Without the trust of the community, we wouldn’t have a business.
As Sam says: “Trade Me involves people sending money to sellers they have never met for goods they’ve never seen.”
When you put it like that it’s hard to understand how Trade Me works at all.
We hate to hear about people being ripped-off.
We do everything we can to make Trade Me safe for everybody.
We have found that the vast majority of people are good and can be trusted to do the right thing where we make this easy for them.
We have no place or sympathy for the small minority who can’t and won’t.
We employ a full-time Trust & Safety team who take great pleasure in tracking down these people.
We engage the help of everybody using the site via the ‘Community Watch’ scheme.
We work with a number of external agencies to make sure that we are informed as soon as possible when something looks dodgy.
People are sometimes surprised to discover that people have been sent to prison and even deported as a result of these efforts.
As the audience has grown our responsibilities have become even broader. For example, our ‘Safe Computing Centre’ contains lots of useful information about keeping computers protected from viruses and spyware and how to spot fake (phishing) emails.
It’s easy to forget that many people are not aware of these risks.
We know there is always more we can and should do to make people feel confident about using Trade Me.
Related posts:
Other posts from the Trade Me Manifesto series:
Do you still work at Trade Me Rowan? - As you say “We”
Robert -
I no longer work at Trade Me.
A lot of this was written when I was still working at Trade Me, so I say “we” rather than “they”.
I hope this doesn’t cause any confusion.
I didn’t want to spam you with comments but liked the last 2 posts. I like the bit where you say ‘Big fonts force us to use less words”. Simple! And it works.
This one was funny because whenever I buy stuff over $100 off Trademe, people say ‘how do you trust that person?’. But Trademe is set up in a way that people can’t afford NOT to be trusted - I feel safer buying off Trademe than most other places - an individual is much more likely to worry about their reputation than a larger company.
Man I wish I could hear the gossip about those people you have deported!
Thanks for these posts as well. Really informative, they’ve sparked many a discussion at PlanHQ.