Developing a Safe and Secure Trading Platform

The company I own is working on developing a platform that allows steam users to securely trade and sell Steam items for cash.

In order to provide a solution to users that prevents scams, we're setting up an automated middleman service, that allows sellers to trade their in-game items to us, and buyers to pay us for the items. Once we've received the items and money from both parties, then we'll hand them over to the right person.

This will thereby eliminate the need for anyone to go first, or even need reputation. This also eliminates any possible chargebacks that buyers can make towards sellers.

We're aware that places like Opskins does this already, however we plan to take things a step further and make it an easier process for both buyers and sellers without having to jump through tons of verification hurdles just to make a sell or purchase.

We plan to offer both Paypal and Bitcoin payment for buyers, as well as Bitcoin and Paypal cashouts for sellers.

For providing this service, we'll charge a 10% service fee to sellers.

Do you think this would be something you would like to see built and would you use it?

Thanks

That last point, security has been problematic on a variety of communities as well, some lost up to $ 10.000,- or some in bitcoins or other valuables. If this would have been something easy to handle by SR, we would have done it.

Also, another commercial party was trying to set something like that up, but Valve wasn't willing to give them exempts or different rules etc to provide them immunity on their accounts/security etc. Such is very hard if not impossible to obtain. As far as we know now, they gave up. They where still in the works but we're still unclear on how that would turn out or what they intended to do without these assurances etc they needed.

I'd like to thank everyone for all the feedback. It's really appreciated and has provided great information and insights for us.

@SilentReaper(SR) and @Mattie! : We couldn't agree more that security is of the utmost importance for a platform like this. The whole idea of it is to be able to "securely" and "safely" trade your items for cash, so this is our #1 focus point during development of the platform. Our developers are extremely knowledgeable, skilled, and experienced in best security practices and implementation.

@Mattie! :We've figured out a way to eliminate chargebacks to sellers as well as ourselves, but still allow them to buy over Paypal. This was something that we took under heavy consideration and spent weeks brainstorming before even considering starting the project. It's a "make it or break it factor". I won't go into details right now about how since we're still under development, but it does allow us to only charge 10% without the worry of losing profits to chargebacks. The main thing we wanted to guarantee is that the seller is at no risk of chargeback or fraud. If anything, we'd rather take the loss than them, so that we can maintain satisfied users.

We think 10% is a fair fee that users will be satisfied with paying. When trading items for cash on their own, there is no fee, however there is the risk of losing 100% of their items value instead of just 10%. I don't think they would go for anything higher though. From the feedback we've received so far, people have been fine with a 10% service fee.

With any business or service, a good reputation is important in order to build trust with your users/customers. If we're able to actually make this work, then scamming people would be stupid on our part since we stand to make a lot more money being legit than stealing a few thousand dollars worth of items.

@Mattie! : Can you elaborate a bit on what you meant by "Valve routinely shuts down trade bots that do not work at anti fraud and ant laundering". What type of anti-fraud and laundering methods does Valve think/recommend bots employ? Many thanks!

@Mattie! : We will not be handling escrow through Paypal. Paypal will simply be our method of paying sellers from our own company bank accounts (we'll optionally offer Bitcoin payouts too).

@Mattie! : Thanks for the information concerning the legal requirements of online escrow, we're taking that into consideration and will look into the escrow laws concerning this. Kudos!

@SilentReaper(SR) : Thanks for the information, can you elaborate a bit on the example you were giving about the commercial party and the exempts/rules/assurances they were seeking from Valve? Thanks

Making profit is great and the goal of every company, however the platform's conception is mainly stemming from the desire to finally have a safe and great way for gamers to cash out their items without a lot of hassle. In fact, we want to make this an absolutely painless, easy, and efficient process. As an avid gamer and consumer myself, I'm honestly just tired of companies that don't put the consumer first. For those that actually try to do is, I spend way more money with them simply because they provide a great service and experience for me. That's what we'd like to do for the Steam community.

1. Routinely shutdown of trade bots by Valve: Various communities/sites had their bots been Trade Banned for trading with hijacked accounts/scammers for laundering. In general they require that they use our API (?!?!) and add additional measures (not aware which exactly) to prevent this from happening. An example is that accounts get limited in "value" with first time trading to them (tf2wh) and only with weekly trading can get higher in value trading with them etc. Warehouse got abused by scammers for they offloaded their items to warehouse, got their trade ban, waited their trade ban out and then retrieved those items again etc...
   
2. PayPal Escrow: PayPal sees any escrow form as colliding with their rules afaik. But I'm not aware how you are covering the risks with this.
   
3. Those examples I gave where of 2 different cases. We where never made aware on what assurances they asked from Valve. I'll ask the admin that was keeping tabs to respond with whatever he can share on that ( @Penguin The Fluffy ) . The Bitcoins case was that the website security was flawed, and the abuser was able to make repeat payments with the bitcoin interface to himself, and the owner only could take it down and repair the website. The problem there was that the bitcoin account had way too much value that was "live accessible". I do believe he split the wallet up, one in a wallet only accessible manually by the owner, and a wallet with a "acceptable" amount of bitcoins that could be risked (separation of risks). One other case, a big time trader used his company PayPal to trade, but various accounts that he traded (unknowingly) with scammer alts or fence accounts etc caused his PayPal account to be shut down. He had at that point about 15k in the account, and could only get his money back after 9 months, and they told him literally: The account will stay disabled, but he was welcome to create a new account meanwhile and keep using that after the account was fully closed....

We've encountered all kinds of attempts in the escrow, so far none where keeping afloat, most where fraudulent of nature. PayPal is the worst party in this, don't keep any significant sums on there that would be problematic to lose access to.

Hey DeadShot,

I was a seller at TF2 Shop a couple years or so ago so ago and the system always seemed to present issues, at this point in time it's currently down. If you can have a smooth and operation system that will be great for everyone involved but if not it could be painful.

I don't know what you have planned regarding support but you need to have a solid support system, tf2shop was just 10 or so sellers and there was a support forum for issues (missing items, missing payment, issues with mis aligned items, issues we never expected or considered will always pop up) they feel behind which led to me leaving. Even if your system is 100 percent operational Steams isn't and when they have an issue it could create issues for you. Also consider some users are new to it and will have questions during and post checkout, TF2shop pretty much left them high and dry at times which would have cost them repeat customers.

"In general they require that they use our API"???

How is it that CSGOSKINS remains operational if this is the case?

https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/35da06/steamrep_has_issues_but_you_fail_to_consider_the/

I'll quote:

Thanks for the feedback. Our goal overall is to have a system that puts users first. We want to provide an amazing experience to users, that will make them happy repeat users.

One thing that I notice with a lot of Steam related websites is that they lack a lot of information. It's like you basically have to have a friend that uses it already explain it to you, or spend a lot of time on the site just working it out as you go along. I really hate that, so it's something we're looking to change with our platform. We'll likely have a in-depth FAQ in addition to walking users through how to get started and what to do. Step by Step procedure with the option to skip that walkthroughs for those that don't want/need them.

What type of support system do you think is a good idea to implement?

Thanks

One that makes it easy to understand what the different ways to use the site are while there. We have a whole bunch of guides in a subforum here, but the experience is that we still have to link the guides to them anyhow. They rather just post and ask then go looking for their answer or even search.

I guess it really depends on what functionality the system has to offer. On a side note I worked as a process manager for Australia's largest ISP for 6 years where my main role was to write up processes for complex tasks + I think i know a lot about TF2 so i could probably help with this

Some suggestions off the top of my head will be:

- Sign up process
- Feature list
- If required: How to add a bot
- How to list an item for sale
- How to edit an item for sale
- How to remove an item
- If possible, how to list multiples of the same item
- If possible, how to edit prices of multiples of the same item
- What to do if there's an issue with a listing
- What to do if there's an issue with a purchase
- How to report a user
- Referral bonus?

Regarding systems, there's different options i guess.

Most common I guess is a forum or ticket based system. Both have pros and cons:

Forum:

Good in a way where everything is out in the open, the community can help answer questions, community can help write guides but it can be a hassle at time when you have please like me with strong options posting. TF2shop had a forum software and yeah people can post their issues with the site there, spam.. troll, ect.

Ticket Based System: This is a more personal level of issue management and the better solution imo but could require more effort and staffing.

User has an issue > Submits a ticket > It gets assigned > Can be reassigned if need be to someone with more expertise with the issue > User gets an email when there's a response > Case gets closed

If there's an outage you could have a notification board on the main page highlighting the affected / any ETA's

IMO that combo is a nice clean approach.

Not sure what your budget is but another option could be a live chat to combo with the above, where people could ask questions and there could be a rep to help answer it. The reps could be community members with trust who are willing to help out.

Notes:

Hidden Content:

**Hidden Content: Content of this hidden block can only be seen by members of (usergroups: Administrative, Moderating).**