More than 68,000 people in the UK use eBay as their primary or secondary source of income. Many businesses use it as their online shop front. And with more than 15m customers in this country and 233m worldwide, it’s no surprise.
Most of the people who use eBay for business – whether they are a sole trader or a multinational – have a good experience. But with so many users and such a big market, it isn’t surprising that there are bad guys out there who try to take advantage. In this as in other ways, eBay reflects the real world.
However, we take the problem very seriously. We have over 2,000 people worldwide working in our Trust & Safety teams. We haven’t always been very good at telling people what we were doing. So, this guest post on GetSafeOnline.org’s blog gives me a chance to take you behind the scenes and tell you what we’ve been up to:
- We recently revamped our UK Safety Centre, providing more relevant information on how to trade safely on eBay, written in a simple, easy-to-understand way.
- We are creating Seller Standards criteria which will help sellers understand the standards our buyers expect from them. We are already taking action against the sellers who create the most bad experiences for our buyers.
- We recently updated the Feedback mechanism so that buyers can rate sellers on things like communication, shipping price and responsiveness. This will reward responsible sellers and encourage the others to meet eBay’s higher seller standards. It also helps buyers make more informed buying decisions based on the more detailed feedback from past buyers.
- We have a team dedicated to preventing phishing (criminals using fake emails to get personal details). Every time someone reports a fake email to spoof@ebay.co.uk, eBay follows up on the report to get the related fake website shutdown asap. Typically, they take down 80 percent of fake sites within 24 hours. They also constantly update the Account Guard functionality in the eBay Toolbar with the latest known fake websites. They catch over 90 percent of hijacked user accounts before the bad guys can actually buy or sell anything..
- We also have a global team who work closely with Law Enforcement around the world, helping with their investigations and bringing many criminals to justice every year.
Despite this work, most of it unpublicised, many users blame eBay when something goes wrong. Of course we have a massive responsibility to keep our Community of users safe, but those users have to take some responsibility of their own to protect themselves too. 99 percent of the time, when someone has a bad experience on the internet, it’s because they used a weak password, or didn’t have up-to-date security software, or hadn’t taken the time to educate themselves on the risks. This is why eBay supports GetSafeOnline.org so strongly – we want everyone to enjoy the internet and to enjoy it safely.
We work hard to make eBay a fun and safe place to do business. We can teach you to buy and sell safely on eBay. GetSafeOnline.org can help you enjoy the whole internet safely and easily.
