Will 1 negative review kill my UpWork account?

[j_rains]

It hasn't happened yet but I'm more or less "expecting" it to come here relatively soon.

A client I"m currently working with sells an extremely outdated product and has a margin of $3 after manufacturing costs. (Makes for $8 & sells for $11). Anyways, he isn't satisfied with the results he's received with me, and he's also the type of guy that thinks throwing a product up on Amazon automatically guarentees sales.

So he sent me another freelancer's messages off of UpWork, in which the freelancer says the EXACT same things I say to him everyday, except he charges substantially less and is offering to "buy reviews" for his listings, which goes against Amazon TOS. So I sent him images to remind him that I infact run ads and such for high level brands on the Amazon platform, and that I know what I'm doing and received no response.

Basically, I'm afraid he's going to leave a negative review, which will in fact be my first and I am nervous that it'll just kill off my entire account. Does anyoine have experience with this?

[petra_r · Accepted solution]

---

Justin R wrote:

Basically, I'm afraid he's going to leave a negative review, which will in fact be my first and I am nervous that it'll just kill off my entire account. Will 1 negative review kill my UpWork account?

---

No, it won't, but it could irritatingly drop you below the 90% mark if you're unlucky, so try and close some other contracts if you can before this happens.

Also, on your My Stats page, what does it say for eligible weeks?

[j_rains]

I'm at 0, I was stuck at 86% up until last Sunday because I had open jobs that I was unaware affected my % greatly, I'm going to be closing some more here in the upcoming days though.

Thank you for the response though, It's been stressing me out the last few days! (I was really hoping to finally work towards the top rated badge) 

[yitwail]

Justin, I don’t want to pile on bad news but just closing open contracts won’t help much unless a number of the clients whose contracts you’re closing choose to leave you feedback

[kbadeau]

If you can, you can start and finish a quick down and dirty project in the next two weeks and have that client leave feedback... to balance out the possible bad feedback.

Although I had a client who I was sure was going to ding me, and instead they left a glowing review. No telling what the private feedback was though. But sometimes clients don't hurt us as much as we think they're going to.

[j_rains]

I closed one job prior to the last update period and it went up from 86% to 93, it had been open since July with 0 activity because the client "ghosted" me. I have 2 other jobs like that, that still need to be closed. 
So I think it certain circumstances they can effects your %.