People are mentioning the need for reviews in such a marketplace. I present one possible solution:
> Users pay some fee to leave reviews. the more they pay the more the review is weighted.
> Buyers can rate the reviews on how helpful they are.
> A small transaction fee is collected from every transaction and distributed to reviewers proportionate to how many votes their each of their reviews has gotten.
I imagine this would prevent review spam, and reward people who post good reviews. In fact it could even support a class of professional reviewers making a living off of reviewing sellers and products.
This is incredibly open to abuse by both vendors and their competitors. A rater's "realness" is probably much better judged by other measures of marketplace activity or simply equal weighting than by their willingness to pay to bias the ranking of a particular review. I'd tend to defer to what's worked in other (semi) anonymous markets -- it's pretty easy to tell when someone is real or not based on their activity patterns.
A better policy is probably to keep raw information available and let people parse it in different ways, rather than baking in a risky and probably fragile system we hope will work.
> Users pay some fee to leave reviews. the more they pay the more the review is weighted.
> Buyers can rate the reviews on how helpful they are.
> A small transaction fee is collected from every transaction and distributed to reviewers proportionate to how many votes their each of their reviews has gotten.
I imagine this would prevent review spam, and reward people who post good reviews. In fact it could even support a class of professional reviewers making a living off of reviewing sellers and products.