Como provar aos nossos usuários que eles não estão sendo enganados? [fechado

Question

Tenho uma pergunta da teoria da informação sobre como provar (ou pelo menos dar evidências estatísticas) que um site de leilão não está abaixando seus usuários.

Recentemente, lançamos um site de leilão de pay-per-bid. É um novo tipo de leilão em que os usuários pagam para licitar os leilões cronometrados. Cada lance aumenta o preço e aumenta o tempo do leilão. O último lance quando o horário acaba compra o item.

O problema é que os usuários suspeitam de que possamos enganá -los. Não tenho intenções como a confiança dos meus usuários é de suma importância para mim. No entanto, o modelo pode ser implementado por outros sites sem escrúpulos e seria simples trapacear os licitantes. Preciso implementar medidas que mostrem aos nossos usuários que somos legítimos.

Estou comprometido em executar uma operação honesta. O desafio é como provar isso ao mundo? Qualquer abordagem precisará ser equilibrada com a preservação da privacidade dos usuários.

Algumas idéias que tenho são:

• Mostrar endereço IP de cada usuário

• solicitar depoimentos de vencedores que receberam suas mercadorias. Peça a eles correio em fotos deles com suas mercadorias e uma cópia recente de capa de seu jornal local.

• mostre algumas informações amplas sobre cada usuário, como estado doméstico e país

Estou procurando sugestões.

Atualizar

Algumas ótimas sugestões. Até aqui:

• Forneça informações comportamentais sobre cada usuário:

  • quando unido
  • quais leilões participaram
  • Estatísticas para leilão - lances colocados, custo

• Não publique informações pessoalmente identificáveis. Nenhum endereço de IP, já que as pessoas que não venceram poderiam exigir uma retribuição no vencedor.

• Fórum Público para Discussão e Abordagem Perguntas

• Solicita depoimentos dos usuários para mostrar que as pessoas vencem e recebem produtos.

  • Como podemos mostrar no depoimento que ele não é "inventado" por nós? Estou pensando em talvez pedir para incluir uma foto com um jornal local recente. Isso seria difícil de fingir em larga escala e como a distribuição dos vencedores no tempo e na localidade.

Você acredita que seria bom mostrar o estado de origem e o país do usuário, ou isso seria muita informação pessoal?

Answer 1

1. Provide as much information as possible to users, such as who won, how much was paid, how many buys/sellers a user has made, etc;
2. Provide a feedback mechanism on individual auctions and users;
3. Have a public forum for discussion on results, support issues and complaints by users;
4. Don't require users to use other pay services you provide to get results, such as your own snipe system;
5. State your policies clearly on your Website. This should include, at a minimum, a privacy policy, discussion of how the site works, an FAQ and steps you've taken to prevent any appearance of impropriety or conflict of interest (eg employees aren't allowed to participate); and
6. Have a complaints and dispute resolution mechanism.

This isn't a technical problem. It's a social problem. The only way users are going to feel confident in the results is with transparency and professionalism.

Answer 2

Isn't that something like swoopo.com?

Answer 3

It first and foremost must be designed well and look professional enough that people will trust it. People are remarkably good at detecting a poorly designed website and will not respond well to it. This may be a hard market to get into since there are such well established alternatives, but the best way to gain users is by word of mouth from existing users. This takes time, but is most effective. Don't go violating people's privacy and publishing their information jsut because they use your site. People won't like it and won;t come back. Provide a feedback system for users (a la ebay) where people can see other real people that are pleased with the service. Also a public message board for comments and complaints would help comfort people as well. Good Luck!

Answer 4

Be ware of providing too much information though, depending on your site, your users may decide that they do not like it when too much privacy is revealed to others when they bid on something. For example, if I'm a customer and I just purchased something expensive, I do not want my user name or email shown to other people who'll start spamming me to buy a cheaper version of what I just paid for. Some others may take offense at being out bid and grief the person who out bid them by running a DOS on their IP, for example.

Yes you should protect your own site's reputation, but if you do not take actions to protect your users, you may end up losing some of them.

I think the best way to improve your reputation is through usage (may be hard), or through some reputable review sites.

Answer 5

Giving out IP addresses of users might be risky, and ultimately it's something that a fake site may fake as well.

I guess one way of gaining trust is to use a trustworthy authority to approve you. IOW, delegation :) let someone else solve the problem for you. e.g. Users will tend to trust you more if you're backed by someone like PayPal. That would cost you, though.

[philosophical]

The main problem is that in order to gain trust you need to provide what sociologists call "honest signals". And honest signals are usually costly. That's a problem in business because it means you have to sacrifice your earnings in order to get more customers on-board, and then balance that equation. IOW, customers and shareholders have different incentives. But as a "starup" trying to gain the trust of a user base it would make sense to signal your honesty by costly gestures. You might make less money initially, but eventually, once you're big enough, that signalling would no longer be necessary.

So what kind of honest (costly) signal can you send? Well, maybe instead of soliciting testimonials from winners you should Pay them a symbolic fee. Make it worthwhile for users to help you prove the site's authenticity by disclosing information about themselves or the transaction, and in turn make it up for them with discounts, rebates, whatever.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure you won't gain trust by simply handing out people's information to everyone without asking them. Let people do that for you, and compensate them, thereby signalling your intentions in a costly (honest) manner.

[/philosophical]

Answer 6

Have real time chat on the bidding pages, like IRC. People can only bid by typing "#bid $200" or something in the chat window. That way users can interrogate anyone they think might be a bot or whatever. They can also discuss the product for sale and warn others if it's a fake listing or whatever. You need to show people they can trust the site. People trust people.

Answer 7

Remember sitting through a talk on use of cryptographic methods to prove various facets of auctions were conducted properly. Googling "cryptography" and "auctions" together should provide some starting material if your interested in this approach.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzVCrSrZIX8

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/crab/Auctions.ppt

Answer 8

Jeff Atwood talked about this on www.codinghorror.com last month.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001261.html

I had never heard of the concept before. He does explain it fairly well.

Cathy

Answer 9

You cant without lying.
The only way to win is by sheer luck. You just call your lottery tickets "bids".

Shame on you.

EDIT:
Some opinions on penny auctions
Profitable Until Deemed Illegal
Penny Auctions: They're Gambling

Answer 10

Open source?

Answer 11

This is a matter of trust and so is a social, not technical issue.

Even if you open-sourced the code and/or had an information theoretical proof, how many of your customers would understand it?

In situations like this, many companies rely on a the word of a trusted third party who has inspected the company's operations. The third party stakes its reputation on its public statement that the company is doing business correctly.