A project for ICA

[boker]

Sometimes I dream. Sometimes I dream a lot. Pushed by a few bad buyers lately, I dreamed (or maybe I was half awake) for a solution to help us deal with bad buyers. I'm not sure if that it's a good idea and for sure that there is a lot of place for improvement, but this is the raw plan. Somebody (ICA will suit great) to put up an online database with bad buyers, where everyone can add a review (with prove of transaction) and the details of the buyer, encrypted, to avoid spam and respect privacy. Just 1000 of us, with 10 buyers added in a year, means 10k possible info. The database will look something like this:
I have the phone number/office address/email/ name and other info of a buyer, but I can't know how the buyer will act during the transaction. I go to the database, I fill his email address, for example and if he ever used that email address to buy something and didn't acted as he should have, the seller will find info, like: a buyer, using this email address, on x november 1900, in a transaction with seller xxxxx, has defaulted the payment, payed late, was rude, did not confirmed the transfer and others. All the info about the buyer will be hidden, to protect his privacy, less the info matched by the new seller, searching through the database. Knowing that a seller had made 10 offers for a domain without buying, or defaulted, or try to lie about something, will give the new seller more info about how to deal with him. When there is a bad payer, godaddy/sedo and the rest should ban the buyer, but that almost never happen, because they want him to have the chance to buy again and that we can understand somehow. Using a search database like this, you can choose if you want to deal with him or not. What do you think, it's doable?

 

[biggie]

Hi

depending on where you’re getting sales from, chance of bad encounters are slim

so, other than a trader rating, not worth the trouble

imo….

 

[boker]

Hi

depending on where you’re getting sales from, chance of bad encounters are slim

so, other than a trader rating, not worth the trouble

imo….

Probably is more useful when you have your own marketplace and dealing with your own leads, but it"s useful for godaddy/sedo as well. I had 3 buyers with sedo in the the last few months, one was unresponsive, an it took him 1 month to start the transfer,one, after an expedited tranafer, never replied to me or sedo and the deal was he will pay a discounted price for a fast deal, so it was on purpoae and there are lot"s of other issues. I checked him out, he has 3 other startups, braging how honest he is, for sure he bought other domains before.

 

[nlitenme]

It's an interesting idea.

Other than what @biggie said, a few other quick thoughts that I have are:

Bad actors will change their info, possibly a never ending amount of times, to not let the database affect them.

Current marketplaces probably don't care or they'd be doing this internally already and you wouldn't have the issues that you've had (or at least less of them). Yes it could be better if they had one, central, all-encompassing place to track the info, but we know they won't work together to make that happen.

To make it fair, it would have to go both ways. Buyers should be able to look up sellers too. The marketplaces that don't disclose who the seller is upfront would have to adjust for that.


I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I think it would take more work than it would save.

 

[Vertibox]

While there are ostensibly security measures in place, all over modern society, they are not foolproof and we hear of horror stories all the time of accounts being accessed by criminals, names and details of vulnerable children/children in care being accessed, supposedly hi tech companies having their entire databases stolen, money being stolen from bank accounts, crypto accounts, ID theft and more.

As one doctor told me a few years ago "What we can do for your health is considerably less than what you can do yourself, by taking care of your body, eating right, moving and having balance in your life" (which is the hardest thing to do actually). The medical world can help but it is really a last resort situation and often its drastic action that is required by the time you get to them (serious accidents/emergencies excepted).

The same goes for many things in life.

You have to use your senses and judgment about other people, their behaviour, the signs they emit and to be sensitive to all of that. This is especially so in the anonymous and faceless digital world of strangers transacting with other strangers, and where nefarious and murky characters abound.
You have to be able to discern genuine from not and at accordingly. Discernment is massively underrated and I doubt there is tuition on this. The same goes for gut feeling/intuition, but this can't ever be taught. You have to become sensitive to your body's signals. Once you are, and you listen to your instinct, you will make good judgments and never get hurt because of it.

Things to look out for in the domain name offers scenario.

1. How does an offer come to you?
If through direct email, does the person use a gmail or other anonymous email address?
Is the email address garbage (hevk8873 @ gmail) or is it boastful (supertopguy500 @ gmail)? Both are suspect.

2. What is the content of their emails?
Is it brief or detailed?
Do they know how to write in complete sentences?
Do they use proper punctuation?
Are there gaps between words and punctuation, such as word , next word, or punctuation out of place?
Is their English proper and words spelled correctly, properly capitalised, or not?
Does it look like they just bashed out a message on their phone while in traffic or does it look like they took time to write their email at a desk or some static environment?
What do they actually say in their message? Does what they say indicate a genuine interest in buying your name or does it sound like they are doing you a favour by making an offer?
Search the web for the sender's email address as sometime there is info that can be useful. Plus their name too.
On their name, do they provide their full name in their first email, or do they just give their first name?
Do they provide a phone number? If so, you can search the web and see what comes up. Or search their name and phone number combo.

3. If you get an offer from a landing page or through a marketplace, the above still applies just without visibility of their email address (just to mention that Namepros landers provide the sender's email address and after the email address has been verified).

4. Do they offer an amount close to what you show as your desired amount, if that is shown? If their offer is below what you want to accept, I suggest you ignore the offer. That sends a clear message to the other person.

5. Wait 2-3 days before responding to any offer that interests you.

6. IF you get to the point of agreeing a price and the buyer is ready to make payment, I suggest you use escrow.com for transactions if the marketplace or landers you use don't facilitate a transaction function. Same goes if you are engaging with someone directly with no lander/marketplace.
Escrow.com will confirm the validity of the payment, if it comes through and only after that has happened will they advise you to transfer the name or provide the authorisation code.

7. If the buyer does not send payment or provide a valid reason for payment delay, cancel the transaction at escrow.com or the marketplace you are using and just move on. If you can report the user to the marketplace, then do that.

Once you have experienced several people making offers, you will soon get to ascertain the validity of offers and who it is likely you are dealing with - a charlatan or a genuine person.