:: Online trust ::

I am an avid long-time eBay member. I love eBay probably partly because I love to shop, partly because it gets me stuff from the U.S.A. without the 2-hour drive. Mostly, though, I eBay because I save money and can trust the people I am buying from. Or so I thought.

A recent auction in which I was the "winner" got me questioning the whole thing a bit.

I live in Canada. Most of the sellers in the categories I frequent are from the U.S.A. I know that shipping costs from Canada to the U.S.A. are not the same as shipping from, say, Canada to Europe. I know the same is true in reverse because I have won my fair share of auctions and paid my share of shipping costs to ship from the U.S.A to Canada.

In this recent auction, I paid $6 shipping for something that cost the seller 89 cents to ship to me, based on the U.S. Post Office postage marker on the bubble envelope... Even if you do include the envelope in the seller’s cost, the total thing probably did not cost this seller more than $1.30 to ship to me. That means that this seller made a nice and easy automatic $4.70 pure profit from me. In U.S. greenbacks too.

What does all of this have to do with online trust?

The entire eBay business model is based on trust. The site and company could not function if the buyers and sellers did not trust one another. Without the trust, the two sides of an auction would not come together.

In eBay, you gauge trustworthiness based on an individual’s “Feedback profile”. If you come across an item you are interested in possibly purchasing, you can check the seller’s feedback profile to see how others have viewed that seller, based on the feedback they have left for him. From browsing the items available for auction to the actual receipt of the item, the entire process of eBay is based on an exchange centered around virtuality; the proof of trustworthiness therefore is essential to the equation.

I had never questioned this concept much or thought much about it in any depth before this transaction. Based on this one transaction, though, I am now thinking about it.

(To preserve the principle of anonymity on eBay and out of respect to the seller, I am not linking here to the auction in question.)

I will spare this space the long list of “he said, she said” details about this auction transaction. Instead, I will just cut to the chase: when I notified the seller that I was unhappy with the transaction’s conclusion and that I felt I had overpaid, the seller was deaf to my words until I notified them that I would leave them negative feedback to alert other Canadians to this seller’s profit-generating shipping costs.

The seller panicked and a flurry of emails ensued in which they tried to convince me to practice that old chestnut “if you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all”. Keeping their supposedly “perfect” eBay feedback record of positive feedbacks intact was ultimately more important to them than actually keeping me happy. This means that they are working for their trust record without working with trust itself.

I say this because if I had gone ahead and posted my negative or neutral feedback, as I was/am sorely wanting to do, I would have “spoiled” this seller’s trust record and this, in turn, could have affected this seller’s ability to convince other Canadians to trust them enough to buy from them in the future. The circle of trust would have been affected, publicly, visibly, openly.

By encouraging me to not post negative or neutral feedback, they are misleading the eBay community into believing that they are trustworthy and have had nothing but positive and happy eBay customers to date. Because I have caved into the seller’s pleas and I have decided not to leave any feedback at all on this somewhat fraudulent transaction, I walk away from this completed auction knowing that this seller is ultimately dishonest and yet I have colluded with them to ensure that the rest of the eBay community remains ignorant of this.

If sites such as eBay depend on the feedback generation of buyers to reassure other buyers that the sellers are trustworthy and that their money is safe with this selling group, what kind of negative subversion have I engaged in by not following suit? What kind of deceitful collusion have I agreed to by not accurately, honestly and openly acknowledging the unsatisfactory practices of this one seller with whom I have done business?

What happens to the virtual circle of trust when it is not fully reflected in its entire truth, bad with good? When the bad and negative are consciously excluded from the feedback circles and records?

How accurate, then, is the online trust mechanisms within eBay and its sister sites?

How does this whole experience translate to the trust aspects of other areas of virtuality?

All questions to ponder further.