Market Place Insurance: Moving to Alpha Stage

A couple months back, I proposed an idea to gauge interest in what is effectively a per-purchase insurance platform. My team received a lot of mixed thoughts, and because it was still so early in conception, there were a lot of good questions on how it would work, and even more 'what if' scenarios. Well, I am on reddit today to do a second round of interest gauging and question answering about the topic, and I am more prepared than ever to help everyone understand what we believe to be the future of marketplace safety. We want to roll out a small vendor set up some time in August if we can get the appropriate support.

To start I'd like to revisit the concept.

 

What is Per-Purchase Insurance?
Per-purchase insurance is as it sounds, you only pay for our service when you make a purchase, there is no subscription fee. The way it works is like this: your favorite vendors partner with us, they allow us to post their products on marketplaces with a premium already attached. You then would make a purchase with us using the appropriate vendor's key to send shipping information. Finally, we make the same purchase on the vendor's page, pasting that encrypted shipping information that we can not see. Here's the best part, we ask you to never finalize early with us. What we mean by that is simple, if no one finalizes early we can not steal your money.

 

What does the Insurance cover?
This is the hardest question to answer, because the process is very dynamic. Initially we can only cover exit scams, because exit scams are proven. We can easily send out a purchase like a probe, if the probe doesn't return then the exit scam proves to be true.

We create what we call profiles. There are vendor profiles and consumer profiles. We collect information based on order volume, order prices, and feedback. We then use this information to establish reasonable trust of both vendors and consumers.

The more you use our service, the more likely we will be able to trust any claim that is not an exit scam. There is no hard start to this type of insurance, meaning we will not announce whether or not you are eligible for a claim, because that is essentially leaving money on the table. You have to understand that in this instance keeping you unaware of what you are entitled to keeps you honest. While we do understand that this leaves us open to lying to the public you should consider this type of insurance as a luxury on top of the exit scam protection. While I have no way to prove to you that we will fulfill these types of claims, when it does happen, which it eventually will, I'm sure the consumer will leave a great review for you to read and maybe you will put a little more faith in us.

Additionally we encourage all customers to place claims in regardless of whether or not they think they will receive any money back, because the issue may be able to be resolved by just reaching out to the vendor, and if not we can at least attach the claim to the vendor's profile so that if it becomes a recurring theme with the vendor, we can consider further action. We do not want consumers to feel as though putting in claims goes against their profile, putting in claims will usually not hurt your ability to put in claims in the future. (obviously if you put a claim in every time you order, then you're just a boy who cries wolf, don't do this.)

For the people who are nervous about data collection, I want to remind you that we do not collect any personal information, we only collect data that is laid out, and metrically useful to deciding whether or not to trust you as a consumer. It is important to use the same username however so we can accumulate the data under that name.

 

Tell me everything
My organization likes to be completely transparent about our operation, even though it gives the possibility of competition, we believe that if we can establish our name and make it out to market first that there is nothing to worry about. So in this section, I will describe to you, in detail, the entirety of how this operation works starting from the consumer end.

Like any other vendor's page we will post everything that you can buy from us with the prices attached and only escrow listings. You would pick the item you want to purchase; using the vendor's key that you can find on their page, you will encrypt the necessary information and send us the encrypted information with your purchase like normal. That's it! All you had to do is now done.

We then receive your order, and use an anonymous buyer's account to make the same purchase with the vendor you selected and use the same encrypted information, which only that vendor can read. We use anonymous accounts so that the vendor does not know the purchase was made through our insurance. Here's an important part, we then Finalize Early with the vendor so that they can get their money right away, and we take the full risk ourselves.

From there everything should be smooth sailing, you get your package, the vendor gets paid, we scrape a little bit for ourselves and everyone is happy.

If; however, you need to place a claim, you do so by messaging us preferably through the purchase page, like you would if you were trying to resolve any issue with a normal vendor. We may ask you some questions, like if you filled out your information correctly for example. From there we will open an investigation, and start a dialogue with the vendor to try to figure out what happened. If a vendor is believed to have exited than we send a probe purchase, if we do not receive our order then the exit is proven and we send 100% of all coins involved back to consumers. The reason we are able to do this is because we work with vendors that we trust.

Additionally we spread the shares of our invested coin over multiple vendors as evenly as possible using numerous tactics to do so. The easiest way to do this is by raising or lowering premium prices by vendor. The reasoning for this is because the more a vendor is used by consumers, the more coin that we invest in them making them more dangerous for us to trust. So we try to persuade our customers to use other vendors by adjusting prices appropriately until our invest coin shares are stabilized. We justify our premiums and any adjustments for 3 reasons:
* Coin fluctuation and volatility while our coin is in escrow
* The imminent possibility of suffering losses
* providing 24 hour customer support cost time and resources

While we do stand to make a profit, we estimate the profit to be comparable to sustainable wages in most first world countries. We are not doing this for the money, we truly do want to establish a safer market place for everyone.

 

Final Thoughts
Now that I have established a fairly comprehensive description of how our system works, let me know what we missed, any concerns, and of course give me all of the questions!

 

Additional Thoughts
Thanks guys for all of the questions! Please be patient while I try to reply all of your comments, I didn't expect this much interest.

To the people who understand and are excited about our business model, we can't wait to get set up to help service all of you!

To the people who didn't understand fully at first, I hope my answers are sufficient to help explain why our platform will help evolve the marketplaces as we know them.

To the people who didn't understand and are flaming, I'll try to address you as well, but you'll have to be a little more patient. I just hope that your favorite vendors don't escrow exclusively through us in the future. ;)


Comments


[17 Points] Devoid_:

This is the dumbest thing ever


[8 Points] izza123:

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[3 Points] manchasingpaper:

It's a good idea on paper I guess but there's just too many resources being used and not a big enough incentive


[3 Points] None:

OR YOU COULD JUST USE MULTI SIG

ffs some of you people make my smh so hard sometimes


[2 Points] tfmeads:

Overall it's not a bad idea, your biggest obstacle is definitely going to be convincing people to trust you, and after that there's no guarantee there's going to be a high volume of people who will pay the premium.


[2 Points] None:

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[2 Points] growawayaccount26:

Here, let me handle that transaction for you. We will do everything we can to make sure you get your package and a complimentary set of bracelets!


[2 Points] UncleRays:

lol please dont waste your time doing this.....


[1 Points] octomarvel:

So you're asking for money to protect people from vendor exit scams?

What about entry scams? Selective scams? Seizures? CDs?

Kinda like buying home insurance that only protects me against fires. I can't imagine what kind of "premium" you're thinking of charging, but there's enough vendors out there to find escrow/MS listings of whatever you're after without the added cost/opsec risk.

It's a creative idea, but unfortuneately a lot of ideas ain't very ideal.

=\


[1 Points] iJustNeedDropsYo:

Who here remembers Passages Malibu?


[1 Points] UncleRays:

No vendors are gonna team up with you brah, they already got enough shit to deal with (not that youd add extra stress on them....but you would...) they dont need you is the thing, customers dont either. you do need them to operate. Just doesn't add up if you ask me


[1 Points] dilirio25:

[deleted]

What is this?


[1 Points] dilirio25:

[deleted]

What is this?


[1 Points] None:

[deleted]


[1 Points] None:

any vendor that does FE only also does selective scams so they won't willingly partner with you cause they know the relationship would be impossible in a matter of time. i think thats the point you are missing.


[1 Points] Here4thedrama:

This idea is good.


[0 Points] None:

This is extremely clever in my opinion. It's not perfect and it doesn't guard against every potential loss. But it's a very cool start. I wish you the best of luck and I hope that this is successful. I'd probably even be a customer of yours.

For example, a very popular US heroin vendor, TheGiftShop, is in the midst of what must be an exit scam right now. This guy was one of three US dope vendors thta could be counted on and, like all dope vendors, was FE only. Like them all, you can only count on them until you can't. And so, making what would be an FE only purchase under escrow for a small premium to be protected when that vendor eventually goes bad, as TGS has done despite nobody believing it was likely or really even a possibility, is a very, very cool idea. For an extra ten or fifteen dollars per purchase to be insulated from vendor exit scams, no matter how established the vendor, is great peace of mind. I wish you much success!