February 2019 Update
I don’t do this lightly, but I want to talk about the truly horrendous customer service I have experienced with Konker. If you go through my review in the sections below, you will see that I had been fairly positive towards Konker in the past – identifying it as an online service marketplace with good potential (just a lot of bugs that needed ironing out).
In an update I posted in January 2019, I talked about the fact that due to a serious bug in the platform, my account basically disappeared. I was unable to login (because my account could no longer be found). This was causing me issues as I needed to get in and grab some details about some of the gigs I had ordered.
As I’ve mentioned before, Konker doesn’t really have much in the way of support. There’s no live chat or ticket system or even email address. What you get is a private Facebook group that you have to ask to join. Inside this group there appears to be one guy who looks after support.
TL:DR? I was banned from Konker support for requesting assistance with the recovery of my account (or at least the personal data of my account). No apologies, no attempts to assist. Just straight up blocked from being able to request any help.
I now have no way of knowing what has happened to my personal information – whether it is truly deleted, or just locked away on a server somewhere under a pile of bad code.
January 2019 Update
I’m revisiting my Konker review – for a really simple reason. It’s coming up end of financial year here in NZ, and I want to get my accounts all sorted and submitted to the accountant.
I decided to go into Konker to export invoices and receipts for both gigs I have sold, as well as gigs I have purchased.
Lo and behold, a wild problem appears:
Firstly, I cannot log into my Konker account. I go to log in and my email address I used to sign up for the account is not recognised. There’s no option to log in with a username either. I also cannot reset my password because, once again, my email address isn’t found.
What would you do in this circumstance? Surely you’d go straight to support. Well here’s another doozy – Konker doesn’t really have support. It has a Facebook group (that you can’t post a thread in anymore, only comment on posts by the admins). There’s one guy – as far as I can discern – who is responsible for all the support.
I made a comment on a post asking for you to post any issues, explaining the situation. I got a reply back from the support person saying “email communication is down, you’ll need to wait”. Fundamentally, I’m not satisfied with that response. If your login and password reset system is broken, you should be doing EVERYTHING in your power to fix that. But this issue has been ongoing for a while now, and I can see others in the support group are having similar issues.
This is just another example of the kind of bug that plagues the Konker platform, and makes it feel very “hacked togeher”, as opposed to something like Fiverr that is polished and professional.
Another major error I’ve discovered in this process is that one of my gigs is now being sold by someone else. Seriously, I set up the gig, got initial orders and reviews, and now if I go to that gig URL it’s been “hijacked” by another seller. Madness!
But the biggest problem I’ve encountered (apart from being able to log in) is sufficiently serious to make me recommend that nobody who takes their business seriously should use this platform: You cannot get invoices for payments or purchases.
From reading through the Konker FB group, it has become apparent that you simply cannot go into your dashboard – when it’s working that is – and download invoices for gigs you have purchased or sold. Instead, you are told to rely on Paypal receipts/invoices. But this is massively problematic for a few reasons. Firstly, Paypal invoices and receipts made through Konker do not pass any information about the gig you ordered or sold, apart from the price paid and the email address and Paypal name of the seller. Secondly, because of the affiliate system in Konker you can wind up with gigs (that you ordered or received with an active affiliate cookie) that have a second output. So say you spent $10 on a gig, and you found that gig by clicking an affiliate link (or someone just hijacked the whole site with their affiliate links … happens quite often) when you get a receipt in your Paypal account it will show most of the money going to the gig seller, but a fraction going to the affiliate. It’s just so confusing to reconcile this, because of how everything is hacked together with Paypal.
I’ll upload an obfuscated screenshot to show you guys what I mean. But in the meantime, suffice it to say that using Konker will RUIN your Paypal export history. It becomes an endless litany of inflows and outflows with no invoices to tie to them … and even worse when you cannot even log into your dashboard to screen capture or screen print a gig order.
Same problem goes for affiliate earnings. I have fractional little inflows (50 cents here, $2 there) from when I used to recommend the old Source Wave marketplace and dropped my affiliate link in a few places. Reconciling would be so much easier if your affiliate balance and gig sales balances were stored in Konker until you hit a threshold, e.g. $100, and then withdraw that all in one amount with an accompanying invoice.
Because of this problem, I simply cannot recommend Konker to anyone who wants to run a bona fide business with good tracking and bookkeeping in place. It’s not acceptable, in my opinion, to have so many small transactions with no data provided. And it’s doubly bad when the platform is always broken so you can’t get what scant data would be avaiable anyway.
Original Audio Version
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Review Transcript
Hi everybody. Sam here again with another review. Today it’s going to be a pretty short review. I want to cover a platform. Sort of an online marketplace, I guess you could call it. That online marketplace is called Konker.
I’m not going to do a long review here, but I do want to talk you through this plant form. It’s getting some notoriety, and it’s worth knowing about and knowing what’s good about it and what’s bad about it.
What is Konker?
It’s a place for you to buy and sell digital marketing services.
If you sell key word research, or you sell on-page UCO, or you sell graphic design, or you sell article writing or whatever, you can register for an account and you can sell that service. You can set your price and the product you deliver. There’s quite good flexibility there. On the flip side of the coin, if you want to buy services, you go there and buy them, too.
I think what Konker does is it positions itself as being a slightly more, should I say, libertarian marketplace than something like Fiverr. Fiverr, especially in its early days, Fiverr was all about those $5.00 services. I will photograph myself with a silly mustache on and holding a sign with your name for $5.00, or something stupid like that. Or, I will write you a 250 article for $5.00.
Of course, now you’ve got Gig Extras, and different priced services and all that. That’s just the platform evolving with the requirements of this sort of marketplace. Konker, there’s not restrictions there, gigs that are a few dollars. I mean, there are gigs that are hundreds of dollars on Konker. It’s free to register as a buyer or seller, as well. You just go to Konker.io and sign up.
As I said, it’s all focused on digital marketing services, so the sort of things you would normally need a VA for. There’s a good variety of services on there as well. There are some good ones that I’ve used in terms of link building, citations, things like that.
If you’re the kind of person that sells a service to a client, let’s say you’re a social media marketing guru and you’ve got some clients in that space, and they say, “Oh, what about doing some local CO for me,” well, you could trundle over to Konker, and if they’re paying you $500.00 for a CO, you could probably buy yourself a decent package of gigs that you resell to them for a $100.00 or $150.00. That’s a discussion for another day.
Things I Like About Konker
What I want to focus on really is this sort of … I guess the good things about the platform and the bad things because that’s really what I’m all about. Good things about the platform: a lot of flexibility for the seller in terms of the services you provide, and that results in a good selection of services if you are a buyer.
I think Konker’s done a pretty good job at that. The other thing as well is you can get paid by PayPal as a seller. That’s nice. Money comes into your PayPal account. It’s easy enough to get set up and start selling services as well. There’s ranking systems and feedback and all that kind of thing. It fulfills all the sort of basic marketplace requirements that a service marketplace or gig economy marketplaces have got to have.
The good points are the foundations there, but what I want to actually focus on more is the bad points of about Konker.
Things I Don’t Like About Konker
The bad points about it is really, that is very buggy. Whether you’re a buyer or a seller, there are a number of bugs that occur on this platform. Way too much regularity. They are concerning, because if they were ironed out, it would be really, really good.
What you have to remember with Konker is it’s an updated version of the old Source Market, so Alex Becker, you might of heard of him. I’m not going to go into opinions on him. Some people love him, some people hate him. I think he’s very good at what he does. He set up Source Market. I actually started out on the old Source Market, and then he, for some weird reason, rebranded it to Konker. I don’t really get why because Source Market saved the work pretty well. Konker promised a whole load of new features, but the flip side of the coin is it often seems pretty broken.
I want to run through some of the bugs you might expect to see, because they can be quite frustrating and almost disturbing in some senses. Bugs I have personally experienced … just the other day, I haven’t sold anything on Konker in quite some time. I’ve sort of moved away from doing lower value services. Really, if you want to work with me, you’ve got to spend probably upwards of $1,000.00 to get in front of me, unless you’re a client whose been grandfathered in on an old sort of platform or an old service that I offer.
It’s not to say I don’t want to do … there’s opportunities I can see for lower priced services with a faster turnaround time as well. Anyway, that all aside, I haven’t sold anything on Konker for probably six months, maybe even more, like 10 months. I can’t remember off the top of my head. I was browsing my PayPal account the other day, and suddenly there was a few transactions for money flowing in, and then one for money flowing out.
I didn’t recognize I had absolutely no … the amounts I was receiving and paying out didn’t seem to make any sense to me at all. It wasn’t a payment I was expecting to come in. There was no payments I was expecting to go out. I’ve got a good track of what comes out on a regular basis such as my FPTraffic subscription, or anything like that. I thought, “What the heck can this be?”
I went through all my email addresses looking for receipts and everything. In the end, all I was able to do was … I found the buyer email, the payor email in PayPal for the person who’d paid me the money, and I emailed them. They’re a business on the other side of the world. I’ve never heard of them before.
I said, “Hey look, I don’t want to alarm you, but I think some money of yours has wound up in account somehow, and I want to pay you that money back because I don’t want to take money off you for free and get into trouble.” He came back and said, “Oh, yeah. This is weird. I had a bug with my Konker account. I was trying to buy a service off someone else,” and obviously what’s happened is he tried to buy the service of someone else, and then somehow I’ve wound up getting paid.
It wasn’t even an amount for service I’ve ever offered. It was just crazy. It’s basically like money was flowing to the wrong person. One of them might have lined up with one of my services, but then it got even worse because I can’t log in to actually shut down my account. This is a bad bit of password security, but for this particular account I had an email address I used, and I had a password that I absolutely 100% know of by heart.
I know I’ll never get it wrong, even if I got a frontal lobotomy, I’d still get this password right. I went to type that password in, and it just said, “Account not found.” It said, “Account login details not valid.” It’s basically saying either my username or password was incorrect. I then went to reset my password, and I entered the same email address. It then said, “We can’t find any record of this account,” even though I could still go on Konker and find my services for sale buried away at the bottom of a category somewhere and I could click into that profile.
That sort of thing is pretty worrying because there’s a guy on the other side of the world who had about $100.00 taken out of his PayPal account that wound up in my PayPal account. I’m on the hook for giving him the money back. I look bad, he looks bad because he spent money for nothing until I gave it back to him, which I was always intending to do.
It’s just a worrying scenario. Some of the other bugs with Konker, if you go in the private members group on Facebook, there’s a lot of issues with it. There’s been even a case, I believe, where someone actually manage to hack the whole site so that basically every PayPal transaction, for a reasonably short period of time, but it took a while for the developers to notice and for the other people to notice.
Basically, everything was being siphoned into this guy’s PayPal account. If you bought a service, the service provider would receive a notification that a new order had come through, and they would probably start working on it. The money never arrived in their account.
There was a whole lot of to-do with would those orders be canceled, and would people be on the hook for money and all sorts of things like that. In this day and age, that sort of thing shouldn’t be able to happen. If a hacker hacks a site, fair enough they might bring it down, they might hack an image on the home page and say, “Come check out this,” or something like that.
If you can’t run a platform so that people’s private PayPals can’t be hacked, well I don’t know whether you should be running it. There are other little bugs as well. Things not saving. I’ve a couple of gigs that are still pending on my order list, because someone’s paid me and then for some weird reason I can’t message them and I can’t find out any other details about them, either. Of course, like Fiverr, Konker has this system where you’re not supposed to try to communicate outside of the delivery system so you can’t take your regular customers off Konker and work with them and bypass the fees that they’d be getting.
Conclusion
Konker. Is it worth using? Well, there’s actually a lot of really good services on there. I think for like ACO and digital marketing, the services are better than what you’d find on Fiverr. The issue I’ve got is the bugs. It really does feel like something that’s sort of either been put together by some cheap, off-shore development house that doesn’t really care, or it’s just a case of careless, almost afterthought on the part of people who’ve created it, which is a shame because I think Konker could be really, really good.
I think the name is stupid, as well. Fiverr makes sense, because it was all about $5.00. Source Market was a little bit market that’s in the name. Konker, spelled incorrectly, I don’t understand it, but whatever. Look, there’s potential for it to be a good marketplace, but the bugs need to be ironed out. I just have a sneaking suspicion that I think it will gradually die a death, which is a shame because the ability to pretty much sell the service in the way you want to … mine is the restrictions you’d get with something like Fiverr is really good.
In that sense, they are to be commended for trying hard to make a much more innovative platform. It’s just those kind of bugs, anything that involves people not getting paid, or people paying too much, or people’s money going missing … you have to stamp that out, and that has to be fixed.
Even things like accounts being lost. I’ve got a level two account, really good feedback, all positive feedback for all the gigs I did with Don. I’ve made probably a couple of grand through there doing some little side services. I can’t get into it. The support seems pretty useless. Well worth checking out, but do be weary. Those bugs are annoying.
I’m not going to recommend in a sense that it’s the greatest thing ever, but I think if you can work around the bugs, there’s some pretty good services for sale. Things like TBN links, and other little services like little citation packs and things that are quite good. Konker.io, I’m into mines. The bugs are bad. It feels unfinished, it feels unpolished. There’s a nucleus of something very good there, but you do need to be weary.
Konker.Io Review
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Features
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Platform Reliability
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Quality Of Gigs
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Seller Score (how good is this platform for selling on)
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Support
Summary
Konker.io is a promising marketplace for digital services and "micro gigs". It offers sellers plenty of flexibility to sell what they want, how they want it. It offers buyers a choice of many quality services at an array of price points. However, Konker is very buggy - and some of these bugs affect things like payment and personal info, and that is worrying. If Konker can fix its bugs and poor service, it could be an excellent place to buy and sell. However, there is too much missing (like the ability to have threshold payments and invoices/receipts) for me to recommend you use Konker. If you're a serious business owner, steer clear.
Do you recommend Konker.io as a place to sell SEO services? Thanks for the review by the way.
Hi Ajay,
I think Konker.io can be a good place to sell SEO services, for sure. However, you need to be aware of the issues around bugs in the platform. It’s still well worth trying though!
Do you think Konker is safe to use?
Hi Peter, thanks for taking the time to comment.
Honestly, I’m not to sure as I am no tech/cyber security expert. I know that the platform is very buggy and that any bug which results in a compromise of people’s private data is not good news at all.
There’s some good stuff on this platform, you just need to be wary!
Thanks for the info. I just signed up to Konker, placed an order, and I’m already having problems.
– Orders don’t appear in my order history, yet I did get charged some money in PayPal.
– The order amounts in the PayPal payments weren’t correct. This is just bizarre.
– The lack of decent customer support, as mentioned above.
I’ll head over the Legiit. Thanks!
hi,
i started with konker i posted some gigs there but non of them approved , all of them keep saying penidng approval , there no way to contact the support , only there facebook group it look like it already dies, i joint and also still pending
, not recommended and i think soon will shut down that site , what do you think?
I used a couple of Konker services to run tests in the past. The hacks that happened were as serious as it gets in fraud. Sellers’ accounts were compromised, buyers’ funds were sent to offshore accounts. This is not a safe platform by any means. Avoid at all costs.
Hi Igor, thanks for your comment – sounds like you’re very knowledgeable on these matters and it definitely sounds like Konker’s safety issues are serious.
I agree with your last statement: Avoid Konker like the plague. It’s a rubbish platform that is pretty much abandoned, and hopefully it goes away forever in the near future.
I think in my article above I also forgot to mention that somehow money randomly got deposited into my Paypal, but the buyer had bought a service from a totally different vendor!
3-4 month ago i buy a hatred pbn gigs from konker. But after 1 month when project is complete I don’t see any improvement to my website. So i wanted to message to my seller and i notice the old message is disappear then i contact to the seller and he said to me he didn’t receive any payment from me. He said someone stolen his order.Someone hacked the konker then i try to contact with support but they can’t help me. I fill dispute in paypal and get back my money. Now i am afraid to buy gigs from konker. I will tell you first contact with seller and then buy gigs. Sorry for bad English.
Hi Charl, thanks for your comment. I agree that you need to be very careful with Konker due to these kinds of issues!
Hi,
I am a seller on Konker and just love this platform. I know there are bugs, but
as far as I know it is one of the best platforms for Web related services. The only
way, there will be no problem is if the buyer first messages the seller and then orders.
I also hope Alex Becker will be more serious about this site, I have high hopes for Konker.
Hi Lisa, thanks for taking the time to comment on my article.
I think your comment about Alex Becker being more serious is “spot on”. Konker just feels like an afterthought. There is some good promise, but I imagine it is not as lucrative for him as some of his other activities.
Let’s see if it improves over time.
Hi Lisa Jones – Please post your personal order website, Konker is now down.
Feel free to do so Lisa.
Hello Sam, you just saved me from a disaster. I endee up here after reading this article on Parasite Sites on Medium..It talked about PBN links as being a great thing and lead me to Konker..and something told me to search reviews..Thank God for this article.
No worries Trishia – glad my humble blog could have been of benefit to you!
A great review of Konker.io. Word is that it may have been sold to another party recently. Hopefully they can fix the issues that you mentioned. I had some good and bad experiences there as a buyer. Like buying a link on a site that wasn’t indexed… The worst part was having to open a dispute with PayPal to get a refund. One site that developed partly as a result of these problems is Legiit. So far I’ve had no issues using that platform and customer service is handled very well.
Hi Brian, thanks for your kind words.
Where did you hear that Konker.io may have been sold? If so, here’s hoping the new buyer gives it the love it deserves as it could be a great platform.
Worst part in my opinion was the complete lack of order documentation, receipts etc. No good for someone looking to run a serious business online.
I have heard a few good things about Legiit … need to check it out and review Legiit myself.
Sam