Using content moderation as a trust facilitator

Building trust is one of the key components that facilitate transactions in an online marketplace. From communication channels to identity verification methods, there are many steps marketplace owners can take to build marketplace trust. This article adds a further point of view to the discussion of trust, that of content moderation.

How do you get people to trust your marketplace platform enough to sign up and engage with other users? If you have ever had a discussion or a strategy meeting addressing this question, you are in good company with industry heavyweights such as blablacar, Airbnb, and Gumtree.

According to Rachel Botsman, when it comes to trusting a new online platform, people follow a pattern she calls “climbing the trust stack.” First, potential users need to trust that the idea a platform is facilitating is safe and worth trying. On the second level of the trust stack, they develop confidence in the specific platform. The third level is about using bits of information to decide whether other users on the platform are trustworthy.

If you are a marketplace entrepreneur—or planning to become one—you already know that trust is essential for running a successful marketplace. Most likely you already have a high-level understanding of how to build it.

This article gives you a set of concrete, actionable tips that you can apply straight away to increase trust in your platform and between your users. The more trust there is, the better the user experience your platform provides. This trust built on individual platforms will also create more trust in the idea of online marketplaces and the sharing economy in general.

Applying the tips in this article will positively impact the entire trust stack of your marketplace and our industry.

When you create an online marketplace, you are not just providing a space for your users. You are promising them a platform where they can achieve their own specific goals in a safe environment. Whether that goal is booking a ride, finding people who want to rent studio equipment, or buying and selling pre-owned items, simply advertising a platform that caters to these needs enters you into an unspoken contract with the user.

If you want to succeed and build trust, it is important that you honor this contract every single time your users interact with your site. The tricky part is to define and uphold both the direct promises that this contract entails, as well as the indirect promises your users read into your offering. On top of that, the recurring challenge with two-sided marketplaces plays in as well, meaning you have to cater to two different user groups: customers and providers.

What is more, the promise you make to both user groups, and their unspoken expectations, are likely to differ. In some cases, fulfilling the promise to one group may even risk breaking the promise to the other. But more on this later—let's first look at the expectations and promises that you must fulfill as a marketplace owner.

We will use a marketplace for pre-owned items as an example. Bear in mind that, in case the marketplace deals with rentals or services, a further level of trust-related expectations comes to play. This might require you to include, for instance, rental deposits or product insurance to your services, or add an extra step in the process with ID verification or background checks. Nonetheless, the challenges and solutions listed here will be relevant as well.

Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of what customers likely will expect:

And here is the list for the providers of our example marketplace:

Meeting all these expectations at the same time can be a puzzle, but it is imperative to do so in order to maintain a smooth user experience and to build trust in your platform.

Consider a customer who pays for an item that never arrives, or who receives a counterfeit item instead of the luxury product they thought they bought. Their opinion of the marketplace will naturally be affected. They are very likely to be a lot more cautious the next time they use your site—if there is a next time. In fact, in a study we conducted on online marketplace user behavior, we saw that 54% of users who detected a counterfeit item would be unlikely to return to the site on which they found the listing. This is a clear signal that trust in the platform has been broken.

To safeguard users against buying counterfeit items, you could put measures in place to physically verify the authenticity of each item, as eBay did with their eBay authenticate service. However, this is not viable at scale, and would likely put a cumbersome extra step on providers. This is probably the reason why eBay discontinued the service within a year of its launch.

Apart from the demand on resources, using an authentication tool touches upon the problem mentioned before. To live up to the expectation of customers to get the real thing rather than a fake, you’d have to include something in the listing process that would make it less smooth for the providers to list their wares. This breaks your promise to the providers of a minimal-effort upload and listing experience.

How do you solve this? There are lots of different components that go into solving the full challenge. To stay within our experience and the scope of this article, we will focus on what you can do to solve the trust challenge through content moderation.

To use content moderation in a meaningful way, we need to take a step back and look at the expectations again. Or, more precisely, consider what could stand in the way of fulfilling direct and implied promises.
Let's quickly translate the expectations we listed earlier to potential challenges that we can then solve through content moderation.

If we look at the provider side, challenges and solutions look like this.

As promised, here are four content moderation strategies you can implement straight away to ensure that you keep your promise to your users.

1. Define user expectations and the promises you make. Expectations will differ depending on your platform. On a community site for children, one implied promise will be that you take a strong stance against harassment and inappropriate behavior. A niche marketplace for horse equipment, on the other hand, implies the promise that buyers won't have to look through thousands of listings with guitars. Create a list of all expectations and promises, and build your policies and guidelines based on that list. This is going to be an iterative process because as your marketplace grows, you are likely to come across things you haven't considered.
2. Start researching the main challenges of your specific industry and the scam trends associated with your niche market. Then educate your team. Good moderators/filters who can keep up with scammers are key to creating and maintaining user trust.
3. Define your content moderation approach. Make sure you automate as much as you can, but be cautious, so you don't lose quality. Automation levels increase over time, so don't rush it. Start with areas where you are sure you can achieve high accuracy. It might be helpful to reach out to third-party experts here to not have to take away resources from product development.
4. Decide which KPIs will allow you to ensure that your content moderation process is on track and helps your users to reach their goals. Then make sure you'll be able to measure your marketplace's success by tracking your performance and acting on the insights you gain.

A complete content moderation strategy is, of course, a lot more complex, but if you cover the four points above, you are able to lay the foundation for trust for your platform as well as between the users on it. When you have built this foundation, you have overcome one of the biggest challenges of starting an online marketplace.