I’m Rob Chesnut, Senior Vice President in charge of Trust & Safety for eBay. I work with our teams worldwide, including Sharat Digumarti, Senior Manager, Trust and Safety - India, to ensure that our community of users feel safe and confident when buying and selling on eBay.

As the Internet continues to evolve, there are many more online shopping choices for buyers. This competition means our buyers' expectations are growing.

To keep pace with the changing of the Internet, we’re evolving eBay’s Trust & Safety philosophy. Where we’ve so far put an emphasis on transparency and free choice for buyers on eBay, we’re now more actively protecting our buyers from fraud and other bad experiences on our site.

My team has been working on solutions that address these two priorities worldwide:

• Taking a new, more proactive approach towards Trust & Safety to protect our members from fraud.

• Improving the buyer experience on the site by holding sellers to higher minimum standards

A More Proactive Approach to Trust & Safety
In India we recently restricted ability of Sellers with Private Feedback to list on site. This gives buyers the ability to make an informed decision, by accessing a sellers’ complete Feedback record.

Aside from visible changes like these, we’ve been working on others. One issue we’ve fought on eBay is counterfeits -- these are illegal and not welcome on eBay. We’ve cooperated with Rights Owners around the world through our VeRO program to remove counterfeit listings for years, but recently we put stricter measures in place. For some items reportedly favored by counterfeiters, we’ve started requiring additional seller verification, we’ve eliminated the ability to list these items with 1 or 3-day auction durations, and we’ve put in additional restrictions for people selling these items cross-border.

These efforts appear to be working with minimal disruption to our legitimate sellers, and, going forward, we’ll be considering similar projects. We’re continuing to balance transparency and convenience with the need to keep our Community safe.

Holding sellers to higher minimum standards
It’s a fact that the majority of bad buyer experiences result from circumstances controlled by sellers. Buyers are less likely to return to the site after having a frustrating experience - like finding the shipping & handling charges are excessive, receiving an item that is not as described, or experiencing poor customer service during a transaction with a seller.

It’s clear we have a shared responsibility with our sellers to make sure our buyers have satisfactory experiences. eBay’s philosophy till now has been to allow practically anyone to sell, with few restrictions. Going forward, we’ll apply higher minimum standards for selling on the site. These changes will improve the marketplace for the vast majority of sellers who deliver a good customer experience.

Here are some ways we’re addressing this issue:

• Private Feedback – In October 2006, we eliminated the ability for sellers to make their Feedback private. This was important, as it eliminated the ability for sellers with poor track records to hide their negative reputations from prospective buyers.

• Cross-Border Trade Requirements - We’ve also implemented new requirements for sellers who want to sell cross-border. To list outside one's home registration site, sellers must establish their identity by becoming PayPal Verified (sellers with established track records will not be affected by this requirement.)

• Feedback 2.0 - eBay pioneered online reputation systems with the
Feedback system back in the ‘90s. Although debated for its merits, the fact is, it’s a great system, but it needs to keep pace with our marketplace.

In addition to leaving an overall positive, neutral or negative Feedback, from next month buyers will have the option to leave Detailed Seller Ratings for the seller on four aspects of a transaction:
-- Item Description
-- Communication
-- Postage time
-- Shipping & Handling charges

The average score of the Detailed Seller Ratings received by a seller will be displayed on the seller’s Feedback Profile page. It’s a system that rewards sellers by recognising the things they do to ensure customer satisfaction.
Next month, we’ll be launching Feedback 2.0 in certain countries and we will share more about this soon, so stay tuned.

Finally, I want to thank our Community for your help and support in keeping the site safe. We receive reports every day of suspicious activity from conscientious buyers and sellers, and each one helps us to investigate and take action to stop negative activity where appropriate. We appreciate everyone’s contribution in making eBay a great place to buy and sell.

Sincerely,

Rob Chesnut
Senior Vice President, Global Trust & Safety