Failerr

By Colleen Walsh Fong

I spend lots of time looking into different ways to help my clients develop the best content for branding to grow their businesses. And I usually test things out myself before I recommend them.

Look at the icon in my featured image.

Isn’t it great? I love it. It’s too bad I never really got to use it. Or the video at the bottom of this article.

I had them made to sell services on Fiverr, a platform where you can sell almost anything legal for $5.

I’d heard that using Fiverr was a good way to grow a client base. The five-dollar service listed could be used as a hook, I was told and listing add-on services could make good money.

Before recommending Fiverr to some of my younger or start-up clients, though, I thought I ought to try it out myself and see how easy it really is to get a worthwhile return. There isn’t much I’ll do for only $5 so I had to come up with things I can do well and really fast.

I quickly set up an account and listed my services without reading the fine print too carefully. That’s where the “my bad” comes in later. I loaded up a handmade seller icon. But then I read somewhere on the platform that I’d get more views if I had a professional icon and also a brief video about what I do.

So I commissioned those two items from a couple of different vendors on Fiverr and for $10 I got the icon and the video shown above.

Once they arrived I logged back into my Fiverr account to load them up and found that it was frozen and my gig was listed with a suspended status. After mousing around a little bit I guessed that the reason for the suspension was improper listing of my services. And when I read the terms of use more carefully I found that I’d listed add-on services and I probably wasn’t allowed to do that until I’d sold enough for Fiverr to bump me up to that level of use. So I tried to delete the gig, but every option was greyed out and inaccessible to me.

It took some doing but I finally found a place to send a “my-bad” email explaining that I realized my error and wished to correct it but couldn’t access my account to delete what I’d already loaded. I sent the email and received a confirmation. It said that my request would be handled within three business days.

I went on about my business as usual, and sometime about a week or so later I realized I’d never heard back from Fiverr. So I sent another zendesk ticket, which is what platform people call a request for service or help. I won’t bury you under a mountain of detail. Suffice it to say that two months and 11 zendesk tickets later I was still unable to log in to my account and had received nothing other than the automatic “noreply” emails from Fiverr’s end. Finally I cleared out my cache of zendesk tickets and sent a new one detailing my saga. This action resulted in an email response from an actual human being cheerfully informing me that the problem had been fixed and instructing me to log in to my account as it was now unfrozen.

Only it wasn’t.

By now you’re probably thinking, “Wait, isn’t this the same person who couldn’t get into her Twitter account?” Okay. Busted. But I promise you that is different. I really do set up Twitter accounts for clients all the time and have three of my own that I log in and out of without incident, except for that one account. It turned out that Twitter was just being owly with me, and I got it all worked out. Twitter had comingled two of my accounts and combined the passwords. It wasn’t me it was Twitter.

This time it wasn’t Fiverr it was me. I readily admit to making the original mistake. My beef with Fiverr is the same as my beef with Twitter, though. Fiverr wouldn’t respond to me. So I decided to recommend Fiverr to my clients as a good source of purchasing inexpensive custom media but not to recommend it as a good way to snatch up clients quickly.

This saga occurred several months back so I figured I should test out my account one more time before writing this article. When I tried to log in this time I was able to reset my password and got to my account. The gig I had tried to delete months ago now had a status of on hold due to inactivity. That means Fiverr users could not view it. I deleted the gig and it appears that I may now launch a new one and even change my profile if I choose to do so. But I think I’m going to pass having learned all I care to know about using the platform.

The folks at Fiverr have also revamped their Help forum and it seems a little better organized than before. But users are still directed to a menu of topics they can read to theoretically find answers to their problems. And the same email inquiry system I used last fall exists. In other words, it’s still self-serve. So you may wait a long time to get any problems resolved if your issue doesn’t match one of their menu categories or FAQ’s.

I’ve moved Fiverr to status: Failerr