Let’s face it, buying things online can always be a bit of a risk. There’s fraud everywhere, scammers around every corner, and half the time sites just don’t care. Few ecommerce platforms have, until now, put the effort into keeping things really safe for their users.
This is something that has more or less become part and parcel of doing business transactions on the internet. When dealing with individuals or small companies there is often a sense of worry after you put enter your financial information into an online form, and see the money taken out of your account. You have no sense of security, and you don’t necessarily feel sure you will get what you ordered.
Buy&Sell is making this a problem of the past. Up until recently the technology just wasn’t there. Someone was always going to have to act on faith and just trust the other. Either you were the seller and sent the product before payment was received (rare) or you were the buyer and sent the payment and trusted that the seller would put it in the mail upon reception of the product (more common).
It is to avoid this conundrum that so many people buying and selling things with classified ads insist on meeting in person. It’s much harder to scam someone in a public place! But this is limiting, it means that classified ads are more or less confined to your immediate locality and, well, that doesn’t always cut it.
Luckily Buy&Sell is using blockchain technology as well as their in-house proprietary system to help make these issues problems of the past.
The Solution is the Blockchain
When it comes to fraud prevention, the utilization of the blockchain is crucial. Not only does it do payment tracking and give an honest account of the payment history of the buyer, Buy&Sell uses the blockchain to track the history of items themselves, giving customers a better idea of the history of their used or second-hand products.
The use of cryptocurrency allows for two crucial things: both parties, as well as an arbitrating party, can see, with perfect accuracy, how much money left a wallet and how much entered another. In this way, it is impossible to lie about not having received payment or about having already sent the payment, etc.
This eliminates a major aspect of online sales fraud.
Escrow is the Way to Go
Buy&Sell takes this one step further by using an escrow service that was developed entirely in-house. Escrow services are a key feature to modern online fraud prevention in exchanges. An escrow service or escrow account is a service that holds onto the money of one party in order to give it to another once certain conditions are met. Should those conditions not be met, it will generally be returned to the first party depending on the circumstances.
This is a key facet of fraud prevention. If you buy something online, send the money to Buy&Sell’s escrow service and then the product never shows up, you can get your money back. This makes grab-and-go frauds much harder to execute. But this isn’t one-way protection either, it also protects the seller.
If you want to sell something online, you certainly don’t want to send it on its merry way only to never have a check arrive or get a PayPal payment. With escrow, you can be sure to only send the product once the money has already been committed (even if you yourself don’t yet have it).
Less Fraud, More Opportunity
The combination of the transparency of the blockchain as well as the fiscal security of the built-in escrow system allows for vastly increased faith in both the system and the people with whom you will be doing business.
Since the system is designed to prevent fraud and because the escrow service exists to keep everything separate until the exchange itself is completed, there is no longer a need for face-to-face meetings to exchange goods.
This opens the entire world up to both buyers and sellers, greatly increasing their access to goods and decreasing their exposure to fraud.
This is the power of Buy&Sell.
Images courtesy of Buy&Sell