The guy who started this website posted about it on the Official Ebay Seller Group on Linked In. Opinions were mixed, comments below:
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Omer Nuriel Co Founder at Safe-Markets
New website for screening abusive buyers
This group is a great meeting point for us sellers to share our selling experiences and frustration from abusive & aggressive buyers.
In order to help sellers like myself to deal with abusive & aggressive buyers I founded safe-markets.com, a platform for sellers to verify any documented history of buyers abusing sellers.
With Safe-Markets.com you can reduce risks and losses when selling online and you can also protect other sellers by reporting your experiences with buyers who abused the buyer protection policy.
Safe-Markets.com is free to use and you can verify any number of buyers without any limits, registration will take you less than a minute:
www.safe-markets.com ----------------------------------------
Deb Koons
Omer, can I just ask - is there a safeguard against someone being reported maliciously? I mean without grounds?
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Eric Edie
@ Deb....I have already reported you
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Eric Edie
My only concern is liability issues....there is also another site that just launched as well doing similar. What I would love is for eBay to take all the blocked bidders list from all of us and look for patterns of where there might be a buyer on a number of sellers lists that were never reported. I am just as guilty in that we stopped reporting and just add these buyers to our BBL
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Omer Nuriel
Great point Deb & Eric.
We dedicated a lot of thought into this issue when we designed our product.
It is the same for all user generated content sites. Mistakes happen (even in Wikipedia) but we believe that most sellers are honest people that focus on selling and not reporting abusive buyers for living. There is no interest for a seller to report buyers for nothing.
If a buyer has one report, or appears in one seller's blocked buyers list, this does NOT mean that this is an abusive buyer. This is only an indication that there was a one-time incident with this buyer. Misunderstandings between sellers and buyers are not rare. But, if a buyer is showing up in more than one blocked buyers list or has more than one report, then this may imply that there is a behavior pattern for this buyer of abusing sellers.
If a buyer with a single report or a single appearance in a blocked list will contact us and ask to be removed from the database, we will notify the seller. We will encourage the seller to work together with the buyer; maybe the buyer will be willing to remove a negative feedback he left in ebay for this seller (we never expose the seller's identity to the buyer).
If we run into a case where we see an issue with one of the sellers who abuses the system and mal-reporting buyers, we will know how to handle it.
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Deb Koons
But someone who is both a buyer and a seller, or who is in competition with another seller, might have an interest in taking the time to do some malicious reporting. Thus my question. So you are parsing the FB that's been left to quantify issues? or people's blocked-bidder lists? What if, for instance, I left no FB for a seller but did add him to my list? or just report him to you? Just some thoughts about this type of service. I think you might be heading down a super difficult and time-consuming road if you do plan to try to mediate with some of the reporting/reported parties. But I do wish you luck!
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Donna Purcell
I'm reporting all of you.........chuckle.......
.....kidding.
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Angela Current
I like the idea and will check it out more! Thanks!
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Lesley Stuart-Smith
There is a Blocked Bidder List group on Facebook.
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Mike Galuska
I am generally in favor of the concept, but really believe that eBay should be doing more of this type of work to protect sellers. Unfortunately, blocking potential commissionable sales (even if they are fraudulent) is not in the best interests of any online company doing business. They need to maximize their profits and there is nothing wrong with the premise. I wish you the best and hope that your model is successful and free from actionable consequences. I will be watching to see how it works. I also will check out the FB group and see how many of my blocked bidders are on there.
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John Tischler
I echo the concern of sellers putting their competition on the list. I can certainly see this happening and would love to know how you prevent this. I would think that any seller that is a TRS or has otherwise very high marks should be exempt from the list.
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Valerie Koudelka
Yes Ebay SHOULD be doing this, but they ARENT so kudos to Omer for taking on the job!
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Steve Foley
I'm not touching any of this due to liability and not touching of some crazy like the guy who had the Ohio Attorney General's office hound me because he would not follow through eBay's managed returns procedure. eBay was, of course, kind enough to offer me no support on this matter despite repeated attempts.
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Joshua Abramson
Omer, I appreciate where you're coming from. The point I've made endlessly is that Pierre Omidyar's stroke of genius twenty years ago was the feedback system: thumbs up, thumbs down, neutral and 80 characters to add a succinct qualitative rating. And that feedback lives FOREVER.
The entire ecosystem of eBay was built on the premise of honest people doing business with honest people. Having a 'clean, well-lit marketplace' where buyers and sellers had the same rights to preserve the integrity of the channel worked beautifully as eBay scaled beyond Pierre Omidyar's wildest imagination.
I realize that I'm likely in the minority, or an e-commerce fossil and that times have changed, but where it all went horribly wrong was in 2008 when sellers could no longer leave negative feedback. Sellers no longer had a way of letting others know about bad-apple buyers. eBay was left in a role where they had to step in as police and enforcers. Unfortunately, the balance has been skewed in the favor of buyers and enabled outrageous, extortionate behavior for the last seven years. Quality sellers have left in numbers, never to return as the cost of doing business is too high.
I know for certain in the groups I've participated in that eBay execs have heard the sellers' pain points loud and clear and that they are committed to balancing the scales. I am confident that they will make the appropriate changes. Whether they make changes in the future that restores the genius in the simplicity of sellers being able to leave negative feedback for buyers as a necessary caution to other sellers remains to be seen.
As far as a third party platform like you have launched (I'm thinking about the success of ripoffreport), I commend your efforts, and pray that you're not kicking the hornet's nest. Our biggest losses (read extortion) have come from powerful people who probably have borderline personality disorder. They have the potential to create enough damage to put you out of business, just because. As a policy, we do whatever it takes to extricate ourselves from the situation and back away as quickly as possible.
I wish you every success!
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Omer Nuriel
I read the comments, thank you everyone. These are my answers:
Safe-Markets.com does not block potential commissionable sales. If you know company who can do that, I suggest you stop selling in ebay and invest in that company. We provide information AFTER there is a username/email address. The majority of these cases is after an item was sold (the rest are potential buyers asking questions or submitting a "best offer" or placing bids on auctions). The information provided helps sellers to decide how to deal with the buyer in case he is marked as an abusive buyer. We do not block any sales.
For the concern of sellers listing their competitors - I mentioned before that none of the user based content websites is 100% proof from errors. It is hard for me to see how this can really damage sellers. Actually, I can think of some other creative & much more painful ways to "play dirty" and kill your competitors. Listing sellers in Safe-Markets.com is the least painful of these options. For more than 6 years I read horrible posts from sellers saying how buyers abuse the buyer protection policy, causing them huge losses, many of them are out of business now because of these losses (or they simply got tired from all the hassle involved). The best solution is the old feedback system and the only one who can restore it, is ebay. Once I figured this out, I realized that the only possible solution is an external solution, a bypass. It is more than 6 years now we are complaining about this and nothing happens. In 6 years' time you can change so many things even in big companies as ebay (I heard that things are changing now but no idea how much more time it will take and what will be the result). If Safe-Markets.com is the catalyst for improving the poor feedback system and bringing the equation back between sellers & buyers then I can say I did my share and I will start looking for my next project. In the meantime, we do monitor our listings and if we identify such a usage pattern by sellers listing other sellers, we know how to handle it.
