Fiverr is a great marketplace to find expert hands on several different areas, allowing clients to connect with freelancers and agencies to share their expertise.
Work is organised on “gigs”, where the scope of the work, price and days to deliver is agreed upon, and the job begins.
Between accepting the gig, and the client accepting the delivery, there is a gap in time where the client can potentially start requesting more help that it was agreed upon.
That is usually not an issue, but sometimes abuse clients appear, and they are a pain in the ass.
There are several warning flags that should be considered before accepting working on potential leads, that even us after 17 years of experience online, sometimes miss.
- They message you asking for discounts
Of course we all know these kind of people, where everywhere they go, they negotiate and rejoice everytime they got $1 less on their TV subscription, but forgetting they spent 2 hours on the phone to do so.
- They send short, fast, unthinked messages
These are fast multitaskers that probably have 100 tabs open, and they reply your message thought in a nanosecond.
This usually involves a hugh back and forth, where you need to quote, reread, rewrite to try to force the client to slow down and read things properly.
- They ask for extra stuff once the gig started
We had a client that needed help replacing their cache plugin. When the gig started, they wanted us to provide them with an Elementor Pro license, audit the security of the site so that they could cancel Sucuri, and setup a QUIC cloud proxy CDN by managing their Hostinger account.
From 32 orders we had so far, this happened to us only twice, so it’s safe to say these are exceptions.
In both cases, I’ve found improvements on our communication, and even in the worst case, Fiverr allows you to cancel the gig, refund the client and no harm done on our profile (except a less “completion rate”).
Fiverr does a great job trying to accommodate client needs with freelancer and agency skills, so though these problematic clients are really frustrating, it’s rare to find them and we have tools to try to detect them before agreeing on a gig.
