Self Sovereign Reputation Will Change How We Buy & Sell Online

What happens when huge marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy no longer own your selling reputation?

Seller reputation is one of the most important factors that a buyer considers when purchasing on marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy. Buyers will often pay higher prices from a seller with better reputation, rather than taking a risk with lower prices from a low reputation seller. As a result, sellers work extremely hard to maintain pristine seller reputation through great customer service, fast shipping, and quality products.

The marketplace benefits most from your hard work.

Seller reputation may sound like reputation that belongs to the seller, but it’s actually the marketplace that owns all of this data. Marketplaces have the power to do things like modify your reputation, censor or otherwise filter out your feedback, and most importantly they are able to charge extremely high fees (20–30% in some cases) because they own it and you are now locked in. The only way for sellers to use and benefit from this hard earned reputation is to continue selling on that marketplace.

Enter self sovereign seller reputation.

Self sovereign reputation is the idea that an individual or entity can maintain full authority over its own reputation. Specifically, we are talking about reputation that is decentralized via blockchain technology. For seller reputation, this means that sellers can use and build up that reputation no matter where they are selling. When designed correctly, buyers should still have full control over the content of each individual feedback rating, and feedback should only be tied to a verified transaction. This way the system continues to incentivize sellers to work hard on customer service, fulfillment, and quality… but it allows the seller to be the main beneficiary of all this hard work. The data is completely free from any centralized party or marketplace.

Self sovereign reputation frees sellers from the confines of any specific centralized or decentralized marketplace, and allows them to sell on any platform they want, such as:

Managed Online Marketplaces

• Self sovereign reputation can be used on huge marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy. In this case, the marketplace would still own a limited copy of your reputation for sales that occur on that platform, but sellers will now own their entire reputation history, including sales from every other platform. This only makes a seller MORE trustworthy in the eyes of buyers. It also makes sure you can branch out from that marketplace at any point if you choose to.

Classifieds Style Online Marketplaces

• Marketplaces such as Craigslist, OLX, and Facebook Marketplace are amazing because they have extremely wide reach and are free to use. No transaction or listing fees in most cases. However, they all suffer from a single problem… you have no idea who you are buying from. Self sovereign seller reputation is a natural fit on these marketplace and would be a huge step in making them more trustworthy and a much more viable place to sell. Imagine taking your hundreds of positive feedback ratings and using them to sell on Craigslist or OLX. You can now reach a much wider audience, all while paying 0 transaction fees.

Social Media

• People don’t usually associate social media (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc) with buying and selling, but self sovereign reputation has the power to change that. With decentralized seller reputation, you can turn any platform that can host images and give you large distribution into your own marketplace platform. Imagine building an audience on Instagram for your handmade jewelry or followers on Twitter for your collection of vintage toys and selling on there for free. Sellers will be in complete control of where they post their items for sale, because their reputation is viewable and usable everywhere.

Decentralized Marketplaces

• Fully decentralized marketplaces aren’t quite here yet, but they are coming soon! One of the best examples of a decentralized marketplace is Open Bazaar, which is a distributed marketplace that uses Bitcoin for payments. As more of these marketplaces pop up, selling reputation will need to be decentralized as well, so it can be shared across all marketplaces. A decentralized marketplace that has its own reputation system that only works on that marketplace doesn’t make much sense.

Offline Marketplaces / Farmer’s Markets / Flea Markets

• Self sovereign reputation works extremely well in offline situations as well. Next time you are shopping at a farmer’s market, you may be able to scan a QR code that is displayed prominently by each vendor. This will allow you to check on their reputation or see what others think about the quality of their goods before you pay them directly, possibly using that same QR code. The vendor could then use this reputation across any other marketplaces they choose, both offline and online.

Services Marketplaces

• Reputation is extremely important in the services business, but most large service platforms don’t let you transfer your reputation out. They of course want to keep you locked into the platform for business reasons, but in some cases the platform has too much control and can censor or filter out your reputation for reasons outside of your control. Self sovereign reputation assures that you are in complete control of your reputation as a service provider and allows you to choose any platform or marketplace to sell or list your services.

Our vision for self sovereign reputation and peer-to-peer transactions

After running the Listia p2p marketplace for over 9 years, we realized that the problems we were tying to solve could be generalized across all types of marketplaces. So, building on those years of experience and learning from over 100M items traded on Listia, we built a transaction system that can be used on any marketplace, called Ink Protocol.

Ink Protocol is a blockchain-based peer-to-peer transaction system that includes self sovereign reputation, decentralized escrow, and dispute resolution. The system allows buyers and sellers to transact in a secure and trustworthy way, without the need for any centralized third parties. Buyers get piece of mind, and sellers get transferable reputation that frees them from the confines of centralized marketplaces… ultimately putting more of that hard earned money into their own pocket.

Ink Protocol is already live on Listia with over 1M items listed to date. You can also use it outside of Listia on any p2p transaction.

For More Information on Ink Protocol

Ink Protocol is a decentralized reputation and payment protocol looking to bring transferable reputation to P2P marketplaces. It is live on the Listia platform and plans to expand to other P2P marketplaces where lack of reputation is a major driver for centralization.

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