Building trust key in growth of online marketing

Online marketplace businesses are unique in the sense that they seek to bring both buyers and sellers onboard for win-win exchanges.

One of the common challenges facing these marketplaces is how to eliminate fear and distrust among buyers and sellers.

More often than not, customers engaging in the transactions are total strangers, which results in all manner of anxiety and questions like; what if I pay for the item and it’s never delivered?

What if the buyer runs away with my item without paying?

What if someone hacks my account? Such fears, though justified, have the potential of creating a huge barrier to trade if not appropriately addressed.

To build trust among the customers, the business must make customers’ safety a priority.

Users need to feel secure as they advertise, communicate with potential buyers and sellers and transact online.

Marketplace start-ups must have strategies and tactics that ensure trust across all their users.

OLX, AirBnB, Uber and Lyft are some of the marketplace start-ups that have made trust and safety amongst their users a priority, something that has hugely contributed to their success.

Various trust and safety strategies have been employed by successful start-ups and market places that have in turn yielded great success.

The quality of content in any online marketplace has to be exemplary; users don’t want to waste time trying to figure out whether the product/service listed is good or not.

CULTIVATING TRUST
For instance, OLX has two key strategies that ensure high content quality: a team of experts that check for all the content that goes through the platform and tools that users can use to report any unsuitable content.

The content team moderate the content that goes live and ensures it is up to desired standards.

The reporting tools have empowered the online community of users to participate in making the online marketplace more effective and relevant to their needs.

The system is also able to detect fraudulent and malevolent activities and such users are automatically rejected and blacklisted.

AirBnB has also promoted community policing whereby users are able to report on any shady apartments listed on the site.

OLX is also planning to introduce the customer rating as well as user verification system.

A verified user will have a badge, which will act as a proof that the seller is trusted.

This is expected to increase buyer trust to a considerably high level, and will also encourage the sellers to deal in high quality products/services since they will fear losing a trusted account as a result of poor rating.

Uber, on the other hand, has a rating system where both the driver and the passenger are able to provide some feedback about each other.

This way, both parties are sure to conduct themselves in the best manner possible.

FINANCIAL SAFETY

Initially, online classifieds were meant to connect buyer and sellers online, with zero control of the payment process.

There has been a paradigm shift in the way marketplaces operate with regards to the payment methods.

OLX is in the process of introducing an Escrow service that will be aimed at providing a fast and secure transaction for both the buyer and the seller.

An Escrow is an arrangement where something (generally money or documents) is held in trust by a trusted third party until certain agreed conditions are met.

OLX will act as the trusted third party whereby the money will only be released to the seller after all parties are happy with the transaction.

E-Bay also has an escrow service for eBay Motors whereby they use escrow.com as their approved escrow service provider.

Online marketplaces are technology-based platforms managed and controlled by people.

The systems should be able to predict future actions and trends by analyzing human actions.

The OLX algorithm-based system has worked very well in analysing a customer’s previous behaviours to predict future actions.

The system is able to analyse all users with suspicious activities and put them in a separate queue for further investigation.

By having a system that is able to analyse and predict user behaviour in place, it becomes extremely difficult for fraudsters to penetrate and publish fraudulent adverts.

The best marketplaces trade off some meaningful level of friction for long-term user safety.

Those that don’t put trust and safety first don’t make it.

The writer is a trust and Safety specialist at the online marketer OLX.