18 January, 2007 | 12:06AM GMT
I’m Rob Chesnut, Senior Vice President in charge of Trust & Safety for eBay globally. I work with our teams worldwide including Garreth Griffith, Head of Trust & Safety in the UK and Ireland, to ensure our community of users everywhere feels safe and confident when buying and selling on eBay. It’s no secret that this is a bigger challenge today than it was a decade ago when eBay was young. The days have gone when eBay was a small Community and we could rely on transparency on the site to keep the marketplace healthy. We’ve gone from being like a rural town, where we knew our neighbours and it was safe to leave the doors and windows open, to a large city, where security is a more serious issue.
Over time, online criminals who target sites like eBay and PayPal have grown in number and sophistication. As the internet continues to evolve, there are also many more online shopping choices for buyers. This competition means our buyers' expectations are growing.
To keep pace with the changing face of the Internet, we’re evolving eBay’s approach to Trust & Safety. Where we’ve historically 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:
- Take a new, even more proactive approach towards Trust & Safety to protect our members from fraud.
- Improve the buyer experience on the site by holding sellers to higher minimum standards
An Even More Proactive Approach to Trust & Safety
In the UK we recently launched the Safeguarding your Member ID (SMI) project, and this change will also take place on the eBay.ie site soon. This was a major change to auction-style listings that offers more privacy for our members to help prevent targeted fraud. You can read more about this in a separate announcement from Garreth Griffith.
Aside from visible changes like SMI, 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 programme to remove counterfeit listings for years, but recently we have put stricter measures in place. For items that have been reported frequently by rights owners and the community, we require additional seller verification; we’ve removed the ability to list these items with 1- or 3-day auctions, and we’ve put in additional restrictions for people selling these items internationally.
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 a small minority of sellers. Buyers are less likely to return to the site after having a frustrating experience, such as finding the postage and packaging 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 that we want to make sure that our buyers have a positive experience on the site. Historically, eBay’s approach has been to allow an open marketplace with few restrictions on sellers. Going forward, we’ll continue to apply high minimum standards for selling on the site. This approach will improve the marketplace for the vast majority of sellers who deliver a good customer experience.
Please read the message from Garreth Griffith, following this one, to find our more about what will be happening in the UK and Ireland to support this strategy.
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
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