Build your own Fiverr, on your own site

What Fiverr is, and who it suits

Fiverr is a hosted marketplace where freelancers list services and buyers browse and order them. Its home page groups work into broad categories such as design, programming, writing, video, audio, marketing and consulting, and it has added newer ones around AI. Buyers search, compare sellers and pay through the platform. Sellers sign up and list what they offer.

Beyond the plain marketplace, its menus point to a Pro tier for vetted talent, an agency option for sellers, a project management service and an expert sourcing service, where specialists help a buyer find and vet freelancers. Those are the parts of the offer that a plugin cannot copy, because they are people doing work, not software.

It suits two kinds of people. Buyers get a large pool of sellers and a single place to pay. Sellers get a ready audience without building a website or a payment system. The platform runs hosting, checkout, support and the rules for everyone.

That convenience has a price that is not only a fee. The platform owns the relationship with the buyer, sets the terms for the seller and can change either at any time.

The real difference: renting a shop or owning one

Fiverr is a shopping centre. Foot traffic arrives for free, but you pay rent, follow the centre’s rules and cannot take the customers with you when you leave. WP Sell Services is the land and the building kit. You get a marketplace of your own, with a domain, a brand and a customer list that belong to you. You also get the job of filling it.

For a seller, the question is whether your income depends on the platform’s goodwill. If you have a following that finds you elsewhere, running your own storefront moves the margin and the control to you. If almost every buyer comes from Fiverr search, leaving costs you your pipeline.

For a founder, the question is whether a niche marketplace can win against a general one. It often can, because a narrow site can vet its sellers and speak to one kind of buyer. It still needs a plan to get the first buyers.

What WP Sell Services does not do for you

We would rather you hear it now than after launch. WP Sell Services does not bring buyers. There is no shared pool of customers, no search engine on our side sending people to your site, and no built-in advertising network.

It also does not take payment risk off your hands. You choose the gateways, you handle refunds, and you set the policy for disputes. It does not charge subscriptions for recurring services: that code exists in the Pro plugin but is switched off, so do not buy Pro for it. And it does not import gigs or reviews from Fiverr or any other marketplace.

Some things are manual by design. The free plugin lets you pay sellers by hand, with an exported list of what each is owed. Automated payouts are a Pro feature.

How an order runs, step by step

Here is the path of a normal service order, with what is free and what needs Pro.

1. A seller publishes a service. A six-step wizard covers basic info, pricing, gallery, requirements, extras and FAQs. Every service has Basic, Standard and Premium packages. Free allows three add-ons, four gallery images, five FAQs and five buyer requirements per service; Pro lifts those four limits. You can switch moderation on so listings wait for your approval.
2. A buyer picks a package and pays. Checkout is built in and takes Stripe or PayPal on the free plugin, or offline payment with a receipt upload that an admin approves.
3. The buyer answers the requirements form. The order does not start until they do, so sellers stop chasing briefs over email.
4. The seller delivers. Files go against the order, and the order has a message thread with attachments.
5. The buyer accepts or asks for a revision. The order moves through eleven statuses, including late, on hold, disputed and cancelled.
6. The order completes and the buyer reviews. The review feeds the seller’s rating, and the commission is taken from the earnings.

Not every job fits a fixed package. When a buyer cannot find the right service, free buyer requests let them post a brief with a budget and deadline, and sellers answer with proposals. An accepted proposal turns into an order, and larger jobs can be split into milestones. Our request marketplace use case covers that mode, and our Upwork page goes deeper.

Scope can grow mid-order. A seller can quote a paid extension with extra days, and the buyer pays for it through the order. Tipping after approval exists, but it needs Pro.

The money side

Money is where owning the marketplace changes the arithmetic. You set one global commission and override it for any seller. The earnings dashboard shows each seller cleared, pending and lifetime earnings, and the ledger records every movement.

Sellers request withdrawals. You set the minimum amount and the clearance period, then approve and mark them paid. You can export what is owed as a CSV and pay by bank transfer or PayPal bulk upload with no integration at all.

Pro automates this. Stripe Connect splits each payment to the seller’s account at the time of sale, and PayPal Payouts pays everyone owed in one batch. Pro also adds tiered commission rules, vendor subscription plans that charge sellers to sell, WooCommerce checkout, Razorpay and analytics with export.

One honest limit: milestone and tip payments work on the built-in checkout and on WooCommerce. If a different checkout rail is active, those pay-by-email links are not supported.

What it costs you to run, compared with Fiverr

On Fiverr, the cost sits in the platform’s cut and its fees; check the vendor’s site for the current terms. On your own site, the cost sits in running a website.

You pay for WordPress hosting, a domain and SSL. You keep WordPress, the theme and the plugins updated. You pay payment gateway fees to Stripe or PayPal. You spend time on support, moderation and payouts, or you pay someone to. Pro is a paid yearly licence; see the pricing page for tiers.

Skills matter too. Setting up takes a site owner a wizard and a few pages. Shaping the marketplace beyond the defaults is developer work. If you want a marketplace but not a website to look after, a hosted product is the more honest fit.

Trust, safety and disputes

This is the section where a hosted marketplace earns its keep. Fiverr advertises a money-back guarantee on its home page and lists a Trust and Safety section. A new site starts with none of that reputation.

What the product gives you:

• Reviews and star ratings on completed orders, with moderation and seller replies.
• Four seller levels. New Seller, Rising Seller and Top Rated are earned from order history; Pro Seller you award by hand.
• A seller approval queue and an optional service moderation queue.
• A dispute process with evidence from both sides and admin mediation.

What you must do yourself: write the terms and refund policy, decide who counts as a trustworthy seller, answer disputes in a fair time, and handle chargebacks with your gateway. Members can also report a service or a seller, which reaches a screen in wp-admin. Reporting a single review or message from the website is not supported.

Data and ownership

On Fiverr, buyer and seller data live with the platform. On your site, they live in your WordPress database. Every member is a WordPress user. Orders, messages, reviews, seller profiles and the earnings ledger are in tables you control, reachable by REST API and WP-CLI.

Privacy tools are included. WordPress export and erase tools return a member’s marketplace data, and erasure refuses while an order is in flight or a payout is mid-transfer. Completed orders and reviews stay, attributed to a deleted member, because the other party and your accounts need them.

You also own the exit. If you move hosts or change plugins, the data goes with you. That is the whole point of owning the shop.

Moving over from Fiverr

There is no importer. Be wary of anyone who says otherwise. Moving over is a rebuild:

• Listings. A seller recreates each service through the wizard, or a developer writes a script against the REST API or WP-CLI. That is custom work, not a built-in feature.
• Sellers. Invite them by email and approve their registrations. They bring their own portfolio and copy.
• Buyers. You cannot take Fiverr’s customers. Fiverr’s own terms govern what a seller may do about buyers met there, so read them and ask the vendor.
• Reviews. They stay on Fiverr. New orders build new reviews.

A sensible staging checklist, which matters more here than on a normal site because real money and real reputations are involved: build on a staging copy, seed it with a handful of real services, run test orders through to review with a test card, run a dispute, and approve a test withdrawal. Only then point your domain at it.

A launch checklist

1. Choose a niche and write the one-sentence promise a buyer will see.
2. Pick hosting and install WordPress with a theme you like.
3. Install WP Sell Services and run the setup wizard.
4. Set your commission, currency, withdrawal minimum and clearance period.
5. Connect Stripe or PayPal and run a test order to completion.
6. Write your terms, refund policy and dispute policy.
7. Recruit a first group of sellers and approve them by hand.
8. Publish a small catalogue of strong services, not a large one of weak ones.
9. Plan where the first buyers come from before you announce.

For a full walkthrough, read how to sell services online, the freelance marketplace use case and the notes on two marketplace modes.

The rest of the stack on the same site

WP Sell Services is one of several separate, optional plugins from the same team. They run on one WordPress site and one login, so a member does not need a second account. Each is installed, hosted and updated by you.

The connections we can state are the ones in the marketplace itself. Checkout runs on its own built-in checkout, or on WooCommerce with Pro. EDD and FluentCart adapters ship in Pro but are in beta and not offered by default. Gateways include Stripe, PayPal and offline payment, with Razorpay in Pro. Vendor payouts can go through Stripe Connect or PayPal Payouts, and delivery files can sit on your server or on Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage or DigitalOcean Spaces with Pro.

The sister products run alongside it on the same site, and we make no integration claim between them and the marketplace:

• BuddyNext for community.
• Jetonomy for forum and Q&A.
• Learnomy for courses.
• Listora for a directory.
• WP Career Board for a job board.
• Eventonomy for events.
• WB Gamification for points and badges.

The themes BuddyX Pro and Reign are also from the team, though any theme should work with the marketplace.

The trade is plain. A hosted marketplace is one bill and takes a cut of each sale. These are separate plugins you install, host and update yourself, and you keep the whole margin. For the details of what connects to what, see integrations.

Other alternatives worth a look

• Upwork wins when the work is custom and buyers want to post a job and compare proposals; we cover the request model in its own page.
• Freelancer.com fits buyers who want bidding volume or a design contest.
• Sharetribe wins when you want a hosted builder, a vendor-run server and no WordPress to maintain.
• Dokan is one of the WordPress multi-vendor plugins we compare; read that page for what we checked.
• WCFM Marketplace is another WordPress option we compare on its own page, with the same caveat.
• WC Vendors is a third WordPress multi-vendor plugin we compare.
• Workreap is another WordPress option with its own comparison page.

Who should stay on Fiverr

Plenty of people should. Stay if your income depends on the traffic Fiverr sends you and you have no audience of your own. Stay if you would rather do the work than run a business around it. Stay if a buyer-protection promise matters more to your customers than a lower margin does to you.

A mixed plan also works. Keep your Fiverr presence for discovery, and use your own site for repeat clients, a niche brand and your favourite buyers. Once you outgrow the platform, the marketplace is there. See features, free versus Pro and the full comparison hub to decide.