Are you looking for a freelancer for your website, a developer, or a graphic designer? Fiverr is a worldwide reference for freelancers.
Fiverr is a company founded in 2010 by Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger. The company is worth, at the time of writing this article, about 811 million USD.
Its operating principle is simple and typical of a marketplace.
On the one hand, there is the offer (of work) with freelancers who will register and offer their services. The freelancers come from all over the world and offer services ranging from website design to data analysis, social networks, or illustration creation.
The site is mainly English-speaking even if it exists in several languages. The profile of these providers is very young since 98% of them are less than … 55 years old.
Fiverr announces more than 830 000 sellers on its platform since the launch, spread all over the world.
Sellers are simple individuals, but also often real agencies that have found in Fiverr a way to expand their customer base.
On the other side, the demand (the customers, like you), who come with projects in their heads and who are ready to invest a few euros or several thousand euros to see their idea come to life and become a reality.
Frequently Asked Questions About Freelancing
Customers can be simple individuals, associations, or even multinationals. Fiverr claims more than 5.5 million buyers since the launch (so about 2 million active in 2018), spread over more than 160 countries.
Various projects are mainly related to the new economy.
The projects that you will find on Fiverr are quite varied even if they mainly revolve around the digital economy.
It can be simply to contribute to the increase of the notoriety of a Facebook page or an Instagram account. Other much more elaborate projects can be found on Fiverr, such as the creation of a crawl to retrieve information en masse from the internet.
In the past, the site was famous for offering logo design on the cheap – starting at $5, but that was changed back in 2013, and providers were given ample opportunity to charge the right price for their services as new categories appeared.
The categories you’ll find on the site are:
- Graphics and design – logo creation, brochure design, flyers and other promotional material, restaurant menu design, Photoshop file modifications, invitation creation, business cards, packaging design, book, and album covers. In short, think broadly when it comes to design and graphic illustration because you’ll have plenty to choose from on Fiverr!
- Digital marketing – the digital marketing category ranges from crowdfunding to email marketing, setting up web analytics for your website, mobile advertising, getting more visitors to your website, conducting surveys, search engine optimization (SEO), and e-commerce marketing. In short, all the services that are essential for the success of digital projects today.
- Content writing – Translations, of course, but also email and business mail writing, product sheet writing, speech writing, and proofreading (always handy if your site is in English or German and you want to be proofread by a native speaker).
- Video and animation – 3D product animation, videos with a spokesperson if you are too shy to learn on a video, for example, image editing and effects, creating short videos for social networks like Facebook or Instagram.
- Music and sound – creating advertising jingles for a radio campaign, writing a song (no, you’re not dreaming),
- Programming and technologies – creating your e-commerce website, updating your databases, creating a WordPress blog and putting it online, creating a chatbot to answer your customers, developing an Android or iOS application for smartphones, creating a UX interface, designing a database, creating Excel macro, QA tests before a product launch of an IT project.
- Business – Market research, financial analysis, legal analysis, creation of a business plan document for entrepreneurs, job interview simulations with feedback to prepare you, data entry, and product research.
- Lifestyle – This is a bit of a catch-all category ranging from astrology (!!) to genealogy help to relationship coaching, viral videos, relationship coaching
Get Paid To Be An Online Friend Worldwide
The big plus: a fixed price known in advance and a clearly defined service
Generally speaking, hiring a freelancer can be a daunting prospect. The main reason is that the price to be paid may be unclear at the beginning and may be subject to hard negotiation after a pitch.
The majority of freelance transactions are done offline, where one-to-one negotiation is a must.
Fiverr disciplines freelancers to define their service exactly so that the client knows exactly how much and for which service he will pay in the end. This also avoids contentious cases, especially since the exchange between the client and the service provider is entirely virtual.
This marketing technique is known as Service as a product, where each service, just like a product in a supermarket, will have a unique reference with its own characteristics.
The product – or service – is called a gig on Fiverr.
Each gig/service put online will have :
- A well-defined scope
- The delivery date is defined from the date of the order confirmation
- A fixed price
- Specifications are specific to the nature of each service.
We can see this as Fiverr‘s effort to standardize and define as precisely as possible. The freelancer thinks in pure transactional mode. The buyer must have the feeling of buying a perfectly defined product, more than a service whose contours are blurred.
How does Fiverr make money? What is its business model?
Once again, pricing is classical to the functioning of a marketplace. To illustrate the pricing mechanism of Fiverr, let’s consider the following example.
A seller is going to put online a service worth 100 dollars. When ordering a gig, the buyer will pay a 5% fee, i.e. for a service worth 100 dollars, an additional 5 dollars – so a total of 105 dollars.
For services worth less than 40 dollars, Fiverr takes a flat fee of 2 dollars from the buyer, in addition to the displayed price of the service.
The seller then gets to work, as soon as he has received all the elements from the customer to start working (project brief).
During this time, Fiverr keeps the funds. Fourteen days after the end of the service, Fiverr will pay the seller for an amount of 80 dollars.
So if we summarize, for a gig worth 100 dollars, Fiverr will take 5% from the final client and 20% from the freelancer.
For your information, the average shopping cart on Fiverr is $145, so it’s relatively moderate.
Some tips to choose your Freelancer
Each freelancer is responsible for his own marketing – but the platform is well thought out to give you a maximum of information about the vendors.
Client reviews and comments are the most interesting and the first thing to read when you have to make your choice to select your freelancer.
- How many services have been performed?
- What are the reviews?
- How long has the vendor been registered on the platform?
You need to ask yourself all these questions to choose your freelance provider correctly.
Often sellers take the time to introduce themselves and give information about their company.
Nothing prevents you from typing the name of the agency or provider directly into your favorite search engine to learn more about your potential future freelancer.
Many vendors are real agencies with a physical presence somewhere and employees, this is often the case for larger projects, like creating a mobile application for example.
Are they serious? What is their reputation? Have they published promotional videos of their agency on Youtube for example?
Don’t forget that Fiverr acts as a trusted third party, which is always reassuring in case of a dispute.
What happens once the service is delivered on Fiverr…
Once you’ve been delivered – often multiple drafts are contractually expected at the time of order release, for example, 3 submissions for a logo to satisfy the client, you’ll need to hit the “Accept and View Order” button for final acceptance.
You can accept the first design, but if the gig offers 3 or 4 versions, there is nothing to stop you from asking for another iteration until you are satisfied.
As a buyer on Fiverr, you will be able to give the freelancer feedback up to 10 days after the final delivery date of the project. All you have to do is log in to Fiverr and find your order and let them guide you.
Interestingly, the freelancer will not be able to see your feedback immediately: he will have to evaluate his collaboration with you before he can see your feedback.
This ensures that the vendor’s feedback is not influenced by your initial feedback – both positive and negative and that the reviews are objective.
The reviews on Fiverr are based on a star system, with 5 stars being the highest rating, so fully satisfied with the service, 1 star… in short, the quality is definitely not there and you were not satisfied with the execution of the freelance service.
Questions to ask yourself when evaluating your Fiverr freelancer
Before you give feedback, consider asking yourself the following questions:
- Did the vendor clearly communicate with you throughout the service on Fiverr, and in a responsive manner?
- Did the final result match the initial offer (gig) provided by the freelancer?
- Would you recommend this service to someone else? A friend? Another department?
In the case of videos, you can disable the possibility for the seller to add the service to his portfolio. Many providers like to show what they can do and use a portfolio, but you can specify that you do not want the work to be shared, for example for obvious reasons of project confidentiality.
The tip… we tip!
If you are really satisfied with the work and you want to give a few extra cash to the Freelancer on Fiverr (remember that for some, this allows them to live and support their family), you have the possibility on Fiverr, in addition to the initial price of the service … to generously leave a tip.
Ok now. What are you waiting for to try Fiverr?
thanks for this post