#i was just gonna buy one secondhand but the seller was out of the country (it seems long term) so i never got it...

[sol-flo]

btw the headdress i mentioned yesterday, a pretty basic affair made from scraps. main body is a poly-cotton jacquard whose biggest dream is fraying into nothingness (and i can't melt the edges bc it burns the cotton), ruffle is cotton twill (there's a line of stitching a little bit away from the edge to keep from fraying entirely), lacing is just a couple of long crochet chains. based on a na+h piece i saw on this blog post ^_^

[majimasleftasscheek]

alright since RGG seems bent on putting merch behind things like UFO catcher shit, here's my crappy how to use a proxy guide lol

gonna be using buyee as an example but most proxies are more or less the same so it's your choice on what to use. I look at fee prices and customer service reviews to decide on my proxies. sorry if it's wordy! but I think I cover the most important bits for general use.

so on the landing page you got all the goobly gook but what you'll mainly be looking at is the stuff in the red box. all the shops are listed there - the ones I mainly use are yahoo! japan auctions and mercari. the other shops are more like regular shopping sites. pretty much all proxies use the same sites as they're just a directory for wherever you wanna shop.

auctions are self explanatory - you bid on things till the time runs out or some auctions offer an immediate buyout price.

mercari is largely a secondhand seller marketplace but you can find companies on there as well.

when I search for stuff, I prefer putting in the actual terms for better accuracy over auto translating. so here I put in ryu ga gotoku (龍が如く). on buyee, I have rgg and dead souls as saved searches so I can just click on them to easily autofill the search bar which is handy.

items will populate and you'll see prices in yen and for me, usd. these are the *listing prices, not the *final price. since I'm using a proxy, there will be additional fees per item I get. also, the currency exchange rate occasionally changes so if something goes up or down in price, that be why.

💥 pls also note prohibited items that proxies cannot ship internationally such as items with flammable fluid which can include perfumes, lighters, etc. other things like alcohol, which may be okay for like 99% of countries is not okay, for example, in the US lol unless you go thru customs paperwork n shit. *ebay is usually where you want to go for prohibited items as those sellers *will go thru the process of filing the proper forms to send such items.

💥 pls be aware of scalpers! I tend to browse multiple pages and multiple listings of the same item to see what the prices typically fall around. if it looks too cheap, be aware of an item's description. if it looks too expensive, it probably is.

let's use this bad boy as an example. the main things you wanna look at on any item is the condition and the photos to be *sure* you are happy with what you're getting. if you see the same photos across listings, be a lil wary. you can see estimated shipping times and the seller's general ratings. always read item explanations if there is one in case the seller makes any notes of defects or other things.

you can add to shopping cart to keep browsing or you can go to the order page to immediately purchase.

so proxies typically have different plans you can choose when you buy items and that adds towards the fees. these can include inspections, insurance, etc of items when they arrive at the proxy warehouse (see your proxy's FAQ for plan descriptions). it's up to you what you deem worth choosing, if at all. for most things, I just go with whatever costs me 0 lol - especially if it's a cheaper item that I really don't feel needs to be inspected or insured, like a plushie or keychain. regardless of plan, you'll have to pay some proxy service fee (here the "buyee service fee"). in the top right, you'll see the total cost of everything. once you're happy, then you pick your form of payment. I usually go with paypal.

you can go to your page and see typical stuff like orders, settings, and the like. there's often specific tabs for certain sites like auctions so you can go there for anything you purchase in that way. the cart is anything you've added but haven't bought.

the orders tab is for anything bought and you may see the status of its shipping to the proxy warehouse which I'll get to in the next bit.

package information is everything that has arrived to the warehouse so here you can see I have 12 items currently waiting to be shipped to me.

user information, pretty basic but do MAKE SURE your addresses and things are 100% correct. it would really suck nuts if you pay out the ass for international shipping and it gets sent to the wrong place.

on the orders tab, you can see the status of the item. it contains important bits like date ordered and order # (I've blotted out mine). order received is *you* paying for the order. order completed is *buyee* paying for the order. shipped means the seller has shipped to buyee's warehouse address and arrived at warehouse is self explanatory.

*sometimes, a seller may cancel an order after you've paid for it and you will be refunded. this is often due to the seller unable to actually send the item for whatever reason or they don't sell to proxies. nothing you can really do about it but I've only had it happen a couple of times in dozens of purchases.

back to the package information tab, here you can see all the packages that have arrived at the warehouse waiting for shipment. proxies will store packages for free for a certain number of days - buyee being 30 while I've seen other go to 45 days, etc. after that time is up, you will be charged for storage per day so be aware of that!

here you can consolidate packages which means putting everything into one shipment instead of going individually. you can see estimated costs of shipping per item which, if you did each item individually, that would be mad expensive. when you consolidate, things can still be pretty pricey but imo better to pay idk 150 bucks in shipping for 10 items instead of 300 bucks for all 10 individually.

💥 shipping is calculated by weight so be aware of that when you buy items - however baseline costs will be the same for lighter items regardless of how much they weigh. baseline costs for me is around 15-30 bucks regardless of what I get. for example, I have a teeny tiny keychain in storage and several figures. the shipping for that keychain is the same cost as the figures so it's only sensible to lump them into one package cuz I ain't paying out the ass to ship 1 keychain lol.

you are free to consolidate what you want and how. if you wanna consolidate some packages to ship now and you wanna do others later, you are free to. just keep in mind your budget and storage time!

proxies also offer services to protectively wrap your packages. if you're concerned about damage, then choose that option when you consolidate. I don't often do it unless what I'm buying can break otherwise all my packages have arrived relatively unharmed.

💥 proxies will consolidate things AS IS so if you have a buncha figures that don't have their boxes, the proxy will put them in a shipping box just as they are, however they received them from the seller. so if the seller only bubble wrapped the figure, it will be sent to you just like that, no additional protection unless you pay for that option.

*consolidation can take some days and you'll be informed when items are ready to ship. at that point, you pay the shipping and that's it! you can choose what type of shipping you wanna go with (such as DHL, EMS, sea mail (if it's available), etc at differing prices and arrival times. pick what's best for you. *note, sea mail is often the cheapest but the slowest (like several months arrival time) and not available to every country (plus you'd want protective packaging for this just in case cuz boat rides be bumpy)

here are some examples of shipping costs for a single one of my items. some of these options will disappear when I consolidate cuz shipping a lil figure is very different from shipping a larger box full of multiple things.

💥 be sure to read EVERYTHING and make sure you know what options you're choosing to make sure it fits your budget and expectations of arrival time.

one more thing proxies can do is order from a number of sites that aren't on the main page. for buyee, you want to go to the other sites information tab and then click "purchase request for other sites."

here you can input the information of whatever site you want to see if the proxy can purchase it for you. this is how I buy things on ebten like the jpn only preorders. if the proxy cannot buy the requested item, they'll let you know.

if they can go thru with the order, they will confirm your payment and it goes thru the same process as any other order.

[cryptiddeer]

Currently banging my head into the wall about people arguing about the new nendoroid packaging and missing the actual issue here beyond collecter preferences

However since this is my house and I can do whatever the fuck I want, I'm gonna talk about it

Goodsmile Company has announced that they are changing their nendoroid packaging, which on its own, is not a big deal

What IS a big deal, is how they're changing it

A plain white cardboard box, with cardboard packaging, with the intention of reducing plastic waste and being more sustainable

Which, on paper, is a good idea! Packaging can be pretty wasteful and expensive, people feel bad throwing away the current packaging, and leaving the figures IN their packaging is actually bad, as they need to "breathe" so the plasticizer doesn't leak

If all doll and toy packaging did this, it would be incredible! So much less waste, less money spent on the packaging itself, which means better prices and better quality toys!!

In practice, this is a TERRIBLE idea, for one very specific reason

Nendoroids, are not dolls. They are luxury collectables, and they have a SEVERE bootleg problem

A problem so severe, that not just the secondhand market is flooded, but the FIRSTHAND MARKET IS TOO

You can't even purchase them from the official goodsmile shop on Amazon, because Amazon has been known to mix inventory, causing bootlegs to be sold by official and reputable sellers, and improper packing, leading to damaged items and boxes

It is so severe, that the nendoroid reddit has an actual guide to purchasing new nendoroids, and heavily recommends against buying used/pre-owned anywhere, as the possibility of bootlegs is simply too high

The easiest way to identify a bootleg nendoroid is by the packaging. There are MULTIPLE different things you need to check for on the box alone, before carefully looking at the figure itself to make sure

This packaging change is going to make this problem much, MUCH WORSE

And for some reason, doll and toy collectors, some of which have outright stated before that they do not personally collect nendoroids, are weighing in on this as if they had anything to do with the conversation

A Japanese figure company changing the packaging of their most popular figure line is not going to affect Mattel, Hasbro, Jaks Pacific, or MGA selling their playline and collectors toys with overdesigned, expensive, inconvenient, and wasteful packaging. They do not care what a company in a different country in a different business are doing with their packaging. It will not affect a doll collector.

Who it WILL affect, is the dedicated community to this figure line, that is already struggling with a horrific bootleg problem, which this packaging change will only make worse, on both the new and secondhand market.

Whether or not you choose to display your collection in or out of the box is a null argument. This is going to actively make a bootleg problem much, MUCH worse than it already is

[gustavowilh]

How eBay Classifieds Solves User Problems with Global Complexities

While users have certain needs that must be met in order for them to successfully engage with the product, how companies approach solving these needs across global markets varies. On top of that, working across markets has its own challenges.

We were excited to host Kacie Wise, Senior UX Researcher, Global Mobile at eBay Classifieds, at our Customer Love Summit. In her talk, Kacie shares the global considerations her team takes into account and goes in-depth into how they approach solving user problems across the world.

Specifically, Kacie’s talk covers:

How to design your mobile experience for trust

Using consumer psychology to supplement research

Different strategies for companies with a global presence

If you prefer to read rather than watch, we’ve included the transcription below the video.

Transcription

Kacie: Okay. Getting my bearings. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk to you about our organization. So, as I mentioned, I am the UX researcher for Global Mobile. I sit on the design team for our group and also on the Global growth team. But you guys all know… Oops, did I do that right? There. Okay. So, you know, eBay, eBay classifieds is part of the eBay family, and that’s who I work with. So eBay classifieds is a C2C classifieds marketplace that focuses specifically in local markets in 11 countries around the world. We have eight brands and we operate in a handful of languages, but we don’t actually operate in the United States so I just wanted to like set the stage. I am part of eBay but I am not eBay. So introducing eBay classifieds.

So let’s talk a little bit about the classifieds space. We’ve all been there. We’ve all been on the buying side of some classifieds product. So we’ve just moved. We’re trying to fill space in our home. We wanna like make it our own. And we find this great patio set that we wanna bring into our place. So we look at all the details and we say, “Okay, like this is gonna fit our space. This is the right price.” We reach out to the seller and we negotiate like the right price for us and a meeting locale. So there’s a lot of moments within this interaction where you’re kind of asking yourself these questions like, one, “Do I have enough information to make the right decision? Am I confident moving forward with this seller based on the conversations that I’m having with them? Do I feel like the price is fair?” Like what are all of those questions that you’re asking yourself in the process?

So you decide on the price and you decide you wanna meet up and you punch in the address and you arrive at the location. And this is the house that you’re buying from. So, you know, and at that moment, this is one of those other decision points. So you are interacting with a stranger. You are going to their home. You are likely bringing a wad of cash, and you’re probably going alone. So what could go wrong? And so from a seller’s experience.

So this was my sexy eco-conscious car. I decided it was time to sell and so I listed it on a favorite classifieds app. And so I took the time to really like provide enough detail in the ad itself so that I could kind of minimize the amount of back and forth with potential buyers. I took a ton of photos because I know that like the more photos that you take, the better likelihood you’ll have selling and so I listed it. And it went great, like within about an hour we had like five hits on the car. And the first one was around, mentioned something about, “Can I send you a money order? I’ll give it to you as soon as my relative gets out of the hospital.” And so we knew that that was scam. And then there were a number of other communications that happened as a result.

So, you know, these are all the questions that are going in my mind as a seller. So do I trust this person that I’m interacting with? Do I believe that they’re who they say they are? I’m getting a series of questions from potential buyers on, you know, what are the additional details? Like some total gearheads that really want to know like the ins and outs of the car itself. Or people that are asking questions about the details of the car when it’s actually in the ad. So there’s, you know, is this person detailed enough to like not waste my time? And these are all the questions that you’re trying to figure out too and like is this person someone that I wanna transact with?

So through those conversations, we had about three people that ended up setting up a meeting with us. Two people never showed, never heard from them. One person ended up did come and she did come to our house, actually to the corner where our house was because we didn’t want to give our actual home address. And she seemed legit. We were, you know, going through all the details. And, you know, she was kind of motioning for her purse as though she was going to like reach out with a wad of cash, so to speak. And she admitted that she didn’t have the money today, that she was waiting for payday and that she would get back to us on Friday. Never heard from her.

So you’re thinking about, you know, what is the experience from a classifieds app from both the buyer and the seller experience, it’s really all about trust. So there are moments within both of those journeys that you really have to consider. So this was actually a quote from one of our users on our Canada app Kijiji. “I don’t trust buying on Kijiji.” And really you could like swap out buying with selling. I don’t trust selling on Kijiji. Because it really doesn’t matter what side of the fence you’re on, trust has to happen in order for you to engage on the marketplace. So this is kind of like our core value, like trust within the product itself. So this isn’t a new thing. This isn’t a new thing for any sort of like marketplace app either. But this is like, really, like how can we always measure ourselves against this? How can we minimize the amount of comments that come from our users on this topic?

And it’s not unique to marketplaces. We’ll go through a couple of examples. But trust is really just a human need. So do I believe that the person that I’m speaking to has my best interest in mind? Do I believe that I’m safe? Do I believe that I’m being treated fairly? And so if we think about this in other world, so trust from a retail standpoint means that like I trust that the product that I’m buying is protected. So whether it’s like a return policy Nordstrom, whether it’s the ability to try before you buy at Warby, but you know that there are certain guardrails in place to make sure that you have some freedom essentially to experience their selling process. And then from a share economy standpoint, I wanna trust that the brand that is hosting me is accountable for certain safety concerns or certain trust issues. So whether or not, you know, I’m staying in a stranger’s home or I’m getting in a stranger’s car, I need to know before I enter both of those scenarios that like I trust this person that I’m dealing with.

So trusting the classifieds app is a little bit different. So you think about kind of the core customer journey from like listening to communication to transaction. And when you’re thinking about this too, so research shows that in order to… Trustworthy people are perceived to be similar to ourselves. So and that that’s just like we trust people who have things in common to us. The problem is, is that in classifieds, it’s pretty much anonymous, like historically anonymous practice of buying and selling. So you think about pennysaver, you think about a newspaper. Like classifieds is fairly anonymous until you actually have that moment of transaction. And then so there’s that tension now within like mobile classifieds in that, you know, you’re trying to reduce a certain amount of anonymity, but you also wanna maintain a certain amount of anonymity because of like safety concerns. Like I don’t wanna divulge so much about myself, but I wanna tell enough about myself so that people will trust me and wanna transact with me.

So how do you design for trust? So when we’re talking about designing for trust, you know, obviously, like I’m researcher, so this is something that we do like on an iterative basis and constantly. So I guess that’s repetitive. But, you know, for instance, within the product itself, like what are all those things that could go wrong? So that’s kind of information that we wanna collect. So if you come back to that customer journey, so from a listening standpoint, are there the right amount of photos in this ad to really understand whether or not it’s like high quality? Is the description really clear? Like is the language spelled correctly, down to from a communication standpoint, you know, is a person that I’m transacting with responding to me in a respectful way? Is there are a lot of time that transpires between communications? And then from a transaction standpoint, like is someone showing up on time? Are they bringing the right amount of money? Are they trying to negotiate a price that we’ve already agreed to? And so like, this is what you consider in like where all those moments where we can like really focus on trust.

So there’s also like cultural things to consider. So if we’re talking about designing for trust, like what are all those breakpoints, you also think about well within the product itself and from a global standpoint, what are those differences? So from a cultural standpoint, for instance in Mexico selling secondhand clothing competes with their manufacturing industry or clothing manufacturing industry, and so in some regards selling secondhand clothing is illegal in some ways so there are…like it happens illegally. It doesn’t happen on our marketplace obviously, but knowing that there are these like certain cultural like levels of acceptance of like the second hand economy. In China for instance too like the second hand economy hasn’t really like established itself and so, you know, we have customers in countries where like this actually doesn’t even resonate. So even just from like addressing customer needs, that’s something that has to come into play.

Alternatively, in Canada and this picture is actually from the Netherlands, the second hand economy is live and well. Like in person experiences for second hand connected to digital are huge. This is actually a picture from King’s Day in the Netherlands in Amsterdam where it is the world’s largest flea market. It’s a country holiday, actually, and among all of the other like festivities, like the entire city shuts down and becomes like this huge flea market. So it wouldn’t be surprising to know that within them the Netherlands, the app that we have there, Marktplaats, has like 98% market penetration. Like it’s just like part of the culture in Amsterdam.

So thinking about all of these problems that we’re seeing, like where are those moments where trust breaks down, how do we solve for it? So how do we solve for those problems when like ads aren’t actually showing up correctly, people are trying to sell a car and it’s just this one dark image of a car from the distance? So we’ve started including for markets where like cars have high sell, where goods and services are particularly popular, for instance, bicycles in Amsterdam. We include guidance text within the post flow so that people know that, you know, you have an X percent more likelihood to sell a car in this market if you provide this many photos and provide this many angles. So like thinking about like, how do we build trust from a post-folk experience in order to help sellers sell their stuff.

We also included ratings and reviews, which is not uncommon to like, you know, an Airbnb or what have you. But, you know, this is not solving like the problem. Like just launching ratings isn’t going to solve this trust problem because everybody has these different ideas of what trust means to them. But it’s the combination of all these things. So it’s kind of like this grab bag, picking and choosing to see we’re gonna include all of these things in our app because like combinations A, B, and G are gonna be the things that work for you, but it’ll be different for someone else. So ratings and reviews, it could be just like that quick five-star rating or it could be the drill down where it’s more granular feedback that indicates like why you chose that five-star and what that means from a level of communication. Some people care and some people don’t, and that’s okay. But we need to like solve for like the broad range of needs from a global standpoint, but also just from a trust standpoint as well.

We introduced profiles, which, again, like this whole anonymity piece was brand new for us. Profile pictures, system generated, activity indicators that show basically like stellar stats or buyer stats, how long you’ve been on the product, how many products you’ve sold, how many active listening do you have. So we’re giving everybody like a wide range of options to gauge whether or not they trust transacting with this person. And then also, we’re incorporating CES into our product. So customer effort score. We also have our customer love, and we also have NPS. So really like factoring in like contextual feedback within the customer buyer seller journey so that we can gauge at what moments within the buyer seller journey, where are they working, where are they breaking down to help us really focus and narrow in on like where we should be focusing our work.

And trust doesn’t stop with our customers too. It’s also something that we need to address like organizationally as well. So these are starlings and they kind of form this big moving like glob that happens kind of like synchronously. It’s called a murmuration. And this is just like symbolizing that like it’s one bird that has like a job to do, but fully recognizes that they’re part of like this larger organization, and that they kind of move without really thinking, like they kind of intuit each other’s moves. And so this is kind of like this synergy, this level of working together, this trust also needs to happen from a organizational standpoint.

So what we did from an organizational standpoint we were trying to solve for, like we were, you know, duplicating research across our markets. We were conducting research in different ways across all of our markets as well. So how can we form like more synergies around, you know, collecting all this information on our users? So we kicked off a knowledge management tool that’s shared globally. We’re streamlining our discovery process. And we’re also creating a unified approach to how we conduct and how we report on global research.

So that all makes sense from like, an operational standpoint and from like behind the curtain as we were talking about, but the only reason why that makes sense and creating those like internally operational focused tools is because we’re serving our customers. And so we need to understand and always maintain this level of like, how are we doing from our trust indicators. Where do we need to dial up, where do we need to dial down and then how can we share that information so that we can work in a more streamlined fashion across all of our global markets and share insights and learnings along the way? So, thank you.

Moderator: Okay, so we have one question. “Kacie, what does the decision making process look like when there is a tradeoff between a seller experience and the buyer experience?”

Kacie: Okay. Let me think about that. That’s good.

Moderator: I thought so, too.

Kacie: What is the tradeoff between making a decision on the seller or the buyer experience? I think with any like marketplace environment, like you have a primary audience and so I think it’s really just evaluating like if we were to make a decision based on what audience, what are the implications to the other, are there opportunities for us to make certain compromises? I think…I’m in research so I would wanna do a bunch of testing to figure out like, you know, are there implications that would impact our business overall? Are there implications that would impact our users? So I think it would…like the cop out, it would depend. But certainly, we’re always faced with those decisions on like which direction do we do and making no decision is the wrong decision. And so I think if we can just stay nimble and flexible and like make adjustments along the way, like that’s how we’ll see it through.

Moderator: Awesome. Thank you, Kacie. Let’s give her another round of applause.

The post How eBay Classifieds Solves User Problems with Global Complexities appeared first on Apptentive.

from Blogger http://gustavowilh.blogspot.com/2018/09/how-ebay-classifieds-solves-user.html via IFTTT

[michaelmikkelson]

How eBay Classifieds Solves User Problems with Global Complexities

While users have certain needs that must be met in order for them to successfully engage with the product, how companies approach solving these needs across global markets varies. On top of that, working across markets has its own challenges.

We were excited to host Kacie Wise, Senior UX Researcher, Global Mobile at eBay Classifieds, at our Customer Love Summit. In her talk, Kacie shares the global considerations her team takes into account and goes in-depth into how they approach solving user problems across the world.

Specifically, Kacie’s talk covers:

How to design your mobile experience for trust

Using consumer psychology to supplement research

Different strategies for companies with a global presence

If you prefer to read rather than watch, we’ve included the transcription below the video.

Transcription

Kacie: Okay. Getting my bearings. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk to you about our organization. So, as I mentioned, I am the UX researcher for Global Mobile. I sit on the design team for our group and also on the Global growth team. But you guys all know… Oops, did I do that right? There. Okay. So, you know, eBay, eBay classifieds is part of the eBay family, and that’s who I work with. So eBay classifieds is a C2C classifieds marketplace that focuses specifically in local markets in 11 countries around the world. We have eight brands and we operate in a handful of languages, but we don’t actually operate in the United States so I just wanted to like set the stage. I am part of eBay but I am not eBay. So introducing eBay classifieds.

So let’s talk a little bit about the classifieds space. We’ve all been there. We’ve all been on the buying side of some classifieds product. So we’ve just moved. We’re trying to fill space in our home. We wanna like make it our own. And we find this great patio set that we wanna bring into our place. So we look at all the details and we say, “Okay, like this is gonna fit our space. This is the right price.” We reach out to the seller and we negotiate like the right price for us and a meeting locale. So there’s a lot of moments within this interaction where you’re kind of asking yourself these questions like, one, “Do I have enough information to make the right decision? Am I confident moving forward with this seller based on the conversations that I’m having with them? Do I feel like the price is fair?” Like what are all of those questions that you’re asking yourself in the process?

So you decide on the price and you decide you wanna meet up and you punch in the address and you arrive at the location. And this is the house that you’re buying from. So, you know, and at that moment, this is one of those other decision points. So you are interacting with a stranger. You are going to their home. You are likely bringing a wad of cash, and you’re probably going alone. So what could go wrong? And so from a seller’s experience.

So this was my sexy eco-conscious car. I decided it was time to sell and so I listed it on a favorite classifieds app. And so I took the time to really like provide enough detail in the ad itself so that I could kind of minimize the amount of back and forth with potential buyers. I took a ton of photos because I know that like the more photos that you take, the better likelihood you’ll have selling and so I listed it. And it went great, like within about an hour we had like five hits on the car. And the first one was around, mentioned something about, “Can I send you a money order? I’ll give it to you as soon as my relative gets out of the hospital.” And so we knew that that was scam. And then there were a number of other communications that happened as a result.

So, you know, these are all the questions that are going in my mind as a seller. So do I trust this person that I’m interacting with? Do I believe that they’re who they say they are? I’m getting a series of questions from potential buyers on, you know, what are the additional details? Like some total gearheads that really want to know like the ins and outs of the car itself. Or people that are asking questions about the details of the car when it’s actually in the ad. So there’s, you know, is this person detailed enough to like not waste my time? And these are all the questions that you’re trying to figure out too and like is this person someone that I wanna transact with?

So through those conversations, we had about three people that ended up setting up a meeting with us. Two people never showed, never heard from them. One person ended up did come and she did come to our house, actually to the corner where our house was because we didn’t want to give our actual home address. And she seemed legit. We were, you know, going through all the details. And, you know, she was kind of motioning for her purse as though she was going to like reach out with a wad of cash, so to speak. And she admitted that she didn’t have the money today, that she was waiting for payday and that she would get back to us on Friday. Never heard from her.

So you’re thinking about, you know, what is the experience from a classifieds app from both the buyer and the seller experience, it’s really all about trust. So there are moments within both of those journeys that you really have to consider. So this was actually a quote from one of our users on our Canada app Kijiji. “I don’t trust buying on Kijiji.” And really you could like swap out buying with selling. I don’t trust selling on Kijiji. Because it really doesn’t matter what side of the fence you’re on, trust has to happen in order for you to engage on the marketplace. So this is kind of like our core value, like trust within the product itself. So this isn’t a new thing. This isn’t a new thing for any sort of like marketplace app either. But this is like, really, like how can we always measure ourselves against this? How can we minimize the amount of comments that come from our users on this topic?

And it’s not unique to marketplaces. We’ll go through a couple of examples. But trust is really just a human need. So do I believe that the person that I’m speaking to has my best interest in mind? Do I believe that I’m safe? Do I believe that I’m being treated fairly? And so if we think about this in other world, so trust from a retail standpoint means that like I trust that the product that I’m buying is protected. So whether it’s like a return policy Nordstrom, whether it’s the ability to try before you buy at Warby, but you know that there are certain guardrails in place to make sure that you have some freedom essentially to experience their selling process. And then from a share economy standpoint, I wanna trust that the brand that is hosting me is accountable for certain safety concerns or certain trust issues. So whether or not, you know, I’m staying in a stranger’s home or I’m getting in a stranger’s car, I need to know before I enter both of those scenarios that like I trust this person that I’m dealing with.

So trusting the classifieds app is a little bit different. So you think about kind of the core customer journey from like listening to communication to transaction. And when you’re thinking about this too, so research shows that in order to… Trustworthy people are perceived to be similar to ourselves. So and that that’s just like we trust people who have things in common to us. The problem is, is that in classifieds, it’s pretty much anonymous, like historically anonymous practice of buying and selling. So you think about pennysaver, you think about a newspaper. Like classifieds is fairly anonymous until you actually have that moment of transaction. And then so there’s that tension now within like mobile classifieds in that, you know, you’re trying to reduce a certain amount of anonymity, but you also wanna maintain a certain amount of anonymity because of like safety concerns. Like I don’t wanna divulge so much about myself, but I wanna tell enough about myself so that people will trust me and wanna transact with me.

So how do you design for trust? So when we’re talking about designing for trust, you know, obviously, like I’m researcher, so this is something that we do like on an iterative basis and constantly. So I guess that’s repetitive. But, you know, for instance, within the product itself, like what are all those things that could go wrong? So that’s kind of information that we wanna collect. So if you come back to that customer journey, so from a listening standpoint, are there the right amount of photos in this ad to really understand whether or not it’s like high quality? Is the description really clear? Like is the language spelled correctly, down to from a communication standpoint, you know, is a person that I’m transacting with responding to me in a respectful way? Is there are a lot of time that transpires between communications? And then from a transaction standpoint, like is someone showing up on time? Are they bringing the right amount of money? Are they trying to negotiate a price that we’ve already agreed to? And so like, this is what you consider in like where all those moments where we can like really focus on trust.

So there’s also like cultural things to consider. So if we’re talking about designing for trust, like what are all those breakpoints, you also think about well within the product itself and from a global standpoint, what are those differences? So from a cultural standpoint, for instance in Mexico selling secondhand clothing competes with their manufacturing industry or clothing manufacturing industry, and so in some regards selling secondhand clothing is illegal in some ways so there are…like it happens illegally. It doesn’t happen on our marketplace obviously, but knowing that there are these like certain cultural like levels of acceptance of like the second hand economy. In China for instance too like the second hand economy hasn’t really like established itself and so, you know, we have customers in countries where like this actually doesn’t even resonate. So even just from like addressing customer needs, that’s something that has to come into play.

Alternatively, in Canada and this picture is actually from the Netherlands, the second hand economy is live and well. Like in person experiences for second hand connected to digital are huge. This is actually a picture from King’s Day in the Netherlands in Amsterdam where it is the world’s largest flea market. It’s a country holiday, actually, and among all of the other like festivities, like the entire city shuts down and becomes like this huge flea market. So it wouldn’t be surprising to know that within them the Netherlands, the app that we have there, Marktplaats, has like 98% market penetration. Like it’s just like part of the culture in Amsterdam.

So thinking about all of these problems that we’re seeing, like where are those moments where trust breaks down, how do we solve for it? So how do we solve for those problems when like ads aren’t actually showing up correctly, people are trying to sell a car and it’s just this one dark image of a car from the distance? So we’ve started including for markets where like cars have high sell, where goods and services are particularly popular, for instance, bicycles in Amsterdam. We include guidance text within the post flow so that people know that, you know, you have an X percent more likelihood to sell a car in this market if you provide this many photos and provide this many angles. So like thinking about like, how do we build trust from a post-folk experience in order to help sellers sell their stuff.

We also included ratings and reviews, which is not uncommon to like, you know, an Airbnb or what have you. But, you know, this is not solving like the problem. Like just launching ratings isn’t going to solve this trust problem because everybody has these different ideas of what trust means to them. But it’s the combination of all these things. So it’s kind of like this grab bag, picking and choosing to see we’re gonna include all of these things in our app because like combinations A, B, and G are gonna be the things that work for you, but it’ll be different for someone else. So ratings and reviews, it could be just like that quick five-star rating or it could be the drill down where it’s more granular feedback that indicates like why you chose that five-star and what that means from a level of communication. Some people care and some people don’t, and that’s okay. But we need to like solve for like the broad range of needs from a global standpoint, but also just from a trust standpoint as well.

We introduced profiles, which, again, like this whole anonymity piece was brand new for us. Profile pictures, system generated, activity indicators that show basically like stellar stats or buyer stats, how long you’ve been on the product, how many products you’ve sold, how many active listening do you have. So we’re giving everybody like a wide range of options to gauge whether or not they trust transacting with this person. And then also, we’re incorporating CES into our product. So customer effort score. We also have our customer love, and we also have NPS. So really like factoring in like contextual feedback within the customer buyer seller journey so that we can gauge at what moments within the buyer seller journey, where are they working, where are they breaking down to help us really focus and narrow in on like where we should be focusing our work.

And trust doesn’t stop with our customers too. It’s also something that we need to address like organizationally as well. So these are starlings and they kind of form this big moving like glob that happens kind of like synchronously. It’s called a murmuration. And this is just like symbolizing that like it’s one bird that has like a job to do, but fully recognizes that they’re part of like this larger organization, and that they kind of move without really thinking, like they kind of intuit each other’s moves. And so this is kind of like this synergy, this level of working together, this trust also needs to happen from a organizational standpoint.

So what we did from an organizational standpoint we were trying to solve for, like we were, you know, duplicating research across our markets. We were conducting research in different ways across all of our markets as well. So how can we form like more synergies around, you know, collecting all this information on our users? So we kicked off a knowledge management tool that’s shared globally. We’re streamlining our discovery process. And we’re also creating a unified approach to how we conduct and how we report on global research.

So that all makes sense from like, an operational standpoint and from like behind the curtain as we were talking about, but the only reason why that makes sense and creating those like internally operational focused tools is because we’re serving our customers. And so we need to understand and always maintain this level of like, how are we doing from our trust indicators. Where do we need to dial up, where do we need to dial down and then how can we share that information so that we can work in a more streamlined fashion across all of our global markets and share insights and learnings along the way? So, thank you.

Moderator: Okay, so we have one question. “Kacie, what does the decision making process look like when there is a tradeoff between a seller experience and the buyer experience?”

Kacie: Okay. Let me think about that. That’s good.

Moderator: I thought so, too.

Kacie: What is the tradeoff between making a decision on the seller or the buyer experience? I think with any like marketplace environment, like you have a primary audience and so I think it’s really just evaluating like if we were to make a decision based on what audience, what are the implications to the other, are there opportunities for us to make certain compromises? I think…I’m in research so I would wanna do a bunch of testing to figure out like, you know, are there implications that would impact our business overall? Are there implications that would impact our users? So I think it would…like the cop out, it would depend. But certainly, we’re always faced with those decisions on like which direction do we do and making no decision is the wrong decision. And so I think if we can just stay nimble and flexible and like make adjustments along the way, like that’s how we’ll see it through.

Moderator: Awesome. Thank you, Kacie. Let’s give her another round of applause.

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