eBay 2002 Annual Report Download - page 12

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Other Services
Customer Support
We devote signiÑcant resources to providing personalized, accurate and timely support services to our
community of users. Buyers and sellers can contact us through a variety of means, including email, text
chat and an expanding phone capability. We are focusing our resources on expanding our accessibility and
capacity, increasing our category speciÑc support, extending our online self-help features, and improving
our systems and processes to enable us to provide the most eÇcient and eÅective support possible.
Value-Added Services
We provide a variety of ""pre-trade'' and ""post-trade'' services to enhance the user experience and
make trading faster, easier, and safer. ""Pre-trade'' services simplify the listing process and include photo
hosting, authentication and seller productivity software. ""Post-trade'' services make transactions easier and
more comfortable to complete, and include payment processing, insurance, vehicle inspections, escrow,
shipping and postage. We currently provide these services directly or through contractual arrangements
with third parties.
Trust and Safety Programs
We have developed a number of programs to make eBay users more comfortable dealing with
unknown trading partners and completing commerce transactions on the Internet.
Feedback Forum
eBay's Feedback Forum encourages every user to provide comments and feedback on other eBay
users with whom he or she interacts and enables every user to view other users' proÑles that include
feedback ratings and incorporate user experiences. Every registered eBay user has a feedback proÑle
containing compliments, criticisms and other comments by users who have conducted business or
interacted with the person. The Feedback Forum requires feedback to be related to speciÑc transactions
and provides an easy tool for users to match transaction numbers with the user names of their trading
partners. This information is recorded in a feedback proÑle that includes a feedback rating for the person
and comments from other eBay users who have interacted with that person over the past seven days, the
past month, the past six months and beyond. Users who develop positive reputations will have a color-
coded star symbols displayed next to their user names to indicate the number of positive feedback ratings
they have received. Before bidding on items listed for sale, eBay users are encouraged to review a seller's
feedback proÑle to check his or her reputation within the eBay community.
The terms of our user agreement prohibit actions that would undermine the integrity of the Feedback
Forum, such as a person's leaving positive feedback about himself or herself through multiple accounts or
leaving multiple negative feedback for others through multiple accounts. The Feedback Forum has several
automated features designed to detect and prevent some forms of abuse. For example, feedback posting
from the same account, positive or negative, cannot aÅect a user's net feedback rating (i.e., the number of
positive postings, less the number of negative postings) by more than one point, no matter how many
comments an individual makes. Also, a user can only leave feedback for completed transactions. Users
who receive a suÇciently negative net feedback rating have their registrations suspended and are unable to
bid on or list items for sale. We believe our Feedback Forum is extremely useful in overcoming initial user
hesitancy when trading over the Internet, as it reduces the anonymity and uncertainty of dealing with an
unknown trading partner.
SafeHarborTM Program
In addition to the Feedback Forum, we oÅer the SafeHarborTM program, which provides guidelines
for trading, provides information to resolve user disputes and responds to reports of misuses of the eBay
service. eBay's SafeHarborTM staÅ investigates users' complaints of possible misuse of the eBay service and
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