Today Flippa announced that their users can associate their profile with their LinkedIn profiles to improve their trust ranking. Flippa believes that the number of connections in your LinkedIn profile provides a good indicator of trust. When you associate your Flippa account with your LinkedIn account, your trust rating increased by +1 if you have 0 connections, +2 if you have 1-14 connections and +5 if you have 15 or more connections.
Flippa’s announcement was met by near unanimous dissapointment in the comments on their blog post. Most of the negative commentors feel that those without LinkedIn profiles that will now be forced to create profiles in order to gain a higher trust rating. Others feel that a LinkedIn account does not indicate whether or not a person should be trusted. After all, in my LinkedIn profile, I have connections to professional contacts, who don’t really “know” me as a person and don’t really know whether or not I am trustworthy. As such, I worry that this new system will create false trust in the eyes of buyers.
Moreover, while this development may allow Flippa to be more sure of someone’s identity, as a buyer, this does not really help me in any way. After all, even if I know who a fraudulent seller is, doesn’t mean I can track them down and get satisfaction. What if I buy a website from someone in another country for $500. Am I going to be able to get that money back if the seller scammed me? No, probably not. Adding the LinkedIn account association does nothing to help the buyer out.
Flippa also announced that they will be adding account associations with EBay profiles in the next month or two.
What do you think about about the LinkedIn account associations? Do you think EBay profile association will be better? Leave your comment below.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t like the fact that new users can create reputation easily while it took us many sales to build the trust factor
Ali Hussain´s last blog ..Different Ways Of Implementing Adsense On Your Blog
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Hi Ali, thanks for stopping by. Yeah, I totally agree with you on that front. the actual feedback should be worth more than the fact that they linked their account to Facebook or Linked in.
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