[wbharding]

Bonanza.com (the site I've been building for about four years now) has become one of the largest non-eBay marketplaces by scooping up sellers like you & the OP. We're now up to 25,000 active sellers and 4 million listings by virtue of having seller-friendly policies.

Admittedly, there is enough gray area in marketplace transactions where determining "right and wrong" can sometimes prove difficult. But I like to think that we start from a neutral POV, rather than the "buyer is always right" mentality that eBay has increasingly gravitated toward.

[callmeed]

You run Bonanza? Cool, I have a bill for you.

2 years ago I caught a lady selling handbags (that she didn't really have) from your site. I caught her because she was having people pay through an account with our service (nextproof.com).

Guess who had to eat the chargeback fees? I did

Guess who had to call other people, inform them the handbag they ordered as a Christmas gift was bogus, then listen to them cry? I did

All that to say, if you (or anyone else) has a successful marketplace, shady folks will swarm to you and you will have no choice but to figure out buyer and seller protection policies.

[mcantor]

Wow. It never occurred to me that when you provide a service like that, someone could use it to literally ruin Christmas.

That is heavy.

[mertd]

Don't make critical purchases from random people on the Internet? We should never blame the victim, nevertheless everyone should be thaught a basic level of "Internet street smarts".

[nym]

You should work with Brian Armstrong to allow sellers / buyers to use bitcoins on the site. The advantage is that bitcoin does not allow chargebacks. Their interface is very close to PayPal, and makes it much easier to get started with.

http://coinbase.com/

[pseudonym]

Don't you think that "no buyer protection" is just heading too far in the opposite direction?

Especially with callmeed's post[1] above...

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730281

[btilly]

With bitcoin you can do some surprisingly complex things. Such as move money into a fund that the other people can verify are there, which only pays out on a trigger condition.

[rohamg]

An escrow account? :)

[btilly]

Yes, but totally verifiable and automated. Which means less trust than a regular escrow account.

[DrStalker]

What triggers it being paid? Surely that part can't be automated, someone (or combination of someones) has to have power to say pay/don't pay.

[nanodeath]

Where's the best place to learn more about this?

[btilly]

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts would be a starting point.

[propercoil]

it's clean and looks kinda cool..