Greetings!
First, allow me to introduce myself- my name is Sarah, I am the new Business and Legal Affairs Deputy at PlayerAuctions.com I come from a legal and business background in the U.S., and have joined the PlayerAuctions team to help modify its policies to make them more transparent and accessible to its Users. As we are now under new management, we are in the process of transitioning the company from a mere technology platform to a customer-centric business. I would really appreciate any community feedback from you guys during this process regarding how we can become a better business.
My friend and colleague, Jacob (PlayerAuctionsPR), has listened to your comments and has escalated the matter to me. I will be helping to address all of your concerns, which will ultimately be used to draft and implement new User-friendly policies for our customers (i.e. you guys) over the coming months. I’ve read through the thread, and would like to individually address as many of your questions that I can at this point in time- both to explain the policies we currently have in place and to describe upcoming changes to them.
1.
Fees for reinstating suspended accounts
First, as Sythe Administrator kindly pointed out, there are major issues with the fee scheme currently in place for reinstating certain suspended accounts. Like 80kalle80 and DivicaSales brought up, a fee of $150 and a deposit of $300 are often requested. I’m going to use a Q&A format to organize my thoughts in addressing this issue.
Q: “What if I dont pay them….” (80kalle80)
A: PlayerAuctions will do nothing if a User whose account is suspended does not pay the $150 fee and $300 deposit. Kmjt, Busta305, and Xier0 were correct when they said that PlayerAuctions cannot impose a fine against a User who has not agreed in advance to pay it. Worst case scenario under the current scheme is that the User’s account will remain suspended.
Q: Will the aforementioned policy be remaining in place?
A: No. As Jacob mentioned, the fee is exorbitant and should not be a blanket policy imposed on all suspended Users. Going forward, we will specifically target certain Buyers/Sellers who abuse the platform (i.e. high volume sellers who consistently cancel orders thereby lowering the quality of our reputation…or Users who solicit private information or off-site trading via messages on PlayerAuctions for malicious reasons). As DivicaSales pointed out, the intended targets of this policy are Buyers/Sellers who pm other Users with the intention of luring them away from our protected trading platform (the concept our ENTIRE business is based on). To alleviate some concerns, I should mention that we only monitor and/or care about communications that occur WITHIN the PlayerAuctions system. As long as there is no on-site solicitation or sharing of private information on our site, what Users do outside of our site is not our concern and there will be no “penalty” (i.e. account suspension and request for deposit/fee). That being said, if someone approaches you on our platform and solicits you for outside communication and then proceeds to scam you…. Well, you took your chances. This is precisely why we forbid the exchange of personal contact info on PA. We’ve had numerous situations where users are lured into providing a skype ID, or an email, and ultimately get served with Phishing emails and get tricked into delivering for fake orders, or downloading Trojans/keyloggers. PlayerAuctions aims to protect you. So help us help you stay safe by obeying the policies.
Q: How are Users supposed to know when/how fees will be levied against them? (fezzbamf and R2Pleasent’s concern, in a nutshell).
A: Once the fee policy is revised, it will be clearly and conspicuously stated on our updated User Agreement and/or its corresponding policies. The goal is to be as transparent as possible so that all parties know exactly what they’re getting into. Our refund policy is up in our FAQ, but we will be revising that as well so that it functions more as intended (to discourage bad seller behavior).
2.
Commission fees charged on cancelled orders
As Richard (Sythe) pointed out, when a contract is breached, the relief sought by the non-breaching party should be reasonably equivalent to the actual damages/loss incurred. This is essentially the reasoning behind the ~10% commission fee levied on Sellers/Buyers who fail to fulfill their contractual obligations with us: any unreasonable breach of our agreement with a given Seller/Buyer results in a loss to us of our commission fee (our actual loss).
An issue arises however when this fee is imposed on a User who is not at fault (i.e. who does not breach his/her contract with us). For instance, TradeFortress said that he was fined for cancelling too many orders even though it was the other trader who had requested the cancellation. This would be an example of where the charge should not and will not be imposed in the future. As with any business, sometimes people get misjudged, and for this reason if you feel you’ve had a fee unfairly levied against you, please PM me directly and I’ll help you out. We are presently working on improving our system to ensure that only Users who have plainly breached their contract with us (i.e. failed to perform their obligations) are charged the commission fee. There is sound legal reasoning behind this policy, however it might be easier to understand from a business standpoint, so I’ll explain thusly:
- Most people who engage in real money trading are accustomed to b2c companies. Not many are familiar with our advanced player to player trading model.
- Due to the aforementioned, when an honest buyer comes to the website, picks an order and successfully pays for it, but the seller returns a “no inventory” response, that buyer might not feel too happy. It’s even worse when the seller delivery guarantee time is 20 minutes, but they ping you asking you to wait for 2 hours. Jacob has told me that being in that situation “sucks” and that he imagines other buyers don’t like that also. What ultimately happens, is the buyer may end up getting fed up with our platform and decide not to purchase. This results in a loss of business to us. Worse yet, this type of seller behavior affects other sellers as well. Is it fair to honest sellers to have to share listing space with dishonest sellers making for sale postings but not actually having any inventory? This results in a loss of sales for honest sellers as well. Therefore, I hope you guys understand that this type of “control” method we are employing is to:
A) help preserve the good performance of the platform,
B) to provide a positive trading experience for buyers and
C) to help reduce customer sales loss to other, honest sellers.
I hope that that was somewhat informative. As we work on these problems, I will likely have updates. Please feel free to contact me here (PlayerAuctionsBD), or email (
[email protected]), and feel free to connect with me as well on linkedIn (
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sarah-styslinger/7b/987/125).
Cheers,
Sarah
