eBay-PayPal Community Court, now we know
By Garry HJ | June 18th, 2009 | Category: Editorial, PayPal | 2 comments
Several times last year, and the year before, eBay raised the topic of Community Courts to mediate in feedback dispute resolution cases.
During 2007, on eBay UK, the idea even went as far as to solicit registrations from would-be jurors, particularly amongst PowerSellers. Last year, simultaneous with most of the world getting the new dispute resolution process, eBay India launched a live version of the Community Court system.
At that time BuildaSkill blogged it as essential for the rest of us in cases where buyers refused to retract or amend feedback under the new, “maximum five per 1000 feedback” limit imposed upon sellers appealing what had been said about them.
By chance today, following up on a PayPal blog post regarding opening of the PayPal platform to external developers soon, I stumbled upon where the Community Court system has ended up, and it’s not where you would think.
Lurking in the Beta applications list in the new PayPal Labs website at www.x.com (I wonder how much they paid for a one-character domain name?) is a website plug-in application from PayPal called … Community Court.
The description of the applet states (bold is mine) -
The Community Court enables online groups to resolve their own disputes at very low cost, but with great participant satisfaction.
Members who qualify can register as jurors, and disputants (in the eBay/PayPal case, buyers and sellers) bring their disagreements to the court and present their perspectives (using, for example, text, pictures, video, or other information). Then the case is dynamically assigned to eligible jurors, who weigh in with their opinions.
Once enough jurors have weighed in the decision is communicated to the disputants, and shared with the group administrator, who enforces the outcome
No community likes to tell its members that they’ve ‘lost’ a dispute, because the frustration from the disagreement is often transferred from the other party to the community administrator. The Community Court is a way to bring justice to any online group while at the same time minimizing that frustration and improving engagement.
It then provides a link to view it in action, at ebaycourt.com, which carries the eBay.in logo in the top left corner – the site is in English.
If eBay have set up the Community Court with its own website and domain name, does this mean that the trials on eBay India are nearing completion and it will be rolled globally soon? I hope so.
Regardless of the implications for eBay buyers and sellers, the significance of the PayPal Labs applet is in the emboldened clause above – “at very low cost” – this implies that eBay/PayPal are embarking on a phase of monetising systems they developed within the eBay platform, by leasing them out to external organisations and websites.
Ethically and morally, one then has to ask if having used the eBay commercial platform for unannounced beta testing of a commercial application, and affecting the finances and businesses of many thousands of individuals and firms in the process, should eBay/PayPal then not be seeking to compensate those unknowing beta testers, particularly those whose businesses were shut down by inappropriate feedback from a buying public that eBay failed to educate?
Gaz
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> at http://www.x.com (I wonder how much they paid for
> a one-character domain name?)
PayPal was x.com before it was PayPal.
Presumably they thought the URL valuable enough to keep,
entirely apart from the issue of keeping phishers away from it.
As Michael Caine would say … “Not a lot of people know that”
Thanks for the update Kansan
Gaz