Fiverr’s new success score is a huge evolutionary leap for Fiverr’s freelancer evaluation systems, and one that continues to confuse and upset sellers months after its launch. But how does it actually work?
Since it was introduced on Valentine’s Day 2024 – great timing – the Fiverr success score has become a core part of Fiverr’s AI automated evaluation processes. Everything you do is sent to a number-crunching algorithm that delivers seemingly arbitrary scores that make no sense.
In this article, I’m going to explore how the success score works, how it is calculated, and how it impacts your visibility on the Fiverr marketplace. I’m also going to show you how you can improve your success score. I’ll also show you a personal situation I was in that had a very positive impact on my success score and show how you can start thinking about this new metric.
Whether you’re a new seller trying to figure Fiverr out or a veteran seller still steaming about your unfair success score, you should find something useful in this article. Even if Fiverr won’t tell us exactly how this new performance metric works, there’s plenty we can figure out with observation.
Let’s jump right into it!
How to Find Your Individual Fiverr Gig Success Scores
Your overall Fiverr success score is visible on the Fiverr dashboard, just to the left of your order queue.
To the left is my success score. You can also see my overall rating is 4.9 (it was 5.0 before the recent changes to the rating system!).
This is is only your overall success score. If you want to see more details about your individual gig performance and scoring, you need to click on the “go to level overview” button.
This will take you to a page that has more detailed information on your overall performance on Fiverr.
This page has a lot of information about your overall progress as a seller on Fiverr. The success score for each gig is hidden away behind a couple of clicks:
The Success Score Is A Part of the New Fiverr Evaluation
Fiverr changed a lot of things in February 2024. The success score was the most obvious new change – and the most confusing. As a result, it has taken the limelight, but sellers should remember that the success score is just one of Fiverr’s performance metrics.
Don’t get too hung up on your success score, because you need to stay on top of all of these metrics to succeed on Fiverr:
| Performance Metric | Tracks |
|---|---|
| Earnings (financial performance) | Revenue generation on Fiverr |
| Orders (fulfillment) | All orders completed; reliability |
| Rating (client satisfaction) | Average rating of gigs |
| Response Rate (communication) | Ability to respond within 24 hours |
| Success score | overall gig performance history |
| Unique buyers (client base growth) | Different buyers you have worked with |
All of these metrics (including the success score) contribute to your level. Some, like earnings and unique buyers will not really matter after you pass the various level thresholds, but others will need to be maintained. These include:
- Overall success score (i.e. your overall gig performance)
- Rating (i.e. your feedback, as close to 5 stars as possible)
- Response Rate (i.e. if you respond to the first message within 24 hours)
How Fiverr Calculates the Success Score
This overall score is calculated from your individual gig scores, relative to other gigs in your category or subcategory. Fiverr puts more weight on gigs that sell more so that the activity of your less successful gigs isn’t disproportionate.
What does this mean? Your Fiverr success score isn’t just an indicator of how well you are performing, but how you compare to your competitors, gig by gig. Your success score is only visible to you, not to your buyers. Your buyers can only see your level (which the success score can affect).
One controversy about the success score is how this works when an individual seller is compared to an agency seller. Clearly, agency sellers can deliver far more gigs, but is this accounted for in the success score algorithm? We don’t know – and Fiverr isn’t telling us.
How Often Does the Success Score Update?
The success score is continuously updated, but it is also designed to be “relatively stable”. This means that it should not change often and only reflect longer-term trends in your performance. As your success score on Fiverr updates, it will look at:
- Your order history
- Past performance
- Current performance
Will all that said, Fiverr’s success score is still very new and people are reporting fluctuations as Fiverr’s new review systems emerge from the transition period.
All you can do is to try your best and improve areas of your gig performance where you are weak.
But how do you do that?
How to Improve Your Fiverr Success Score
Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as there are six variables for each gig. Your overall success score takes the scoring of each gig and then grades you relative to other sellers in your category.
This is important, because it means that your final success score isn’t based on your own performance alone. It will also take into account how other sellers are doing and where you fit into the overall picture. I like to think of it as a sports leaderboard where the scores and rankings are always changing – and upsets are bound to happen as underdogs beat world champions.
The success score tips table below explains exactly what each performance metric measures and some broad actions you can take to improve your performance:
| Success Score Metric | Behaviors Measured | Success Score Tips |
|---|---|---|
| Client satisfaction | Positive user experience | Deliver exceptional experiences that exceed buyer expectations |
| Conflict-free orders | Harmony and dispute resolution | Minimize disputes through proactive communication and respectful conflict resolution |
| Delivery time | Efficiency and time management | Demonstrate efficiency by delivering on time or exceeding expectations |
| Effective communication | Transparency and trust | Responsiveness, build trust with transparent communication, and set clear expectations |
| Order cancellation | Fulfillment and responsibility | Reduce cancellations by understanding client needs, with proactive communication, and finding mutually beneficial solutions. |
| Value of delivery | Fairness and value perception | Ensure clients perceive value by setting fair prices that reflect effort and delivering high-quality work |
Unfortunately, the only information you’re going to get from Fiverr about where to improve is the “impact” rating on your individual gig. It’s not always easy to know what this means, especially if you feel like you have been performing well recently.
If you really feel like you haven’t done anything that should affect your success score negatively, then it may simply be that you are currently performing worse than your subcategory competitors.
To help visualize how you can implement these success score tips in your Fiverr orders, I’ll give you an example from a gig I recently completed.
How I Turned an Order Cancellation Into More Orders
Recently, I had an order that went wrong.
The buyer was an agency, and I was writing for his client. While the buyer loved my work, their client did not and decided to move forward with another writer’s work.
If you’re a Fiverr seller, you already know how this story usually ends – the order gets cancelled. 😱
As you probably already guessed from the impact statement in the image the order was not cancelled. I talked with my buyer for a bit, offering solutions instead of cancelling. In the end, the buyer agreed not to cancel and also ordered another gig. Everyone was happy, and the order was completed with a 5-star review.
The success score for that gig now has a strong positive impact for order cancellations – even if I only scored positive impact for effective communication.
Why wouldn’t I get a strong positive impact for managing to get the best result possible in this situation? I think there are two reasons:
- Sellers usually choose to cancel when there is a problem to preserve ratings
- It is rarer for sellers to avoid cancellation and get a new order immediately after
- Most sellers manage to “communicate effectively” outside of difficult situations
In other words, relatively speaking, my communication was great, but nothing exceptional compared to other writers in my subcategory. On the other hand, I did get an exceptional result by avoiding a cancellation and turning it into another order, giving my success score for that gig a major boost.
Ultimately, I didn’t just make myself more moeny, I also made Fiverr more money. It might not claim that as a factor in its scoring, but Fiverr is a business, too!
It doesn’t matter how exceptional we think our performance is. If you want a good success score on Fiverr, it must be good enough to compare favorably to other sellers.
How to Recover from a Bad Success Score on Fiverr
Since the success score has been introduced, sellers have been freaking out. Freelancers who thought they were on track to become Top-Rated were horrified to wake up to Success Scores of 4 and the prospect of becoming a no level seller.
That’s deeply upsetting. However, Fiverr isn’t going to roll this back. Sellers with poor success scores now have two choices:
- Freak out and leave Fiverr forever (and lose a potential future income source)
- Try to figure out what went wrong and fix it with the limited information you have
If you’re in this boat, try not to freak out and let fear or anger take over your decisions. It can feel very personal, but the reality is that that an algorithm did some number-crunching and you lost.
There are a lot of similarities between Upwork’s job success score and Fiverr’s, so don’t think the grass is greener over there – it isn’t!
If anything, I think this new success score only highlights how freelancers need to diversify their income sources so that they always have work, even if other areas of their business isn’t doing well.
Try to Figure Out What The Issue Is
This can be tough, especially with the limited feedback Fiverr provides. All you get is a statement about the impact of a success factor on your scoring. There are a few things you can do here:
- Go through past gigs
- Consider what went wrong
- Evaluate client feedback
- Look for criticisms big or small
Looking at critical comments and assessing them calmly is important. It’s not always easy to hear buyers criticize you, but they are giving you the direct feedback that Fiverr won’t. Think of these criticisms as opportunities, not personal attacks (and if there are personal attacks, ignore them).
And, moving forward, take the same approach. One of Fiverr’s success score metrics is conflict resolution, or how well you are able to diffuse a negative situation – which usually requires effective communication to avoid a cancellation.
As you can see, thinking holistically about your success score can help you to address issues. Take the value of delivery metric as an example: outside of freebie hunters, you want to make sure that your pricing is fair and reflects the value you deliver. Or rather, that you can communicate your value effectively and avoid cancellation.
Be prepared to ask yourself tough questions and analyze what you can do to improve. If you’re an older seller with thousands of orders, this may take a long time. If you’re a new seller, you should get this done as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to change your success score on Fiverr. You’ll need to put in work and make sure that you consistently perform to high standards across all of your gigs moving forward. Just keep an eye on what your gigs are telling you and adapt when necessary.
Choose Your Buyers on Fiverr Carefully
If you don’t have Seller Plus and Request to Order, this can be tricky, as Fiverr lets anyone buy your gig, which means you don’t really have a choice in who you work with – and sometimes, that means you get to deal with some pretty bad buyers.
Outside of Seller Plus, the only way to deal with this is to put your prices up to a level where most people prefer to contact you first. This will give you time to vet your buyers and make sure that they’re someone you want to work with.
Since you’re trying to improve your success score, you should try to avoid working with buyers who display red flags. During the order, make sure you do everything you can to impress the buyer and deliver an exceptional service.
Depending on how many gigs you get, your score should start improving slowly. If it doesn’t, then other sellers may still be performing better than you. If you think that’s the case, carry out some competitor research and try to see what they are doing that you aren’t.
There are no quick and easy ways to game this.
Learning to Live with Fiverr’s New Scoring System
Like most sellers, I am not thrilled about the success score. It’s a lot of extra pressure that has been added to my plate so Fiverr can use AI and automation to tackle the platform’s worst sellers. It’s not fair… but it is what it is. While I may be a perfect 10, there is hardly any room to slip – and I won’t always be able to turn cancellations into new orders.
It’s pressure I can do without as someone living with chronic illness. While some might rise to the challenge, my advice is not to let this challenge obsess you. It’s just a metric and if you take it too seriously, you may get sick like I did. Trust me, it’s not worth it!
We cannot control most things in life, and this is just one of them. What we can control is how we respond to our success score and how we can influence it in the future. Ultimately, this isn’t a bad thing, since the metrics all directly concern how good we are at different aspects of freelancing.
It may not feel like it, but those vague metrics hold the key to what you can do to influence your future success score. You will need to do the work to translate that guidance into actions and make those improvements. This will take time and you’ll probably make mistakes as you work on self-improvement, but you’ll get there in the end.
Just try to remember that you are not alone. Many sellers on Fiverr are upset about the metric, even if they “won” with a high success score. Nobody can perform at their best every day, which means that your score can improve (or get worse!) even if you haven’t done anything; all that has happened is a shift in the overall successes and failures of others in your category.
Good luck out there!
