and Why We Still Use it Anyway. 

Here’s something new to this blog; let’s talk about copywriting. I have been using Fiverr as a seller for two years now. I’ve written sales copy, articles and blog posts for countless businesses, have achieved a Level 2 seller rating, worked with almost a hundred clients, and (somehow) kept up a solid 5-star average for my reviews. And I still don’t like the site…  

What makes me qualified to condemn a website that provides hundreds of thousands of people with a livelihood they likely couldn’t maintain without its existence, you ask? Well, this is my blog, so in theory I can do what I want. That is, until I get panicky and delete this post for good, of course.  

1. A Fiver is Far too Cheap 

I can’t speak for any industry other than copywriting, but I can say Fiverr pushes the value of genuinely good copy down greatly. After all, why would someone pay £300 for a professional, who produces high quality work every time, when they can pay £3 for something that probably isn’t that much worse, from a seller who isn’t yet experienced/confident enough to charge what they’re worth?

Since, in theory, copywriting needs very little prior skill, it seems to be marketed to potential sellers (and hustlers) as an easy way to make some cash on the side. But, with hundreds of other sellers marketing at a cheaper price point than you, eventually it pushes you away from raising your prices, and even toward keeping them at a minimum. There’s also, undeniably, some complete drivel on Fiverr, which is a pain if you genuinely believe you’re talented and what you’re offering is good, because you have to see your gig next to one with twice as many clients, from a seller with half the skill or passion, churning out template responses and outsourcing to new sellers. 

It’s all based on who Fiverr chooses to put on their search results screen, and I guess that is some kind of meritocracy, although I’d hesitate to call it that because that would lead you to believe it. I managed to get onto the treadmill in my second month and I was absolutely swamped, stressed, making mistakes, and completely unhappy with the work that I was producing. I should have made so much more than I did, for the incredible amount of work I had to do. Nowhere else on the internet or otherwise would it be acceptable to ask for copywriting to be completed in 3 days. Three days! Well, maybe UpWork, and perhaps I’ll condemn that site one day as well on this blog because boy do I have a story about them. 

If you raise your prices or turn down a low-baller, the algorithm recognises that you have engaged in correspondence with no order placed and pushes your gig down in the search. It’s a vicious cycle – the less you get orders, the further down you go. There’s no balance or fair representation in place. I’ve known people who had second accounts, from which they would purchase from their main accounts in order to artificially inflate reviews and get their gig off the ground or provide a boost to their spot in the algorithm.

“Fiverr creates 

the perfect space for cheap labour, 

and if you’re serious about copywriting 

then you’re already

worth more than that.”

2. It’s Never a Fiverr 

Sure, $5 for what could probably be half an hour’s work may seem like a good deal, especially if you’re ‘Fiverring’ on the side. But, if you live in the UK like me, your earnings are far less due to the currency conversion, and that’s without mentioning the fact that Fiverr charge 20% commission for both buyers and sellers. And even after this, there’s fees to remove your earnings into your PayPal or bank account and to convert your earnings from dollars into pounds. I had earned £1770 after Fiverr took their 20% and when I came to withdraw it, ended up with £1579.

So let’s do some math. If you charge $5 for a 500 word article, a common price-point for freelancers starting out, the commission means you actually receive $4, and currency conversion means you have made a grand total of £3 for what is a significant deal of work. This is on top of a pretty complex process for withdrawing the money into a bank account – it’s easier just to do it through PayPal, and then withdraw to your bank account from PayPal. This price drop only incentivises a disregard for quality or care, especially considering just about every mainstream freelancer market is completely saturated with sellers, most who are willing to work quicker than you, for less than you.

But money is money right? It’s not something to turn your nose up at.

This mindset will only make you feel worse about the whole ordeal, since you’re not being grateful enough for what you’re taking home. To make the money you’re thinking of making, the amount of work you will have to do is undesirable at best and physically impossible at worst. Fiverr do not care that this may be your livelihood, they have little care for the fact that you may be trying to build a legitimate career.  

Way back when, a month into my Fiverr ‘journey’, I was doing surprisingly well and had already made $200. Wait, I mean $160. Wait, I mean £120. My impressions, which Fiverr actually shows you and are actually helpful, although not trustworthy or accurate, had been on the up and up. Until I wake up one morning and my gig has been deleted. Yep. Completely gone, along with all that hard work. 

I had to reach out to Fiverr to ask why this was, and it was by offering to write product reviews, which broke Fiverr’s terms of service and the law! Their first reaction was to fully and completely delete the gig that I had put so much hard work into, and the hard work that they had been more than happy to make money from themselves. This is in spite of the fact that thousands of other copywriters openly offer to write product reviews in their gig description, since it is a genuine form of copy, with far more customers than I’ve ever had. I gave them a piece of my mind and eventually got them to reinstate the gig. 

I still get approached to write these kinds of copy, and I still do (as long as I am sent the product/film/book I am reviewing), which is much cooler now it feels like some kind of light crime. However, it’s clear that Fiverr have little care for their sellers’ livelihoods, and this was only the first incidence of Fiverr sabotaging my career. 

3. Customer Service Is for Customers, Not Sellers 

You may make the mistake of thinking that Fiverr would have some respect for its sellers, considering their profit comes from skimming the money we’ve genuinely earned. But in actuality it’s coming from the buyers’ pockets, which means you’re slightly less necessary, and they will ALWAYS take the buyers side. Another downside to the fact that, as they charge buyers a ‘service fee’, buyers will constantly ask you for discounts to account for this, encouraging you to lower your prices ever-further.

Once upon a time, about 3 months into my time on Fiverr, I had the complete displeasure of dealing with the rudest customer I have ever encountered on the site. He approached me with an extreme lowball that I initially declined, writing him off as a time-waster (of which there are quite a few, you get better at spotting them the longer you use the site – $12 for a 5 hour delivery on a full 3000 word B2B presentation was my most recent…hah!). He continued to bargain and eventually agreed to pay my standardised and clearly listed prices. Then, he began to push for a quicker delivery and I, as politely as I could, informed him that the 3 day schedule I had offered initially was already an incredibly quick turn around time for his 2000 word brochure. Eventually he agreed and, since I was still green, I went ahead with the order. 

As soon as the order was through I sent a message confirming I had received it, and he sent back “you must do a good job on this piece for me, give me your best sales copy that converts, I have put my trust in you and paid your high prices so you must deliver”. 

I was charging $0.01 per word. Y’know, THE MINIMUM!

I explained that even though he was shopping in the lowest price bracket on the site, or on the internet, I would do my best to deliver the premium content he was looking for. Well, he didn’t like this at all. An hour long argument later, he told me I was pushy, self assured, and rude for not giving into his lowball, and that I was pushing back because I was a woman, and this is the precise reason I should yield to him. He also said he knew I was young, which is somehow even more creepy. All the while, he reiterated how much of a pleasant and experienced buyer he was as he was simultaneously insulting me and my work. I was distraught, upset, and thoroughly belittled. I asked him to cancel the order (surprise, surprise, this was ‘unprofessional’ in his opinion. I told him it was actually completely the opposite). 

Little did I know, it’s completely up to the ‘opposition’ whether the Fiverr order is cancelled. After declining three of my cancellation requests, and with the looming undelivered order and almost certain one-star review at the end of it, I was anxious beyond belief that I was going to lose my 5-star streak after three months of hard work getting my gig back off the ground after Fiverr deleted it. So, stupidly, I messaged Fiverr support and explained that I had had what was quite a jarring and aggressive experience, and that I’d really appreciate it if they could cancel the order. 

Well, they cancelled the order and I was very pleased. Then, lo and behold, the next time I went onto my profile I had been given a strike against my account! Two of these and your account is suspended. When I enquired as to why, they said I had manipulated the Fiverr cancelation service. Now, bear in mind, going through Fiverr support is a legitimate way to cancel an order. It is fully apparent that Fiverr had cancelled the order to cover their own back against the micro-aggressions directed at me by the buyer, but penalised me for not just sucking it up and doing the work for a person who had called my character and career into question. There is only one commandment as a seller on Fiverr – the buyer is god. This strike against my account prevented me from going up to the next ‘seller level’ (don’t even get me started on those), and stopped me getting orders for a long time. This was the second incidence of Fiverr sabotaging my career, and showed me it can be a very unsafe space, and this is not only protected but encouraged by the Fiverr higher ups. 

Buyers hold the power in your individual conversations; they can be as demanding as they like, and many of them have no concept of the fact that ‘copy that coverts’ is not guaranteed when you’re paying $5 for it. As soon as you have an order in with them, the risk of a negative review can impact your whole process. You’re at their mercy. I found the easiest way to ensure my rating was actually to turn down work and block some potential clients to preserve my mental health.

There’s a lot of processes on Fiverr in general, even if it is streamlined. You have to send buyers requests to extend the delivery time and cancel orders and add charges, and if they don’t answer the request then it’s time to sacrifice yourself for your $5, or you can kiss goodbye to more orders. You’re at the liberty of your buyers when, arguably, it should be the other way around, especially if what you’re producing is above the average, amateur work on there. Clients can also place an order without messaging you first, meaning the clock can start ticking while you’re settling down for bed, and you have much less time to familiarise yourself with their specifications and do your research. The crunch is real. 

4. Everyone is Horrible

Ok, this is hyperbole. I’ve met some wonderful buyers on Fiverr who genuinely seem like they respect the work I’m producing. Many people are experienced in their field, willing to wait if you’re busy, and surprisingly receptive to you upping your prices (as long as they can find you in the long list of copywriting gigs). Also, the vast majority of people will message you prior to making an order and are always very understanding if you explain that you’re swamped. 

But, it’s also true that there are many, much less polite messages from potential buyers. These messages are akin to them barking their prospective demands at you and then going elsewhere when you ask for basic respect. Due to Fiverr’s implicit ‘the buyer is god’ commandment, people tend not to take sellers seriously or act with any courtesy, since there’s almost no accountability. There’s also the impression that if you’re willing to sell your services so cheaply, at the base level of freelancing, then they can take the piss a little bit. After all, if you were worth more than a fiver, you wouldn’t be on Fiverr. I’ve been told by buyers they’d be back imminently and never heard from them again, only to be scolded for removing my offers when they reappear six weeks later. I’ve been asked for examples of work and never heard back even to decline, and left with no review after delivering 2500 words of well written articles in under a day. They know you’re likely inexperienced and so they can and will try and swing things past you that would never fly in the real world of copywriting. 

A way to combat this, and the rare setting implemented in favour of the seller by Fiverr (although it goes both ways), is the power to review buyers. Well, I have a story about this too…

After waiting three weeks for a buyer to submit their requirements on an order, I left them a 4-star review. The buyer, once again, took it upon themselves to insult me and my craft. He came into my messages to tell me he’d never be working with me again. I informed him that he should not take the review personally; that it’s a way for other sellers to be aware of what they might encounter when working with him, but that I was more than ok with him finding another buyer. He messaged me back a badly written paragraph about how I didn’t know how to do my job, after just giving me a 5–star review for, well, doing my job. Clearly, he had a lot of feelings about the whole thing and had taken that one star loss very seriously. I wished him luck and blocked him.  

If the point of the review system is to review buyers, then why is there never a buyers’ review less than 5 stars? Well, of course, it’s obviously bad business to turn away a potential buyer in such a way. But, if you had genuinely had a bad experience and never wanted to work with that person again, why wouldn’t you let other sellers know? Well that’s just it, the Fiverr market is buyer ruled, and the review system is skewed as a result of this and to protect it. Sellers agonise about very real one-star reviews, but buyers can insult us for even losing one star.

Oh, and I’ve also had a few people solicit me with cash in favour of ‘spending time’ with them or sending them lewd photographs. I’ve told them each no with varying degrees of disgust, and blocked and reported them all in record time. 

5. Fiverr, it Just…Doesn’t Work

It breaks sometimes. I mean the actual site – sometimes it glitches out badly.  For example, for a while, Fiverr was telling me I had an 83% response rate, when I’d replied to every single message I’d ever gotten. Coincidentally, this was in the same month that I was due to be promoted to being a level 2 seller. That’s suspicious, considering this is exactly what they did to me before when they deleted my gig. Example 3 of Fiverr sabotaging my career, here’s to many more. I feel as if I should have been more upset about this, but at this point I had become used to it.  Also, buyers you’ve blocked can still place an order with you, which is incredibly stressful. But once again, the buyer is god, you do not matter.

When things like this happen, it can disrupt your entire standing on the site by showing your gig to less people. And when you do actually get shown to buyers, the work required to maintain a fulfilling income is very stressful and definitely abnormal. Wow, what a surprise, brainwashing your peers for profit could be anything other than fun. 

But, it’s not just the site.

By this I mean Fiverr is just not right for copywriting, and I suppose, for other freelancing industries too. Aside from what I mentioned in the first point, growing your business at a manageable rate is impossible. There’s a lot of ups and downs, ebbs and flows while you’re at the mercy of whatever Fiverr has decided to do that day. It’s pretty hard to niche down in a lot of cases, and this also means you end up writing about mundane things you have little interest in, over and over and over and over again. And Fiverr only promotes your main one or two gigs, so don’t expect to branch out into other areas of your market.

As a final story, my highest ever price for one single piece of writing was $30. I mean, the guy basically suckered me into rewriting his entire website. I’m not kidding, this guy told me to write buttons for his site, lay things out like it would be on the site. This is not copywriting, this is web design. He sent a 30-minute explanation beforehand in which he talked down to me about copywriting, the thing he was soliciting me for, while also expecting an incredibly high quality of work. He sent a 30-minute voice note after every revision too, and there were four, one higher than my usual offer and he never paid me for any of them. He frequently changed what he was asking for and what he wanted the tone to be. He gave me so many examples of what he wanted each sentence to be like and edited my work to such a minute degree that I regularly thought to myself ‘why aren’t you just doing it?’. He expected me, a base-level freelance writer who he had just patronised about the skill I actually possess, to know complex details about a variety of coding languages, and he got very annoyed that I didn’t. You can’t patronise me in one breath and chastise me for being inexperienced with the next. Well, apparently Fiverr buyers can, and all that for $30. Wait, $24. Wait, £18. This, to date, is the only order I’ve cried over. People don’t seem to understand that they should be shopping in a much higher pricing bracket to match their high expectations.

Other copywriters who’ve built up a business use Fiverr to outsource cheap services, and then sell your work on as their own for huge, and I mean huge, markups. It’s demeaning to be told a buyer will only accept an order when their buyer approves it. You don’t want to be stuck in a chain and know you’re being used simply for being new to the game. That’s not something you should have to accept. You should be making that money because, before you know it, you won’t be new to the game anymore, you’ll just be getting exploited.

So Why Do We Still Use Fiverr?

For me, Fiverr has always been a little bit of a stepping stone to bigger things. So why am I still stood in the middle of the river? 

Fiverr devalues freelance work in general, but it’s the most consistent marketplace online, and its user base is incredibly large, which is attractive to new sellers who want to get started or anyone looking to supplement their income. In truth, I’ve gotten stuck with a few regular clients who are the rare and wonderful kind, and the constant promise of money every month is a hard tether to sever. This is especially true if you’re just going out into the dark world of freelancing. There’s a lot of security on Fiverr in that you know you’re going to get paid in some way. The buyers, site administrators and the company’s management know all this too, and that’s why they promote newbies’ very first gigs; to get you hooked on the supply.

 “But, with all the levels, 

it’s hard not to make Fiverr 

a full time thing, 

and it’s hard to make decent

money if you don’t.”

The interface is easy to use and is very organised, great for planning your work, and what’s 20% of your rightfully earned money stolen by a cold and faceless website when, instead, you would have to send out those bitingly cringe worthy cold e-mails, deal with even more rejection, set up your own site, risk not getting your invoices paid, and, eventually, become one of those vapid copywriting ‘elite’ that prey on the dreamers and set up their own copywriting course instead of actually writing, to make even more money from noobs such as you and I?

Sure, it’s possible to make the money you want to make freelance copywriting on Fiverr, but it will take a long time, a lot of playing the game, and a LOT of hard work. All told, in 2 years on Fiverr I’ve made £1500 of real money and I’ve given about £375 to Fiverr. But, if you’re willing to put the work in to get this or more, then have some faith in yourself and approach genuine copy agencies with your portfolio. Or, do what many of us are too afraid to do, and go out on your own! There are far better, more lucrative ways to freelance than on Fiverr, especially when it comes to copywriting. 

Closing thoughts? Honestly, I think it would be better if the whole site was just wiped off the face of the internet and people were forced to retreat back into individual, specialist sites, that focus on their particular freelancing niche. This would hopefully help get prices back up to where they should be and afford sellers the agency they deserve. If my stories have put you off using Fiverr for your skill or career, then that’s good, don’t look back. But, having said all this, as long as Fiverr stays put, which it almost definitely will, I’ll still use it to get my $240 a month that I’ve worked so hard to build up. Wait, I meant $192. 

Wait, I meant £145.