An attack on paypal

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

At 05:34 PM 6/11/2003 -0700, David Honig wrote:
>When I buy $20 of gas with non-bearer credentials (ie, credit card),
>the vendor does a real-time check on me.  Seems fair/useful to be able
>to do same on them.  I suppose eBay's feedback suffices... if their
>last N "feedbacks" are negative, I might go elsewhere.

we sort of tried that ... however the financial justification sort of fell 
apart. the big thing about BBB is being able to trust some merchant that 
you have absolutely no knowledge about. However, the actual buying patterns 
are extremely skewed ... with well over 80 percent of the transactions 
either repeat or with some organization that there is other avenues of 
trust propagation .... and involving a very small number of very large 
merchants.  The BBB model tends to work with higher value, infrequent 
transaction. The remaining online, merchant market segment not covered via 
other trust processes, tended to represent a small percentage of total 
transactions, spread over a very large population of very small merchants, 
and frequently low value.

eBay is an attempt to provide an alternative delivery for such market 
segment .... and the issue is how does eBay operations break even 
financially on a BBB like offering. The first filter is to quickly catch 
major scamming  operations ... and differentiate between the one-off 
transactions.
--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler    http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm
  


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