Example 1

$5.00 x 1000 orders = $5,000.00

Simple math. Seems easy enough. If you can turn it into passive income with little effort, why not let some extra cash find its way into your PayPal account right ?

Well a few Google searches later and I quickly came across various forum posts which stated that sellers actually only make a profit of about $3.96 per order. Doing a little bit note research it this turned out to be true.

Example 2

$5.00 order — $1.04 in fees = $3.96

Fiverr keeps approximately $1.00 while PayPal collects its small fee of a few cents for being the payment processor.

Now lets use Example 1 from above once again. If 1,000 orders were completed at $5.00 minus $1.04 in fees we are left with $3,960.00 in profit.

$5,000.00 — $1040.00 fees = $3,960.00 profit

You would be left with $3,960.00 in profit after Fiverr and Paypal take their respective fees. Which leaves a combined total loss of $1040.00 in fees. That $5.00 per order seems less attractive now, but if you could turn it into passive income its still extra income right ? I thought lets find out.

The Experiment

Being the curious mind that I am and having an entrepreneurial spirit, I decided to try an experiment. What if I offered a simple design service on Fiverr ? I decided that I would do zero marketing of these services. Strictly an experiment to see if any profit could be generated from Fiverr.

For transparency purposes I want to make it clear that I literally wanted to put the least amount of effort into gaining sales and completing orders during this experiment. I would still maintain a respectable level of quality in order to respect the customers purchase of service.

Zero marketing.

Zero link sharing.

Zero telling anyone about the gigs.

I would literally create an account, post up a gig, leave the account alone, and see if orders would come in all by themselves (which surprisingly they did).