Contents

♦ Bulk Templates
♦ Best feedback system
♦ Random Plaza's system of making offers and the availability of blind auctions
♦ Protection from bogus/abusive copyright and trademark claims. Better protection for trademark holders from trademark infringement, too.
♦ Freedom
♦ Security
♦ Miscellaneous

(TL;DR: Updating the same text in thousands of listings will take only minutes.)

What happens if you have over 9000 listings up? These all have similar things like listing design, listing terms, etc. Well what happens if you want to change some small item in the terms for all your listings? What happens if you want to make a large change the layout of those over 9000 listings?

On the other community marketplace websites, you have to spend over 9000 hours manually editing them all.

With Random Plaza's Bulk Templates, you just update the bulk templates in your listing, and all the ones that have never had offers will update in one to two minutes. After that, the ones that have either had offers in the past or have pending offers can be closed and relisted in bulk.

The text inserted by bulk templates is also searchable like the rest of the text in your listing.



(TL;DR: Solves most of the problem of feedback that are on other websites.)

Let's say you go to a physical store and in front of it, there's a huge LCD screen showing a numbered score. Below it is a console where anyone who gets a token from the checkout stand can enter a score from 1-5 and the average of the score is displayed on the big LCD screen above. This is supposed to be for customers only, but people who don't pay also can sneak in and grab a token to put into the console so they can enter a rating. Then people who never buy at the store, people who only shoplift from the store, and competitors can all go and give the store bad ratings.

Now let's say every store in the country has to be like this by law. Maybe the government regulates that if a store gets below a 98% perfect rating of all 5 scores, then the government forces the store to close. Or maybe competition makes the people only shop at stores with a 99.9% perfect score or higher. What will stores do? Well they'll first bother all their customers to only do the highest ratings. They'll watch their customers in the stores and if they fear the customer is the type to give bad ratings, security will throw them out and ban them from the store. They'll stop giving low prices because people who buy really cheap items are more likely to give a bad rating without trying to work it out with the store whereas people who buy expensive items are more likely to try to work things out first. The return policy will change so no refunds after people filled out the score. Stores will become unfriendly. Stores will instead of trying to help customers, will try to delay customers with problems until they no longer can give a rating score. Stores will get more return item scams and have to give free items to scammers out of fear for their rating score.

The above example is what happens when a feedback system on a community marketplace website that has a rating system, instead of pure comments that Random Plaza uses. The purpose of these online feedback systems is to help sellers, not buyers. They let sellers have a good reputation behind them so they're not anonymous and buyers feel safer. If a seller has lots of bad points, they can just start over. Feedback also sometimes can let sellers know if a user is not a true buyer, but just a scammer or makes offers on items purely for harassment.

Want examples of places that don't use a feedback like you've seen on websites? Two of them are Wal-Mart or Target, who at present have had 90 day return policies for quite a long time now and buyers can even return things for just buyer's remorse. These are pretty extreme and excessive return policies and these stores don't do the stuff because they're forced, but just to get customers.

Compare that with community marketplace website with scored feedback. Then sellers aren't out for pleasing customers or return business, but they're out for feedback. The most successful sellers aren't those who are best at service, but they're sellers who are best at keeping away customers who give bad feedback and getting bad feedback off.

There's one community marketplace website that had buyers score sellers from 1.0 to 5.0 with 4.0 being "satisfactory" and "5.0" being extremely satisfactory. It then gave special bonuses to sellers who averaged 4.5, 4.8, and 4.9 with different, better special bonuses for the higher averages. Well the concept of buyers checking the scores and determining things for themselves never crossed their minds. Instead, the started banning sellers who got below 4.4 averages, then below 4.6 averages, then below 4.8 averages. In addition, the website also would manually adjust the scores of all their power sellers above the maximum 5.0. The sellers who avoided getting banned were those not who did get service, but simply presented proof to every buyer that buyer the website was lying and how the site actually did rank the scores. So then the average of these scores was around 4.9 site-wide and the scoring system was useless to buyers.

Even the old-fashioned feedback system is not that useful for buyers. With a scored feedback system done to the first decimal place, one negative feedback counts as much as 1999 positive feedbacks since 1999 positives are required to bring it back up to 100.0%. That means anyone who wants to complain is more important than thousands of people who did not. In addition, most of the bad feedback is over things that were already stated in the item description or left by people who never paid. It also disproportionately favors large sellers. Again, not that useful.

The feedback system on Random Plaza is pure text. Nobody's feedback is more important than someone else's. The text itself and the seller reply is what's important, not some score. The text in Random Plaza's feedback system allows for quite a bit longer room than most others. Basically, this makes Random Plaza's feedback system more useful to buyers so it's not just a score for sellers to compete over, but detailed information about each transaction. Random Plaza's feedback system, just like the text of a listing, rewards buyers for reading more of it.

Plus, you may have seen on other sites where feedback gives like this:
Prima bashes Secunda.
Secunda refutes Prima.
Prima immediately does a followup, refuting Secunda's reply and making Secunda look even worse.
Secunda then can't respond to it.

Well on Random Plaza, Prima cannot followup for about four months and Secunda can do another response if Prima follows up. This gets rid of that horrible situation you've seen on other websites.

Now on Random Plaza's feedback system, you may notice there's feedback marked paid and marked nonpaid. For feedback marked as paid, the seller was charged a fee equivalent to one euro. This is done to help buyers distinguish between real feedback and where sellers filled their feedback with a bunch of fake feedback. And if a buyer or seller doesn't leave feedback, well all feedback is counted and if they don't fill it out then it leaves feedback saying, "User did not submit a feedback comment. Automatic feedback left." so you can tell if a buyer is getting customers so happy they're too lazy to bother with feedback. People cannot reply to or follow up to automatic feedback. Nonpaid comments are just as readable as paid and you can learn about the seller by reading both the paid and nonpaid comments.

You may have seen lots of sellers saying that they want an eBay alternative that is free to list and sell. Well, do you know why many of them want that? It's because they want to fill their feedback with lots of fake feedback praising them. Do you want to buy from a place where most of the sellers are doing that?

Not only that, even when a community marketplace websites charge sellers a fee, it's usually a commission, which means you can't buy an expensive item that's not a bootleg without it having a large markup and that sellers will be doing lots of transactions for pennies leaving feedback for themselves. That's why Random Plaza charges a flat rate of one euro, so you don't have either of those bad things.

Other features:

• Everyone must wait seven days before leaving initial feedback.
• Before leaving feedback there's a nice warning message from a real life example about where a buyer mistyped a seller's tracking number, immediately leaves the seller feedback saying they're a scammer and a fraud, and then two minutes later the buyer realizes that they mistyped the tracking number.
• Feedback also shows how long the user waited after the transaction to leave the feedback.
• Feedback is 2000 characters long and if someone types 2000 repetitions of capital G, the individual commentsgets scrollbars instead of your entire browser window getting a scrollbar.
• When a buyer submits their purchase or offer, sellers always chose to accept or reject it so they can review each new buyer beforehand instead to protect themselves from people who bid just to leave bad feedback.
• Feedback will tell if the buyer and seller have the same IP address or are using the same IP range.
• Random Plaza has no irritating dispute/resolution center where typically the buyer and seller are forced into communicating using forms that only allow two sentences per message, so each person has to compress their sentences and break their communication up across dozens of messages, and each party addresses the other in third person instead of second person, thus aggravating both parties and ensuring the problem only worsens. On Random Plaza, buyers also do not get bad marks on their accounts that suspend them for not paying so many items, but rather they get feedback from the seller.

In a normal online auction system, to get the item to a proper price, each item for auction depends on at least two people who want it. If nobody wants it, it doesn't sell, but if only one person wants it then the result is that the item sells for far less than its value, even if a person would have paid a lot of money for it, since nobody else bid to raise their bid, then the item sells for the starting bid.

Now if an item only has one single bid on it and it's sitting there, then only way to for an item to proper market value is shill bidding or the item sells at a loss. Shill bidding is deceptive way to make a hidden reserve price on an item and is unethical due to being deceptive. However, if the only way to achieve market price on an item is by shill bidding, then something is fundamentally wrong with the system.

If there are at least two bidders competing on an item (not one person bids starting bid, another bids a penny above it and the first bidder never rebids, but rather competing), then the item should get a proper market value without shill bidding.

However, many buyers do very late minute snipe bids on items. This imbalances the market even further. And while snipe bidding is claimed to be a defense against shill bidding, all a seller needs to do is put a protective shill bid on all items without bids before they close and this then protects against snipe bidders making items sell at a loss. How poorly designed is the standard auction system if the only way to counterbalance snipe bidding is with preemptive shill bidding?

Now some websites just abandon the auction model all together and go to fixed prices + making offers. Random Plaza may look like it does that too, but it's a bit different.

The way Random Plaza's auction system is better is that it uses blind auctions. First the seller sets the preferred price really high and then puts "auction" right in the title, clearly so people see it's an auction. Then logged in buyers go and make offers on it and their offers last for thirty days. If the listing is not a free listing and the seller has funds in their account, then the listing will auto-renew each thirty days so the offers will last thirty full days unless the seller takes action. Then the seller simply waits until they get an offer they like and then they accept the offer. Then they don't have to reject the other offers manually, they just close the listing, click "Item no longer for sale", which if it's been stated it's an auction, then it'd make sense to buyers that the seller sold it to someone else. If the seller has multiples of the same item, then they could accept more than one offer.

But wait! There's more!

Sellers can use the auto counter offer stuff to set the lowest bottom price that buyers can bid so buyers don't waste their time and the seller's time with offers too low. The seller also, even if the buyer goes above that, can reject their offer as too low if they get a whole lot of people bidding much higher to hint to the buyer that this is happening. Buyers can make infinite reoffers on an item. This solves the whole problem of blindly haggling and waiting for seller after seller to respond. If you really want to save time, you can do non-binding offers for the same item for a bunch of sellers. If the seller rejects the offer, the buyer rejects the offer, or it's cancelled for some other reason then registered users can see the logged reason why.

In the end what happens is items will sell for fair market value and there's no deception for how this gets done like with the traditional online auction system.

• Many community marketplace websites are full of sellers posing as companies and making fraudulent DMCA claims to get other sellers listings shut down. Even when it's done by the manufacturer, the manufacturer is 99% of the time doing a fraudulent DMCA just to artificially inflate the price of their product, control the supply of their product, and prevent people from reselling used items. All of these instances are illegal and they harm buyers by not allowing them to get products at lower prices. Random Plaza is one of the few websites that abide by the the DMCA part of DMCA law where Random Plaza does not remove content for a second DMCA notice if the user has given a counter-notice to the original without a court order. Even if you have a new listing number, you can still reference the old DMCA and your counternotice after uploading them to chillingeffects.org.
• Random Plaza also prevents a lot of fraudulent DMCA notices by requiring that that people physically mail the DMCA notes and does not accept them by email.
• Random Plaza is hosted outside North America and Random Plaza's webhost will not shut it down for some baseless DMCAs emailed by a bot.
• Unlike most websites out there, for trademark claims, Random Plaza does not do anything DMCA-related. The DMCA does not relate to trademark at all, only copyright. Instead, Random Plaza requires that the trademark holder make a public statement on their website of what constitutes knockoffs of their brand. This is so anyone can use it to determine knockoffs so the trademark holders don't have to manually check Random Plaza's listings and also so buyers can read it to learn for themselves. Buyers can know what is legitimate no matter where they see a knockoff. It is also so if the trademark holder gives a false statement, it can more easily be brought to light. Random Plaza will be compiling a linkfarm list once trademark holders give us links to such pages.

• Did the seller trick you in their listing and turn out to be a scammer? Random Plaza has no unpaid marks, which on other community marketplace websites, after three in an eighteen month period, you get suspended no matter how much you regularly buy through that site. Instead, on Random Plaza your feedback will let sellers know if you're a reliable buyer.
• Random Plaza doesn't shove any payment method down your throat for how you buyers should pay sellers. Random Plaza gives a guide but let you make your own choices.
• You can list anything you want as long as it is legal for you to do so.
• Fewer rules for buyers and sellers
• Hold private listings that are password-required to view.

• Did you know that some sites don't encrypt your password as another way they track people who use multiple accounts? See Random Plaza's "password recovery" section in here about a free email provider that doesn't encrypt passwords and also see this thread then google "Vladuz". At Random Plaza, each account's two passwords and secret date are encrypted and salted in the database and the first password is encrypted and salted in a way that is not reverse-decryptable, only checkable if the password matches it.
• Random Plaza has strong security designed to protect your account from hijacking even if your email address is hijacked, there's a keylogger on your computer, and you just gave your first password to a phishing site.
• Random Plaza has protection from insecure wifis that steal your cookie and connect to this website from the same IP address you just used.

• Sellerscan also do blind auctions that are immune to shill bidding and snipe bidding see, Help with Making Offers on Products
• Random Plaza doesn't send users email advertisements.
• You know how you visit most websites and you get a ton of spammy cookies (that is provided the website isn't a cloaking site that refuses to work without cookies or javascript unless the user-agent is a search spider) and if you log in, you get ten more? Well, notice on Random Plaza, that doesn't happen and only if you log in do you get a cookie, and just one, of which this site promptly deletes when you click the logout button. The only other one Random Plaza will give is optional and stores only your preferred currency.
• The pages on Random Plaza aren't bloated and rarely is there any JavaScript, of which none of the JavaScript is abusive (whereas it's the norm for most sites to abuse JavaScript these days).
• Random Plaza's forums are forced anonymous that do not require login so you don't have any people demanding your username before they help you, nosing over your items, causing trouble with you if they don't like your comments, and you also don't have to worry about getting banned for criticizing this website on the forums. The moderation is also very relaxed as you can see by the posts veering very off-topic.
• Invite-only listings, which of course people only need the password to view and do not have to log in to view.

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