Comments
Unintended Side Effects
I have been buying a lot off stuff off Trademe recently. This uncovered an interesting phenomenon. Trademe works on a feedback system, when you make a trade, you offer feedback on the other party, the buyer or the seller. This raises or lowers their trust profile and affects future sales.
A fairer marketplace
The theory behind this is that it creates a far more honest marketplace… You have to be fair or else everyone knows about it. The thing is, now everyone is so worked up about their feedback, it’s actually created an environment of suspicion.
A weird side effect
I bought a phone for my flat, I sent an email to the seller requesting pick up details and got a reply. I then sent a further email requesting bank account details and trying to confirm a pick up time. They didn’t get it. The next thing I know, I’m being sent an email accusing me of being a ‘time waster’ and questioning if I ‘even want the phone’. Which I found fairly shocking. The issue was resolved with a fast phone call, but it seemed a weird reaction. When the truth was discovered, the opposite occurred and they obviously were a little afraid that I would turn on them!
My boyfriend had a similar issue when trying to buy glasses. After weeks of communication, the glasses never arrived. Eventually his money was returned and he wrote polite but firm piece of feedback which questioned if maybe the glasses were ever sent. The response was immediate and viscous. He is now the angry owner of feedback that claims he is a scammer.
Freakonomics
I’m quite new to buying on Trademe and I actually found myself AFRAID of not picking something up on time or not contacting the buyer immediately. It actually became surprising stressful.
I’m reading Freakonomics at the moment which is a book all about incentives, but also shows how everything has unintended side effects. This was one particular one I’d never considered arising from such a perfect sounding solution to trust int he marketplace.
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June 29th, 2007 at 2:26 am
This mirrors my experience, but wait until you do have a bad trade that stops short of outright theft/fraud. Placing bad feedback begets bad feedback, and either both sides mutually retract it (leaving noone the wiser) or you’re left with a permanent bad record. Feedback wars used to eventuate before they limited the number of changes; I much prefer the eBay write-one approach.
It isn’t until you get a hundred or so trades under your belt that you start looking more kindly on those people with *only* 96% good feedback after a thousand trades. There are screwballs everywhere.
Also there is no way of rating feedback against one another; I’d imagine that 2 good feedbacks for buying/selling cars rate higher than 10 books by quite a measure. The removal of $ value and deletion of old auctions leaves buyers ignorant and I think that is a big error.
June 29th, 2007 at 7:56 am
I don’t understand, doesn’t Trade Me have a “Sale not Complete” process to cover when a sale (for whatever reason) ??? Ebay and other foreign auction sites (like the Baazee.com & Bidorbuy.com that I helped build) have a strict process to manage the end of sale process so that lax sellers or buyers don’t get away with crappy service.
To be honest, I’m surprised sometime how Trade Me has made it to the top.
June 30th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
I think they probably do… I have only just started using it :) Feedback wars are interesting because if someone leaves feedback for you last and it’s a blatant lie, you do feel the urge to reply!
Potentially there is room to ‘rank’ feedbacks, and ‘control’ the system a little bit. I think sometimes, as an idealist, I find it frustrating when we’re left the tools to manage ourselves and end up abusing the system so need to bring in more control.