User review for offline transactions

Sharetribe Go Community Edition
1

Hi everyone,

I see that currently the user review system is available only when the Paypal payment is activated. Are there any plans to make the review system available when the online payments are disabled? If not, would such feature be accepted by the Sharetribe team?

Thanks,
Marius

4 Likes
2

Hi Marius!

We are currently not planning to implement this in the near future.

Unfortunately, this would be a big change. Currently, the whole transaction process (including the review system) is tightly coupled with the payment process. Introducing the review system to the non-monetary transactions would mean some big changes to the code base. And to be honest, the code that needs to be changed is not the prettiest code to work with. I’m not sure we are too interested to accept such a big changes to this part of the code base :neutral_face:

3

Hi Mikko!

Thank you for the reply. Do you recommend any approach for achieving this? I’m thinking maybe a noop payment gateway or changing the existing Paypal one? I’m not familiar with the code so sorry if it’s a dumb question. I’m trying to see if there’s any feasible way to provide users who are not using Paypal payments a way for reviews.

Thanks again,
Marius

1 Like
4

Hey Marius, Mikko,

This is not a dumb question, this is a very relevant point that needs to be addressed asap guys.

Reasons:
-There are a number of members who don’t want to use Paypal.
-Sharetribe allows to create “give away” listings to be created, hence not involving a payment.

So why would we allow only sellers receiving Paypal payments to get reviews from the other members. This is in my opinion a major flaw in the design.

In our situation, where a lot of members give away through our marketplace, this flaw is completely defeating the purpose of our marketplace, as members giving away things through our platform cannot build their reputation by getting reviews!

As Marius suggest, you guys should create a noop payment gateway where the transaction flow is completed without punching out to Paypal.

And one argument that was given to me that it would allow some bad members to artificially create good reviews is not really valid because:

  1. we monitor closely who’s on the marketplace and can easily see a suspicious transaction pattern with some members
  2. you could artificially acquire positive reviews the same way using Paypal by creating low value listings ($1) and completing a lot of low value transactions. It would cost you less than $10 (of commissions) to artificially acquire positive reviews, which is a small investment if your goal is to rip off other members of hundreds of dollars.

So Sharetribe please please please, fix this as soon as you can because Paypal is no longer the hottest payment gateway people are looking for, and the quick fix suggestion above is likely an easier one than allowing other payment gatewas (Stripe, Bitpay, etc.) in the short term.

Trully hope you’ll have some positive news for us… I’m sure Marius and I are not the only one…

Keep up the great work!!

Thanks!

Alan

5

Not a dump question at all. Adding a no-op payment gateway is probably the most feasible way to implement this.

6

Hi Alan,

Thanks for your feedback!

First of all, I can assure you that I’m painfully aware of the things that you mentioned. I do agree that it’s a weak point in the design and I’m very aware of the shortcoming of PayPal.

And I do understand that this is a big problem for marketplaces that are not using payments. However, non-payment marketplaces are not currently on our top priority on our development roadmap. From all the marketplaces we’ve hosted, we’ve seen that the most successful marketplaces are usually the once where providers and customers have a monetary incentive to trade in the marketplace. That’s not always the case, of course. But as a team we need to do hard prioritization decisions everyday, and non-monetary transactions haven’t made to the top of the list.

If your marketplace really needs reviews for non-monetary transactions, I wouldn’t hold my breath and wait for Sharetribe team to implement it.

Maybe you can collaborate with @mcornea, fork the Sharetribe repository and find out a way to add a no-op gateway and that way allow people to give reviews?

7

Hi Mikko,

I hired a freelancer to implement this feature and he sent a PR with it:
https://github.com/sharetribe/sharetribe/pull/2853

Feedback is highly appreciated.

Thanks

4 Likes
8

Hi Mikko,

Any hope to see Marius’ contribution on the hosted version anytime soon. I can’t believe I’m the only one from the hosted model clients who needs to allow its users leave reviews while not allowing paypal payments.

Looking forward to some great news here :smiley:

Have a great weekend

1 Like
9

Thanks for the PR! I added my answer to the Github PR.

1 Like