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05-13-2012, 04:01 AM
#6
Artashes is offline Artashes
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Interesting thoughts from both of you.

In my opinion, the idea of a middle-man would only work for digital content such as e-books. When it comes to design, what designer selling his artwork would ever release the source files to a random middle man (unless it is a member of staff) for verification? After all, artwork is a visual object - if you can see it - it exists.

Being a freelancer community, services like coding, designing, SEO services, etc are out of the question for any middle-man to verify or control.

Contracts can be offered and this is something I was thinking about - to offer community members a set of sample contracts they could use to protect themselves (although from experience, established designers and programmers use their own custom agreements that fits their processes). However, even if payment is made up front, nomatch is correct on the argument that scammers use PayPal for scamming purposes. Whether it is performing a chargeback or using stolen credit cars to process payments, etc.

Escrow is also highly limiting in where it can be applied. While applicable for items like domains, designs, it is difficult, expensive and labour intensive to tailor Escow for service providers. I still like the idea very much (an easy built-in escrow tool is possible, monitored by staff), but I wonder why Flippa didn't implement one.

In my view, it is the responsibility of each member to operate within the environment and rules they choose to follow. If someone wants to use Escrow, there are great tools available. If someone wants to write up a contract, the resources are available. My core idea was not based on too much policing (motivated scammers will always walk around the system anyway), but in attraction of quality providers and talented artists, who are already educated enough on how to protect themselves.

Samshelton22, how did you envision exactly for our marketplace to function? What makes a perfect marketplace for You?

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