Thanks to Sue at Tamebay.com for reviewing our service and deeming it the most useful of the new feedback-fix she’s looked at over the past few weeks, and “certainly the only one I would consider using” in her article RepXchange: passing on the bad bidders.
Not a bad mark from one of the most prolific and influential eBay bloggers out there! She raises a few concerns that are valid and that we have thought long and hard about.
For example, she’s concerned that when the number of blocked bidders reported to the system grows exponentially (as it is!) it will be hard to find the ‘next problem bidder’ from this list, even with our granular filters.
She is a absolutely right in that – our site is not a crystal ball that can single out offenders before they’ve created havoc on a seller’s auction. All we do is allow sellers to customize a blocked bidder list based on what type of other sellers each blocked bidder was reported by. The logic is that if you can narrow down the pool of blocked bidders (up to 5,000), to the ones that have slighted sellers similar to you, then you’re better off than just picking a random 5,000 blocked bidders. If you want to do better than that, consult a psychic 
That said, we have in our product roadmap considered engaging a statistical expert to mine all our data and correlate that data with the complete eBay history of each blocked bidder and seller to create unique risk profiles for all sellers and blocked bidders. In combination, this will result in a prioritized list of blocked bidders with a unique “probability-for-trouble” score for each seller.
We don’t have $200K to spend to test whether this has any merit, and chances are that eBay may for no reason other than that they don’t like us, decide to shut down the API access we need. So, for now, this is all we can afford to offer you for free for now, folks! However, we are happy to get any suggestions or constructive criticism that will help us further improve the site. If we get a lot of traffic, maybe we can throw up some ads to pay for the enhancements.
As far as the legal issues are concerned, we feel that we’re pretty well covered, but I’m not a lawyer and I’m convinced that if eBay threw their legal weight over us, they’d find a way to pull the plug. However, if any of you out there have legal expertise you want to share with us that may help us keep the service going, should we get in trouble with eBay, please let us know!
May 30th, 2008 at 10:45 am
[…] just a list of blocked bidders that have been collected by various sellers for various reasons. As Sue Bailey has commented in her blog, a bad buyer for one person may not necessarily be a bad buyer for […]