Rapleaf is a new feedback and reputation startup that aims to be the open version of eBay feedback. For more information, see my initial profile and launch post. Rapleaf is a product that I strongly endorse and believe in (and I asked for something like this last year in this post).
In what I see as a good sign for Rapleaf, eBay appears to be selectively removing listings from sellers who point to their Rapleaf reputation profiles:
From: auended@ebay.com < auended@ebay.com>
Date: May 16, 2006 5:53 AM
Subject: eBay Listing Removed: Inappropriate Links (=LS &12362 JM10590049)
To: [redacted]@gmail.comDate: Mon, 15 May 2006 14:54:23 PDT
Dear [redacted],
We appreciate that you chose eBay to list the following listing(s):
[redacted]
[redacted]
[redacted]However, your listing was in violation of eBay’s Inappropriate Links policy and has been removed from eBay. We have credited all associated fees to your account and notified eBay users associated with the transaction that it has been cancelled.
We would like to take this opportunity to let you know what part of your listing is not permitted.
Your listing(s) contains the following information:
http://www.rapleaf.com/profile/view/[redacted]
http://www.rapleaf.com/profile/view/[redacted]
http://www.rapleaf.com/profile/view/[redacted]
eBay does have complicated rules for what type of outside links may be included within a post (see policies here). However, these rules are rarely enforced and there are countless examples of policy breaches that do not result in a listing being terminated. For example, see this listing for the sale of search engine DigForIt, which contains numerous third party links and which also clearly violates eBay’s linking policy.
In this case, it seems clear that eBay does not want Rapleaf’s new reputation system encroaching on their territory. And by banning links to Rapleaf, they may have just given them the marketing push that the new startup needed.
See all
Post
“RatingsReviews” space has a huge opportunity. RapLeaf definitely looks promising.
Regards,
Nag @
Startups.in
Maybe Michael.
I Mean, this can also be horrible for Rapleaf.
Rapleaf was created for sites like Ebay. No place for them to go just leaves them to die. And I think this was Ebay’s intention. Yes they may give them publicity by including them in the inappropriate links policy. But, this may give Rapleaf bad publicity. Most of the Ebay users are ….well… stupid. And not web savy. They will see Rapleaf as a possible hackers domain and Ebay did this step to protect their customers.
There is a flipside to this coin. Lets see what happens.
I’m not sure how bad this is for Rapleaf. I was under the impression Rapleaf was designed to be used on sites like Craig’s List, not eBay who already have their own proprietary reputation system.
It’s still pretty interesting that eBay has taken this action. Expected, but still interesting.
I don’t see this as good at all. I’m an eBay user AND a geek (and I’m not stupid). I’ve been ebaying since 1999, I have a large feedback score (for someone who is not a power seller) and my feedback is hugely important to me. And I use feedback scores to decide what I will bid on and who I will allow to bid on my stuff.
I can honestly tell you that a Rapleaf score would mean ZERO to me in eBay. I don’t care about what some 3rd party rep system states about a person on eBay. I want to know what their rep is inside ebay.
Furthermore, how do I know it’s not some dude who set up a Rapleaf account, got 10 of his buddies to write some good stuff and then proceeds to rip me off? I really can’t know how legit it is.
I suppose if someone came on with a rapleaf score of like 100, it would be less likely to be fake, but I still wouldn’t know.
However, ebay’s feedback system is time tested and rock solid. I can go and look and see what the specific problem is. And it is specific to the exact transaction I am wanting to process.
So, no this is not a good thing - but Rapleaf was an odd idea anyway. I don’t see a “general” rep system as a good idea at all. I think it’s too general, it’s too easy to spoof and it’s meaningless without context.
Reputation feedback is a great idea in context. My feeling is Rapleaf will die out slowly. Certainly I could be wrong, but that’s my .02
I certainly did not set up an account on there either to try and help my ebay listings - my ebay feedback is more than satisfactory for that.
Cheers
In Rapleafs case I would sue Ebay. Only for publicity. The guys also should make sure that they have a waterproof patent on their system. Ebay will might go after them.
I agree with Tom - eBays feedback system has been around for long that many many many eBay’ers have generated enough feedback over many years to give them a great reputation.
However, Craigslist needs this much more! Rapleaf would be a great addition to craigslist, and maybe even some other smaller trading sites. I could definitely use it on my site for user ratings.
I still think that Rapleaf has a good product and eBay publicity is great. Hell, any publicity from big companies is good. Afterall, if eBay is to prohibit Rapleaf from listings, it must mean that eBay sees the threat.
Surprised that they would notice something like this. Seems to me that the receiver of the email sent to him/herself.
For some “users” who already use the inbuilt reputation system, this might not be bad at all. But this is good to “rapleaf” in terms of publicity in blogosphere
Startups.in
Seems like a valid thing for eBay to do. Allowing links to other feedback systems dilutes the value of eBay’s system and, ironically, all the linked systems. You’d end up with individual eBay-ers having ratings in eBay, ratings on RapLeaf etc. And that surely cannot help the people who are trying to buy on eBay.
If eBay assesses RapLeaf and believes it to be a suitable alternative then it’s feasible that they could migrate their ratings system to RapLeaf. However this then takes an integral part of eBay’s value outside of eBay, relying on a third party.
I think Craigslist is a definate use for Rapleaf, but also could see it tied in to the mashups currently used with mapping software like Google Earth. A Rapleaf rating for auto mechanics, plumbers, doctors, lawyers, etc in my area would be amazing.
Developers, feel free to use the idea.
From a user experience perspective, as eBay, would you want your users trying to parse out multiple rating systems? How would the average user rate the credibility of each?
EBay’s move is a QC one not a protectionist racket - they want to deliver good transactions, and transactions based on a rating system that eBay can’t guarantee as credible open the door to all sorts of problems.
I agree with Erik (#3.) Ebay’s Feedback system is fine for ebay, and RapLeaf still has plenty of room to get in on pretty much every other site on the web where transactions take place. In addition, RapLeaf could simply allow users like Tom (#4) to store a link to their ebay feedback within their RapLeaf profile. This way, RapLeaf would be able to use Ebay feedback to bolster their data and their users credibility, for free.
eBay’s income depends on the inability of buyers and sellers to connect outside the eBay system. Any links that add identity to an auction listing break that dependency. The reputation management market is much larger than the widget and doodad sellers on eBay. This move by eBay is unlikely to have any effect on any of us targeting the larger market.
I as well agree with Erik,
Rapleaf is just a waste of webspace
Why go to a 3rd party rating-reviewer when the important one is right in front of you when selling on ebay?
RapLeaf won’t last
I think that eBay did makes perfect sense. eBay is already notoriously hard to use if you are new to eBay and the last thing they want to do is make their site more confusing. In addition, they open themselves up to potential scams and fraud. The scammers that try to take advantage of eBay users always go after the weakest link, which is definitely Reapleaf since it has not been battle tested for the past 10 years. The eBay feedback system, however, has.
Additionally, I wouldn’t say eBay is giving them much free pub… it’s Techcrunch that is posting this, which is a pretty niche blog. It doesn’t appear that eBay has made any wide announcement on the issue - I didn’t see one as an eBay user. So they didn’t publicize anything - this blog did.
From what I hear of Craig from craiglist.org - he is pretty loathe to do anything that is not basically his idea/his baby. He basically scoffed at the redesign done for him at SXSW. Don’t look for rapleaf on craigslist, won’t happen. He kind of has his own way of dealing with it seemingly.
Those saying eBay is protecting their product are dead on as well. They are smart and fully within their rights to ban it.
In in the end, I really can’t think of a good use for rapleaf at all.
Michael:
I believe you are correct that Ebay is blocking RapLeaf to protect there market but this is definitely not a good move for RapLeaf because they need to build a critical mass of ratings and users in order to provide meaningful data. Per Tom’s comments a user rating of 10 is not meaningful but user ratings of hundreds or thousands would be. Ebay represents a viral marketing channel that will be difficult for RapLeaf to reproduce anywhere else. Ebay sellers use RapLeaf in order to enhance their credibility and in doing so they advertise RapLeaf’s service to other prospective RapLeaf users, which has a lot of parrallels to classic viral growth stories like Hotmail, ICQ or Skype. Ebay doesn’t want RapLeaf to succeed because seller credibility is what stands between Craigslist breaking out of local transactions into national/international transactions. Without piggybacking on Ebay I can’t see RapLeaf building up a large enough transaction history to be significant in the near term.
-Andrew
There *are* ways to get around this; if RapLeaf wants to work with eBay, they need to make available links that follow third-party listing rules. Or they can contact eBay directly to become an accepted vendor/developer with them. If you wanna play ball with eBay (which our company does on a regular basis) you have to play by eBay’s rules.
There is a really strong case study on eBay’s support of 3rd party systems in PayPal.
If you recall the story, PayPal was all but banned by eBay over and over, especially as they were trying to push their Billpoint system.
But PayPal was persistent and used the volume they created in spite of the eBay ban to muscle their way back in. Perhaps eBay is too big of a castle wall to climb right now. Perhaps RapLeaf can build critical mass elsewhere and attack eBay when they have gained steam.
If anyone is interested in the story, read “PayPal Wars”. It’s a very interesting account of PayPal’s battle with eBay to get in.
makes sense. user buys something from someone with a “high” rapleaf rating, user gets scammed, complains to ebay. rapleaf doesn’t represent ebay transactions so ebay doesn’t want to be liable. ebay’s own feedback system could use some work, but I don’t blame them at all for wanting their users to stick with their feedback system.
for now I’m filing rapleaf in the “decent-but-not-groundbreaking-idea” folder along with the other stuff that won’t work out in practice or gain critical mass.
I agree, this is just the break that rapleaf needed. Now if rapleaf would just create their own auction product they would have ebay right where they want them.
So eBay will pissed of if we finish the Skype addon to put Rapleaf reputation inside Skype. Rapleaf is already checking it out.
Good points re: initial PayPal resistance and the fact that there are many other local/global auction options out there.
There have been many reputation services that have come and gone in the past, Ebay is but one sliver of the reputation pie. What about dating, social networking, local businesses, service reviews, SecondLife, doctors, etc? Most of the data is silo’d and needs to be centralized and mashable.
80% of all eBay communication happens during the last 2 hours of an auction ending. They want to faciliate the transaction with real-time communication and video of products. Rapleaf can easily integrate ratings into Skype by creating an app based on Skype API linked to Rapleaf reputation data.
I’m one more on eBay’s side. Having a second rating system who’s results they can’t verify can harm them. Over the years they’ve added a lot of protection to their ratings system (My first few positives were just from friends who didn’t have to transact with me to give me a +1).
I can see RapLeaf being great for Craigslist and the lot of smaller sites, but I don’t see why a site with it’s own rating system (especially the size of eBay) would want to support a 2nd system.
Keep in mind that there is also an analog for 3rd party rating systems in GeoTrust, BBBOnline, TrustE, etc. Perhaps there is something to be learned there as to how to build “trust” in a trusted seal. Certainly there must be dozens of companies who have tried to create value around their seal and have lost the battle.
This is bad for ebay. Everyone who is saying Rapleaf won’t last are obviously avid ebay users. But are we forgetting that there are a ton of other smaller auction sites and forums that people use to sell things?
This may give people more reason to use those other sites to gain more exposure on the products they are selling. Rapleaf will give them a way to prove their credibility on these lesser known sites that don’t have elaborate feedback systems like Ebay.
I think if Rapleaf keeps growing it will push some customers away from Ebay onto other sites (especially craigslist).
-Brian Balfour
http://www.brianbalfour.com
Rapleaf + Third Voice might equal something of value… but eBay crushes anything that messes with their core. After all folks, eBay is really just a search engine plus a rating system.
I like the idea of a universal rating system, but without a community behind the ratings, it might be too easy to create a bogus “good” score for fraudulent purposes… hence Rapleaf’s need to leech on eBay.
You know, it’s hard out here for a pimp…
i can’t tell if its my browser, but the buttons on their home page are offensive…
other than that, great site!
@Frank Cefalu
Your run of the mill eBay user isn’t necessarily stupid; it’s just that with eBay having such large userbase, that the percentage of stupid users is pretty substantial.
Anybody who work fork over money to buy a grill cheese sandwich that resembles Jesus Christ on it is a f*cking idiot. End of story. Fortunately for RapLeaf, these users aren’t he majority on eBay; rather those who have too much money on their hands.
Hopefully Craigslist won’t be douchebags like eBay.
eBay is not the whole world of potential transactions online.
Don’t think just eBay, think FICO and how that has grown to apply to everything.
So if they can’t be used on E-Bay and E-Bay owns a 25 percent share of Craigslist, then E-Bay might have the power of also blocking them there. If this happens, then Rapleaf would have to visit other E-Commerce powerhouses such as Amazon, Buy.Com, and maybe even become Yahoo Shopping Certified.
Johnny- Ebay may own 25% of Craigslist, but from what I understand they do not have any say in how the company is run.
I dont think its a conscious decision for ebay to lock out RapLeaf … YET . . . eBay has a program that crawls its own listings to take down listings with ANY link going out of eBay. In general the cawler is slow so it doesnt get to all the listings. . . this one just happen to get caught I bet. . .
put up 10 listings. . . I bet only 5-7 will get taken down. . .
it’s fine for eBay to block such a service IF they offered their own [ex-]portable (ie, outside the eBay marketplace) reputation system; however, they don’t.
perhaps short-term smart (tho i doubt it), they’re being long-term stupid. trying to keep merchants captive on the eBay marketplace by not innovating around a core asset (eBay reputation) and enabling portability / new platform opportunity is absolutely idiotic. we fought this battle internally on the PayPal side, and i always thought eBay was being short-sighted by tightly controlling & restricting eBay reputation to a limited arena. i believe eBay is now experiencing some of the repercussions of such narrow-minded decisions with Google and other startup incursions.
this isn’t such a great development for RapLeaf on the eBay platform, but it’s a terrific commercial & PR opportunity for them to promote on every other significant non-eBay platform out there (Craigslist, Google, Yahoo, etc).
(and Auren: if you aren’t drafting a press release right this instant, you should give me a buzz to chat
- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com
(disclaimer: actually, i have nothing to disclaim since i don’t work for eBay anymore… i can say whatever the hell i damn well please
Shouldn’t companies like Rapleaf be developing a partner ecosystem prior to building or as they are building the product? What I mean is, when they launch the beta they should have partners already lined up, someone like Craigslist.
Apparently, the eBay Power Sellers who have replied to this post aren’t aware that there are other sites through which transactions are conducted and that those sites are in dire need of a rating system. Anyone who would say RapLeaf is a waste of space and or time doesn’t understand the big picture. The eBay user feedback system is reliant on a single community, which is very large. RapLeaf can live collectively off of many communities. If I had to choose to have the user base of the eBay community or the combined user base of every other transaction-conducting site on the web, I’ll take the latter.
Rapleaf is correct to take a grassroots approach and try to get links or reputation tiles on sites like eBay, but it would be naive to think that eBay would risk devaluing their own reputation system (a competitive advantage) by enabling external ones to thrive within eBay.
The validity and trust around the eBay system is critical to its success - even more so than PayPal / Billpoint was because it underlies the biggest single problem eBay has - trust.
The feedback system has plenty of other uses that don’t involve sellers on eBay. Professional Services (a la Angie’s List) for example uses the same basic principle.
Keep in mind the Better Business Bureau has been set up to do this same type of “consumer confidence” game for years.
Looks like most of the arguments that are pro-eBay are from people who have really good user ratings. That’s the real problem. You’re fighting for it because you’re stuck in it. Does your eBay reputation apply anywhere but eBay? It’s a closed system.
As Bryan Bartow pointed out without saying it, Rapleaf is interested in the Long Tail.
Hard to say whether Rapleaf is the complete answer, but it’s absolutely a step in the right direction. Our reputations shouldn’t be owned by or limited to eBay.
Look at this flickr slideshow describing how a reputation system could work: http://www.flickr.com/photos/s.....8682/show/
Rapleaf is in fact building an ecosystem of partners. Look at their agreement with Opinity. Opinity and iKarma are the real plays here. Aggregators of personal information, reputations, authentication and trust built on data provided by partner services. E-commerce is the low-hanging fruit of reputation management, there is so much more. Derek, I’m not clear on what reputation management has to with the long tail? Look at that LinkedIn spike!
Sure, at first glance this eBay ban thing seems like a big blow for Rapleaf. But is isn’t. In fact, what makes this announcement or realization shocking is its sheer predictability. Of course eBay feels challenged by the reputation management startup… it is linking buyers and sellers outside of eBay with a system created using the same principles as those which fueled eBay’s success. This tool allows users to buy outside of eBay with far more ease than ever before.
BUT, who cares what eBay thinks. The real target and need for reputation scores is outside of eBay… such as buying on craigslist, but that is not the main target market for Rapleaf’s use (or it shouldn’t be), it is in the use of all those millions and millions of small .com shops that sell us stuff, forcing us to cross our fingers that they will follow through with the sale, and many times goes through the fraud reporting process through our credit card companies when they try to rip us off. If the critical mass adopts Rapleaf as the source for this information, we’ll be able to refer to the site for all non-eBay purchases, especially tiny websites that do not use eBay.
So… screw eBay… Rapleaf lets us buy outside of eBay, that is why they are on the defensive, and that is why we shouldn’t care.
RM
Great website
Ebay feedback works because it’s been validated by the actual money transaction! Rapleaf has got nothing to prove the validity of feedback. Ebay is doing a right thing by banning Rapleaf. It protects non-computer savvy people who might think that Rapleaf feedback is as good as Ebay - which it is not.
Honestly, when I look at the Rapleaf website, I would think it was made by people that just made their first website ever.
The looks are terrible (besides the logo), the HTML coding is even worse and I have already spotted an error in their backend coding.
good web2.0 site
Looks like a non-category specific/context free reputation system that can lead to lots of abuse; How do they plan to monitor this? Also, what prevent a vendor/buyer to create a different email address for different purposes — in that case an email address is not linked to an eBay account/transaction nor to a paypal account so I bet you’ll see tons of email address with one feedback:) Finally, I wonder why they did not use tags (very web 2.0) as part of their offering. Does anyone know?
http://www.heatware.com has been doing this for a long time now…
Never rely on other platforms if you want your platform to be a success. Good for eBay! Take that!
“And by banning links to Rapleaf, they may have just given them the marketing push that the new startup needed”
Uh. OK…
Except that ebay is automatically the largest market for a rapleaf style service and ebay just killed it for them. So, this is what we call he “huge setback” not a “marketing push.” This is going to do nothing but hurt rapleaf. FYI, I’m glad rapleaf got the smack, ebay’s rating system is great as it is, and rapleaf can try to sell their crap to someone else.
This is SILLY. ebay should buy them out. ASAP.
it seems to me ebay isn’t understanding web 2.0 trends.
if ebay took their ratings outside of their own site they would have a HUGE asset. Maybe they have planned already in mind and that’s why they are blocking rapleaf…