on holiday mode.Mary: Right.Adam: The last time I went on vacation mode, it was the complete opposite. It was like Redd where I activated and I received absolutely loads of orders and it was a little bit daunting because I had been out of work in kind of like – you know, sitting down in the morning, turning on the computer, getting into the frame of mind and it kind of took me back a little bit and what I actually found myself doing was after I came back and I received so many orders, I just extended my delivery time slightly just to allow me to get back into the flow of working because you’re still kind of in holiday mode. Everyone knows when you come back from holiday, you don’t do your best work on the first day back.Redd: Yeah, I think that’s a really good idea to kind of like ease back in and shorten your lead time slowly. So you can still have that like holiday afterglow for as long as possible. So I mean we’ve talked about like planned vacations and planned time off. But everyone knows that there’s – sometimes there are days where things just happen or you get sick or things like that. So what do you guys do in the event that you have to take like an unplanned day-off?Adam: I’m not the best for this because I often – my queue often works where I work on the day of delivery. So everyone receives their orders on the day stated or the day beforehand with the buffer. So because I work in quite short lead times, when I get sick, it becomes quite difficult.However, what I will do is if I’m a little bit sick, I will still try and work and thankfully not a lot kind of depends on my voice or how I appear. So I’m not on video in any kind of way. So I could be as sick as a dog but still kind of typing.But if I’m really sick or if there’s kind of like an emergency where it’s a hospital visit or something along these lines, I will often communicate with my buyers. I will kind of say to them, “I’m really sorry. Something unforeseen has completely come up. I maybe can’t do this today but I can do it tomorrow,” and then based on how the buyer responds, I may refund them if they want to go that way or most of the time, they’re more than happy to say, “It’s no problem. Take your time. I want your best work so I will wait until you’re available.” How about yourself Mary? How do you handle when you’re sick?Mary: Sort of like you Adam. If it’s mild, I will try to power through it. I don’t really have to appear in front of camera so I could just start doing videos and do as much work as I possibly can. But unfortunately if it’s something that’s bad, I’m really sick, I will talk to my buyers and let them know what’s going on and I will also let – I will also add a little bit of extra days to my turnaround time on my Gig pages.Back in 2012, Hurricane Sandy actually hit me and my apartment got flooded and I lost power for 10 days and at that point I had no choice but to tell all my buyers, “Hey, I’m going to be out of commission for a while.” At that point, I also had to cancel a few open orders. But everyone was really understanding, which was good, and then some people even came back after and reordered with me. So that was good.Adam: Yeah, I think buyers are actually really quite great in that situation as long as you kind of give them a heads up and let them know what’s going on. They can kind of understand and they empathize with that and they allow you the time to do so. So Redd, I imagine when you’re sick, it’s quite difficult because your whole service relies around your voice. I know when I’m sick I sound a bit like Darth Vader. So how do you handle that with the voice change or the potential for there to be a voice change and a sore throat?Redd: I’m really, really lucky. I generally get sick one time per year and I almost always get sick when I go home to visit my family in England. Like almost every single time I get a cold, which is always really funny. But luckily, I’m usually on vacation mode so it’s fine.I do sometimes get a little under the weather. For me, it’s very, very rare that I will get to a point where I am so sick that I cannot possibly work because I’ve learned how to really take my time with recordings and I can super, super slow down and make sure that everything sounds good. But it’s kind of the same thing. Like if I do have something happen where there’s like absolutely no way I can work, I will – I don’t usually extend my lead time. But I will definitely contact clients and say, “Hey, I’m going to be a tiny, tiny bit delayed because I’ve lost my voice,” and a lot of the time, they are very, very understanding especially if you just tell them what’s going on.I’m really also quite lucky that I haven’t had any like major emergencies come up of late where I’ve absolutely had to – I had one little one a few weeks ago where I had – one of my friends was very, very, very ill and I had to go and take care of her toddler for her for a day when I was supposed to be working.That was one of those ones where I was late on a couple of orders and as soon as I knew I was going to be late, I messaged them right away and said, hey, I’m going to be – I’ve had something come up. I will have this to you. I told them when I would have it to them by.So for that, I’m usually OK but if I can keep it out of my voice, I can keep working and I’ve worked through food poisoning. I’ve worked through – I had LASIK eye surgery and I kept working. There are definitely a lot of things that you can work around but yeah, it’s a constant fear. I’m not going to lie. For me, like losing my voice is one of the most terrifying things. If I wake up with a little tickle in my throat, I get so nervous immediately and I’m like throwing every possible like potential throat medication or cold-fighting thing that I can at it and just bombarding my system with vitamin C and all kinds of stuff like that.So yeah, it’s hard for sure but I think it’s also about knowing your limitations. Like, you know what you – you know what you can handle when you’re sick. Like for you guys, you know that you can curl up on a couch maybe and work from a laptop, covered in blankets and keep up with your clients. But for some people like – especially people who have to appear on camera, I imagine that must be a whole another level of challenging,Adam: Definitely. I think there is that kind of pressure with that. But I often find that I actually – I only become sick once I am – my queue is cleared. So I seem to have a really busy queue. I power all the way through it and I think, “Right, OK, I’m good. I’m clear. I’ve got a few days off,” and then my body just kind of says to me, “It’s time to be ill.”Redd: Yeah.Adam: Now you are ready.Redd: Yeah. I waited for you and here you go. Here is everything under the sun.Mary: It’s weird. I feel like I’ve had the same thing happen to me where I – the only times I really get sick very badly that I can’t really do too much work and I need the time to recuperate, my queue isn’t too large and I’m not too busy. So I have the time to catch up to all my orders. It’s just lucky though.Redd: It’s weird too. Like I feel – when I used to work a regular job, when I used to work like a standard like working for a company, I didn’t feel like taking sick days was really a big deal at all. But it’s so strange how the mentality shifts when you’re a freelancer. We don’t get built-in sick days.So now like the idea, like I will move heaven and earth to work when I am sick whereas before I would be like, “I’m going to stay home, watch Netflix and just yeah.” It’s so much different and I think a lot of that too is like I feel like when you become a freelancer, like your work ethic changes and you have the ability to power through way more than maybe you could when you weren’t a freelancer. Do you guys – am I crazy? Do you guys feel the same way?Adam: Yeah. I would say I would have to agree although I’ve only ever actually worked one other job where I wasn’t a freelancer and I don’t remember taking any sick days from that. But I know definitely when you become a freelancer, there’s a lot more pressure on you because if you’re sick and you don’t work, you don’t get paid whereas maybe if you work for someone else and you’re sick, you may still get paid from that or there won’t be a large repercussion from that because obviously when you’re a freelancer, the buck kind of falls to you to handle that.So I think it’s important that you’re just basically communicating with your buyers and keeping on top with your buyers and kind of keeping them in the loop as opposed to just disappearing or laying on the couch for the day because even if you’re so sick that you can’t potentially work, just giving them a heads up will often result in them being happy with that.Mary: I think there is a bit more pressure on you when you’re sick as a freelancer since you’re basically your own boss and you don’t have a team to back you up.Redd: I think too it’s partly that when you work in a regular office environment, if you are unwell, you also have the capability of – for one thing, people are going to see you and be like, “Oh, you look terrible,” and for another thing, you have the potential to like contaminate people.Adam: You bring the whole office down.Redd: Exactly. That’s a little – I think that’s another part of it too, like it’s a little different when you work in a freelance situation and most of us work from home where it’s like, yeah, I can if I need to run to the bathroom and have a moment. But it’s not going to affect anyone around me because it’s just me. So it is easier to work because we’re not dealing with an environment of people that are going to be affected by our illness or our actions when we are ill.Mary: Especially if you’re at home. You have access to your bed, medications. Everything is on hand for you.Redd: You can drink a hot toddy with whiskey in it at 1:00 in the afternoon and no one will look at you funny. OK. So I think that about covers our main topic for today. So one of the community questions that we get a lot that we are going to talk about a little today is we often get asked the question, “My buyer didn’t rate my Gig. What should I do about the fact that I didn’t get any kind of review?” Adam, you have a pretty interesting way of handling client reviews, don’t you?Adam: Yeah. What I often find with – well, every review you receive is very important. The more you receive, the better you’re going to do. So what I try and do is every time I complete an order, I try and make it as easy as possible to kind of initiate that review or direct the user in the way of leaving a review.So one of the things I do on my logo design Gig is when I deliver the order, I actually deliver a kind of template page that they can open up and inside that page it will show them the logo that they’ve received and then it will give them two options for them to click.Option number one is to say they liked the work and option number two is to say that they don’t like it. Option number one when they click that, it kind of prompts them how to leave feedback and kind of move them on to that, even showing screenshots of what they need to do and for option two if they don’t like it, rather than prompt them to leave feedback which could potentially be lesser, it prompts them to get in touch with me and request a modification.So you often hear about people not leaving feedback and when you are a new seller, that can be really detrimental because when you’re a new seller, you want as much feedback as possible and at the moment, I believe my feedback rate is actually only about two-thirds of my orders who have actually left ratings.So there’s a whole third there that haven’t which obviously if I was a newer seller and I was relying on that feedback, if I had say only 10 ratings, to lose three or four of those would be quite difficult.But I think there’s a lot of different reasons why a buyer potentially doesn’t leave feedback and personally after that point of delivery, I’m not a massive fan of chasing them up for it because I feel like I may be hounding them.Redd: Yeah, I agree. I feel like if they’re not satisfied with the transaction, they’re going to tell you. If they’ve walked away from it and it’s completed, that they were happy and they’ve got what they need. I don’t feel like – especially with so many clients that come in for just a quick project and then hop off again. I don’t want to pressure them to come and do an extra step that they might find irritating even though of course I want the reviews and of course I want them to spend time on the platform.I don’t want to make them feel like they have to do work after they’ve gotten what they came for. I have the same figure. I have about 30 to 33 percent of clients who have not ever reviewed my work. So I think it’s – I feel like it’s a fairly standard figure. Mary, do you know how many clients you have that haven’t reviewed your work?Mary: I would say about the same and just because somebody doesn’t leave a message or leave a review for you, it doesn’t mean that they didn’t like your work. It doesn’t mean that they’re not going to reorder with you. I’ve had plenty of people that don’t leave feedback and then come back and order with me a week later.Redd: I’ve got one particular client who he orders from me usually at least one order per day and he never leaves me feedback. Looking at the amount of work he does through me, I think it’s purely because he just doesn’t have the time. I’m not going to – I don’t want to get on him about that because I completely understand.The one thing that I do though that I feel like does kind of encourage clients a little bit to give feedback is I always respond with – I always give feedback to my clients as well. So anytime they rate me, I always make sure to rate them back because I feel like when people are looking at my reviews, they see it more of kind of like a conversation than just a whole bunch of lines.So I feel like that kind of inspires them more to review because they know that I’m going to then reciprocally review them.Adam: Yes, I think that’s a great way of looking at it. I mean at the moment, I only really reply to feedback where the comments may be a little bit low or a little bit less positive. But I think it would probably be important to kind of try to respond to everyone.So from that, the new buyers are going to see that they respond and you’re attentive and maybe be more inclined to leave feedback. I kind of have a bit of a checklist for reasons why a buyer may not leave feedback. So I don’t know if you guys want me to run through it. It’s not that long but having been on the platform for so long, there are a few different reasons that I’ve kind of concluded as to why a buyer may not leave feedback.Redd: Definitely. What have you got?Adam: So the first reason is the buyer may have grabbed the order and opened it off site. So say for example you send them an MP3 voiceover recording. They may have downloaded it and said, “Wow, this is fantastic. Let’s go ahead and use that as it was meant to,” and just kind of forgetting to come back on to Fiverr, because unlike sellers, buyers aren’t on the website as frequently as us.The other thing might be they may be indifferent to what they received. So they may not like it. They may not dislike it and rather than kind of maybe leave a less than perfect rating, they choose to not leave a rating at all, which is why sometimes I don’t like to chase them up because if that’s the case, I don’t want to kind of exacerbate that.The other option may be the fact that they just don’t realize or they forget which is quite simply. Another option, maybe it will auto mark it as complete because the buyer isn’t on the platform as frequently as sellers and they will come back at a later date to leave that review.So whilst it closes out for three days to us, it’s still available up to 30 days afterwards for the buyer to go ahead and leave their review. The other reason is the fact that sometimes – and this is crazy to think. But sometimes buyers don’t actually return after their initial purchase.I’ve received scenarios where I have delivered work and the buyer hadn’t come back seemingly at all or until months and months later when I hear back from them. It’s a bit crazy to think that people will go ahead and purchase them. But as you say, people are often busy. Things will sit in their mind and it just kind of happens.The last aspect – the two aspects I have is they may be looking to place other orders or they may not leave feedback on every single option because again it’s time-consuming.The last point to mention is if you have a live portfolio enabled on your Gig, they may be fearful not realizing that the work is going to show in live portfolio and they may just decide not to leave feedback at all, not wanting to make that public.So if you do offer a service where your live portfolio is turned on, maybe just slip a note in your delivery message to let the users know if they don’t want it to show in your portfolio, just to deselect that from the right hand side.Redd: Those are definitely all really, really good points. I would certainly agree with all of them. I think the longest – I actually had a client come back to me. It had been a year since he placed his order and I was so confused because it had been almost exactly a year. So it was one of those things where I was like, “Oh, messaged me two days ago. No, wait. That was August 2014.” So yeah, sometimes it just takes them forever and if they don’t make it back within 30 days, it automatically closes out. So I think a lot of the time – I think I would advise other sellers to not get too hung up on the non-reviewed orders. I think it’s kind of just a quirk of the system and part of the way it works.Adam: Yeah, I would – to put it simply, I would maybe try and do my best to direct or kind of point to leaving a review when you deliver the order but I wouldn’t chase them up after that. So as I say, I kind of show them how they can leave a review but I won’t chase them up a couple of days later saying, “Hi, have you reviewed or have you seen the order yet?” Because like I said, you don’t really want to hound them because they may just have been happy receiving the order and moving on from it.Mary: Sometimes I find that yes, a buyer might have forgotten to leave a review or they haven’t even checked the order yet. So sometimes you will get a review a week or two after you have completed the order. But one way that I try to get feedback from my buyers is within my delivery message, I use a quick response that mentions that it would be great if the buyer would leave me feedback.Redd: Yeah, it definitely seems like prompting them to make sure that they understand it’s a potential thing they can do is definitely good for the clients who aren’t super familiar with the system. Yeah.Adam: In the same way as well, I will often kind of gear it to the way where if the feedback potentially isn’t going to be positive, to rather than just go ahead and leave feedback is to get in touch with me beforehand and contact me beforehand because I’ve also realized that a lot of buyers maybe don’t really understand what to do if they don’t like the work after delivery. So some may choose not to review at all or some may review – to go straight on to the review and leave a negative review whereas you can kind of handle that in between to make sure that you’re directing them correctly.Redd: That’s about all we have time for today. Thanks very much for listening. If you have community questions for us, you can leave them on the podcast thread at forum.Fiverr.com. Thanks so much to Mary for joining us today. You can find her on Fiverr at Uniquefivex. Our jingle was by Ryan AKA Customdrumloops and we were edited today by Dansha. Thanks so much and we will see you next week.Transcription by Transexpert
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