love the site but...........

[fatgreek1]

Okay so what about, for example, a purchase I made, and on receiving the confirmation email from admin, and the address of the seller. I could have sent off payment, but I waited for sellers contact.

Fine, until the seller sends me a invoice with a completely different address for payment. So I query it with the seller, who had genuinely moved, and had not updated their address with admin.
Where would that come into the scheme of things.

Surely if the seller is listing items they'd remember that they'd moved house and change their details with admin.

If the addresses don't match simple: Deals off

[donkeyote]

Okay so what about, for example, a purchase I made, and on receiving the confirmation email from admin, and the address of the seller. I could have sent off payment, but I waited for sellers contact.

Fine, until the seller sends me a invoice with a completely different address for payment. So I query it with the seller, who had genuinely moved, and had not updated their address with admin.
Where would that come into the scheme of things.

It wouldn't matter. If you move, you obviously have to let Ebid know, and complete the confirmation process again!

Two people have brought up cases which are only going to happen less than 1% of the time - somebody who rents office space for example - Ebid can simply refuse to send confirmation letters to office space, they must go to a residential address, and not to a PO box either.

With confirmation letters, Ebid would become much more reliable and it would get rid of a lot of scammers - how can that be a problem, even if it doesn't stop 100%, if it stops 99%, isn't that a vast improvement?

[donkeyote]

I had a similar confirmation problem with Paypal a few years ago, when UK members couldn't confirm their address with Paypal, because apparently it was beyond their intelligence to send a simple airmail letter to you, with a confirmation code, from the U.S.

Ebid can get a lead on Feepay here, by offering something they don't. Feepay would prefer to just allow people to advertise 'get rich quick' schemes, pirated software, and all the other junk that clogs up their site, than actually do something about it, and they don't care much about scammers, the huge profits they make on Ebay take care of that through buyers' insurance. Whereas Ebid can take a lead and show that they are going to stop virtually all fraudulent transactions from the beginning. (Getting even more people to use Escrow and integrating it with the site would do just that).

[tonymaclennan]

This is how I see it working:
New or current member signs up for confirmation
Ebid computer prints out confirmation letter with their name and address, and a simple confirmation PIN.
Member of Ebid staff puts letter in windowed envelope and posts it.
You charge £1.99 for this option.
Cost of letter print out and envelope and postage - 50p?
Cost of 'envelope stuffer' - £1.00 tops?
(I'll gladly do this job for £1.00 per envelope! I could make £30 an hour!)
Ebid gets 50p extra per sign up.

Member receives their letter and enters confirmation code into their Ebid account.

But to do this they will also need to do the following:
-- Mess with the user database to add fields or even add a new table and add the relationships.
-- Add code to randomly select a confirmation code, store in database, send details to admin computer, for computer to send details to the printer. This alone can have it's very own problems.
-- Program page for code input which would modify DB.
-- Change the layout slighly for user lists, about user listings and other pages to display the ID Confirmation logo. In addition to designing the Logo.
-- Then there is the time they spent posting the letters which could be spent replying to emails.
-- Then I suppose they would receive more emails about letters not received.

Dunno if they have programming skills or use a Third Party, but it would cost a little bit of money if they couldnt do it which would cause an opportunity cost.

[tonymaclennan]

... Other than that, I think Address Verification is a great idea :d

[donkeyote]

But to do this they will also need to do the following:
-- Mess with the user database to add fields or even add a new table and add the relationships.

I don't think that would take more than a few minutes - all the user fields are presumably accessible to them, and should be easy to add to.

- Add code to randomly select a confirmation code, store in database, send details to admin computer, for computer to send details to the printer. This alone can have it's very own problems.

Again, this shouldn't be particularly difficult, as Ebid is already accepting thousands of logins per hour, with no problems at all. What I've suggested is almost child's play compared to everything else the site actually does (i.e. I could put up 1,000 different auctions, etc.etc. and we all have loads of different settings to alter in My Ebid).

-- Program page for code input which would modify DB.

True, but again, it's very basic stuff, I would think.

-- Change the layout slighly for user lists, about user listings and other pages to display the ID Confirmation logo. In addition to designing the Logo.

Perfectly true, but it would be well worth it for the increase in sales we all get!

-- Then there is the time they spent posting the letters which could be spent replying to emails.

But I would have thought they could pay somebody to fill the envelopes, I costed it out above - I'll do it happily for 50p an envelope!

-- Then I suppose they would receive more emails about letters not received.

Yes, but not as many as they currently get about scammers who are ruining Ebid for the rest of us.

Dunno if they have programming skills or use a Third Party, but it would cost a little bit of money if they couldnt do it which would cause an opportunity cost.

But I think it would happily pay for itself over the first few weeks - most if not all of the regular users of Ebid would probably sign up and that would bring in a few thousand pounds immediately, we'd then all be more 'legit' in the eyes of potential buyers, and we'd all make more sales, the scammers would have less chance of getting away with it, and we'd all be happy!