Trusting trust the Ebay way

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Advertisement used to do exactly this: informing you that a lot of other costumers were trusting X, so you could as well. Then it became something else, but that is another story. There is a form of bottom-up advertisement, a sort of electronic word-of-keyboard, that the digital era has made possible again: customers' comments and feedback. Everyone has more or less learnt the lesson, from Amazon to Saynsbury's, but the master is Ebay.

On Ebay, sellers and buyers need to build their reputation the hard way: by being good sellers and buyers.

It is a reinforcing process: you are judged by the people you do business with; the better your reputation the more business you may have, the more likely it is that you will wish to do your best to make sure that your reputation, gained with so much effort, remains untarnished and may even improved, which means that buyers are more likely to do business with you, but the more business you are likely to enjoy... and so on.

Some time ago, speaking about the semantic web and the various solutions provided for its possible implementation, I draw a distinction which I think applies well in this case too: check whether your solution is time-friendly, i.e. whether time works in its favour. Trust (on Ebay or elsewhere) but also mistrust (in Palestine or elsewhere) are time-friendly: the longer one stays online doing good business the better it is for the business itself; the longer people kill each other, the stronger their mutual hatred. There are other processes that are time-unfriendly: lying, for example (the longer you do it, the more likely it is you'll be discoverd) or compare keeping updated the Britannica (time works against it, by eroding its updateness and accuracy) vs. Wikipedia (the longer it stays online, the better it gets).

Vendors with a high positive assessment rating get higher returns. This is trivial. Exactly how higher, that's more difficult to determine. Now, in a recent study, Oliver Gartler from the University of Bonn and his Aachen colleague Christian Grund have tried to see what financial value a good reputation at Ebay may mean. They have discoveredd that 1% point more in positive customer feedback (votes) pushes the auction price up on average by 4%.

Trust-ability is a very good investment.

For the complete German text of the article click on the title of this blog.

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