Features of the feedback system

When you're shopping online and see feedback, you know you have these problems with it:
1) Feedback is basically a testamonial. Whether it's for or against the person, it could be honest or it could be complete lies.
2) People who pretend to be a buyer but then don't pay, even those that bid purely to harass, can leave feedback and have it counted just the same as if they were paying. Some other websites claim to have stopped this, but see this YouTube video as they lie.
3) People can buy items for one cent and get it counted the same as a purchase of actual value.
4) When feedback is scored feedback, it compounds all these problems, making feedback thousands of times more innacurate. For instance, a feedback with a xx.x% of positive vs. negative makes one negative count as much as 1999 positives as 1999 positives are what is needed to make one negative go back to 100.0%. Feedback scoring takes away all search for truth as well and is purely about whatever score liars put. Feedback scores don't even take into account any truth or reality or relevance of the score and it's just whatever scores people put.


Firstly, the type of feedback someone leaves is not a reflection on the transaction they had, but on the type of person leaving feedback. There are exceptions of cut and dry things like the buyer not paying, the buyer doing credit card fraud, the seller outright not shipping (as opposed to mail getting lost), and that sort. But since it's usually a reflection of the person leaving it, this is why scored feedback is so very bad, though that will be discussed later. But for Random Plaza, feedback firstly is paired with feedback received and feedback left on one page so if someone gets glowing praise but leaves nasty feedback, it shows what kind of person they are and shows they gave the other person a nasty transaction. [*this is coming soon*]

One major problem making feedback innacurate is the size of text. Now if a person wants to lie, they have an easy time if everyone is forced to leave extremely short comments. Random Plaza has no scored feedback, so if they lie, they have to do it with text and not a rating. Now even if someone didn't want to lie, they have such a tiny area to leave a comment that, they're often forced to give some lie as an approximation of what happened if they had a bad experience because they just can't fit the truth in. However, in the case of Random Plaza, people get thousands of characters to leave their comments for initial comments, replies, followups, and replies to followups. A common method of exposing lies when one can't actually verify the truth is to check the details for logical validity and with Random Plaza, people can leave lots of details.


For #2, of not paying, sellers get from 7 to 45 days (extendable to 90) to decide whether the buyer is going to pay or to give up. When they choose, they also choose when leaving feedback. A seller also gets their fee back if they put the buyer doesn't put. When the seller puts it, it's final. If a seller lies on this a lot, then it'll show up on their feedback making them look bad. For #3, the fee the seller is charged is a flat amount about one euro and not a commission, so a seller can't do the #3 problem. Nonpaid comments are just as readable as paid and you can learn about the person by reading both the paid and nonpaid comments.

You may have seen lots of sellers saying that they want a website 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.


Random Plaza also will note if the two people leaving feedback have used the same IP or the same IP range in their most recently used IP addresses and IP ranges to prevent fake feedback.


For why scored feedback is bad, see below:


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. It also makes followups relevant so someone cannot just waste their followup but has to use it for something important, like to note if a seller that seemed bad later corrected the problem or a buyer that seemed good later did credit card fraud.

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.

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.

Documentation on the feedback system

Reading feedback

In reviewing feedback, try to overlook any reviews that are overly positive or overly negative as many times on any community marketplace website those are sometimes are fake.

Dates and times are in UTC.

Day count is how long they waited to leave it after the offer was accepted.

You can also get a better understanding of how to read feedback by reading the documentation on how it is left.

Remember that for sellers who are serious about selling and want to stay in business, the internet is serious business. They will try to not get bad feedback and when they do get it, they may take it really hard unless they're so high-volume that their feedback is burried.

IP address tracking notes

We had planned to make this more detailed, but right now the system just notes if at the time of leaving feedback if the buyer and seller had the same IP address or if the first three blocks of numbers in IPv4 had a range match. This is noted even in automatic feedback.

Don't ever login Tor or Proxies if you might bid on someone who uses the same one. For AOL users, please login and bid from an outside of AOL browser. You also shouldn't use an ISP that forces everyone to have same IP address (maybe unless the ISP is free) because suck ISPs simply suck.

Timeframe of leaving each tier of feedback and automatic feedback

Initial comment -- seven day minimum since offer accepted. Maximum 45 days normally, though the buyer or seller can request to extend this to 90 days and then the other party can accept it. If the other party does not answer to accept it, then it still ends at 45 days. The extension is for things such as if the buyer takes over 30 days to pay, the seller ships internationally, and then the item becomes lost, and international insurance generally requires a 45 day wait and then an evaluation before reimbursing.

---- If either or both parties do not leave the initial feedback, an automatic comment is left saying in italics, "User did not submit a feedback comment. Automatic feedback left." In automatic feedback, there can be no further replies or followups. The automatic feedback only applies to the initial comment and if a user never leaves a reply, followup, or followup-reply, then nothing happens.

Replies to the initial comment - can be left immediately up to a maximum of 60 days.

Followups to the initial comment made by the person who left the initial comment - These are left either 120 days since the offer was accepted or 75 days after the initial comment, whichever is longer. This is because they are not to just reaffirm the initial feedback, but if something changes over months, like if a buyer does friendly fraud with their credit card, the bank will always sit on that chargeback for months before notifying the seller. Followups can be left until 420 days (approximately fourteen months) after the offer was accepted.

Replies to followup-comments - These can't be left until the followups are left and then can be immediately left. The user's time to give followup-replies is [how many days it took them to follow up since the initial offer was accepted] + 120 days.

Text formatting

200 characters (not bytes) maximum with UTF-8 allows. This is the same size for all tiers of comments.

Anything too long for the screen and that does not wrap gets a scroll-bar.

We replace < and > that mess up XHTML code with similar Unicode characters, 〈 and 〉. This does not alter the character size that they take up compared what they replaced, but these replacement characters have odd spacing when you view them on your screen.

Removed comments

If Random Plaza staff removes your comment, it will be replaced with something like the italicized text, "Comment removed by Random Plaza staff due to rules violation." This will generally only be done for legal issues or privacy violations.

Feedback is left individually with a preview including the transaction details before each person leaves it, so Random Plaza staff will not remove mistakes that do not have a rule violation.

Fee to accept offer and non-paid feedback

For a seller to accept an offer there is a charge in internet money equivalent generally equivalent to one euro, which is close to a dollar or pound in most currencies. This is not a commission but a flat charge necessary because without this, then people could trade fake feedback for free and fill their accounts with fake feedback.

Sellers can opt not to pay for the feedback to count as valid for example if the buyer does not pay or if they're selling cheap ebooks. A seller with an account mostly of non-paid feedback looks bad to buyers since they may be putting all their bad feedback into non-paid and they may be trying to bury it in fake feedback.

A buyer with mostly non-paid for feedback also looks bad because the buyer may be a deadbeat who does not pay for most of their items.

If a seller marks "not paid" to be cheap or if they get a bad review, then if someone comes in and wins the seller's items to leave bad feedback and not pay, then it's harder to tell this and it will protect the seller less. So it's extremely important to use feedback as intended.


If a seller wants to sell a lot of cheap ebooks (as opposed to more expensive ebooks), then they have some options:
1) Selling ebooks extremely cheap is generally not something where a buyer has to worry about in terms of safety of a transaction. It is possible for a seller to charge ten cents per ebook and rip buyers off, but it's actually much easier for the seller to simply email an ebook than to try to run a scam only taking in miniscule amounts each time. So a seller would probably just want to list them as an anonymous seller. If the seller wants to manage their items more easily, they'd need to make an account purely for this, but they should likely explain to buyers that they'll only be taking anonymous offers because a lot of non-paid feedback looks bad to buyers, too.
2) The seller could instead combine multiple ebooks together and sell as a group to make it cost more.

It is better to try selling a bit more expensive ebooks because the point of feedback is for buyers to trust sellers as if a buyer doesn't trust the seller, the buyer would only want to pay with payment methods that are extremely unsafe for sellers (e.g. credit cards). Now with ebooks, the seller generally is sending these electronically and so can easily get ripped off due to no signed proof of delivery and even if they get a chargeback reversed, the non-refundable chargeback fee is usually many times the profit margin of an item.



The seller selects whether to pay for the feedback when they leave the buyer feedback. Sellers do not get any other chance to mark this and feedback cannot be changed back after this. So when the seller leaves feedback as nonpaid, they should be sure that the buyer is never going to change their mind and pay aain. And when the seller leaves feedback as paid, they should be sure that the item arrived to the buyer, arrived in-tact, etc. and the seller isn't going to have to deal with shipping a replacement, trying to get insurance to refund, having to refund the buyer, or that kind of thing.

If the buyer does a credit card chargeback fraud, banks generally receive those and then sit on them for two months doing nothing and keeping the seller in the dark until they pop a surprise chargeback. This is generally far beyond the maximum time to leave feedback and in this case, that is what the followup on feedback is for so ideally sellers can look at a buyer's feedback history and see if a buyer is a scammer. As for Random Plaza's fees, sellers will not be refunded for it as after all when a seller gets a chargeback, they've been robbed the item, the shipping and packing cost, their time, the credit card processing fees, and a large chargeback fee so the fee we charge to make feedback count as valid pales in comparison to all this other stuff.

Q: Can you let us import our feedback from eBay and other sites?
A: No, this compromises the integrity of our feedback system. Also, back in 1999 when Yahoo auctions tried it, eBay claimed they own the rights to the feedback and so Yahoo cancelled what it was doing (Cnet News article titled "eBay plays hardball with feedback ratings"). eBay also added a clause in their user agreement which they presently worded that they don't allow sellers to do "such as displaying, importing or exporting feedback information off of the Sites or for using it for purposes unrelated to eBay". Most sites will copy only the total feedback score from another site, often calling the retreiving mechanaism a funny name like "Mr. Grabber" (which is also likely the nickname of at least one convicted sex offender). However, even doing this would just compromise the integrity of our feedback system. Instead, you would want to link to something offsite with a previous reputation and then on that page give your account name on Random Plaza so people know the reference is genuine.



♦ Humorous comic on feedback. XKCD #325

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