Making your online shopping portal safe for users, including merchants and buyers, is an important part of establishing trust in your new online marketplace. When your company has all of the necessary components in place to earn a user's trust and establish itself as a trustworthy platform, you will make more money.
Both buyers and sellers are apprehensive about dealing with one another. Because they are both vital ingredients, they are indeed essential.
Before building trust within the seller-buyer online, we need to understand first why do customers do not trust the online marketplace and build actions from there.
The first is having low confidence in selling. Not the way you sell but the way buyers negatively look at your product. It could be the way you display your product online in poor manner products are unorganized.
Next is providing private information. Lately, there are millions of scams logged on daily basis targeting those poor sites. Lastly, you do not have any contact us page. Customers may lose confidence in your marketplace if they are dissatisfied with your service and criticize it if delivery takes longer than promised.
So how do we give trust to buyers online?
To begin, you'll need a company that fosters trust. What exactly do I mean? Simply put, your business must deliver on its promises. If you advertise excellent customer service, make it a priority to deliver. Maybe it's offering a 24-hour call center or quick email help.
1. Creating Terms and Conditions
When you start building a marketplace, you must first define your terms and conditions. Privacy disclaimers, shipping expectations, refunds, order processing, restrictions of use, any fees, intellectual property, and more should all be considered by marketplace operators. Customers and sellers on your marketplace will have clear instructions to follow if you explain boundaries in your T&C.
Please see the sample on how you can create Terms of Service page: https://guides.yclas.com/#/Content-Add-pages
2. Reviews
When a client may offer public comment online, this is known as a review. Online reviews offer genuine experiences with individuals interested in engaging with the brand themselves, whether it's remarking on a purchased product or their impression of working with someone. Display reviews and testimonials front and center on your marketplace to build transparency and leverage reviews to your benefit.
3. Contact us page
The responsiveness of a marketplace's customer service establishes its reputation. It listens to clients' problems and responds quickly to their complaints. Customers rely on a stable and well-trained staff of agents to develop confidence in the marketplace. If your customer service team is disorganized, it will be ineffective. Systematic processing is ensured by a well-organized crew. Provide your team with tools for resolving client issues. Some methods for assembling the team include using a shared email and saving responses to frequently asked queries.
4. User Verification
Verifying users benefits everyone: demand-side users gain trust, suppliers don't have to worry about fake users, and the platform isn't harmed by users who join solely to take advantage of it. One of the most efficient techniques of establishing trust in service providers and even buyers is to verify them.
Trust in 2026: The Scam Numbers and the Rules Marketplaces Now Follow
Since this article was first written, trust has become a matter of law as well as good practice. Here is what the data shows and what large marketplaces are now required to do. Many of these rules are worth copying even on a small site.
How big the problem is
- The US Federal Trade Commission reported on 10 March 2025 that consumers lost $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, up 25% on 2023, across 2.6 million fraud reports. Online shopping scams were the second most reported category. 38% of the people who reported fraud said they lost money, up from 27% the year before.
- In an FTC Data Spotlight of 27 April 2026, reported losses to scams that started on social media reached $2.1 billion in 2025, about eight times the 2020 figure. More than 40% of the people who lost money to a scam on social media said it started when they ordered something they had seen in an ad. Among 2025 fraud reports that showed a loss, a website or app was the most common contact method (31%), ahead of social media (28%).
A classifieds site where strangers meet is exactly where these scams start. Visible safety measures are a reason for buyers to choose you over an anonymous group post.
What the law now expects
- United States – INFORM Consumers Act (in force since 27 June 2023, FTC guidance). Online marketplaces must collect and verify, within 10 days, the bank, tax ID and contact details of "high-volume" sellers. These are sellers with 200 or more sales and $5,000 or more in gross revenue on the marketplace in any continuous 12-month period in the last 24 months. For sellers with $20,000 or more a year, the seller's name, address and contact details must be shown to buyers. Product listings must also give buyers a clear way to report suspicious conduct. The FTC lists civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation (as of January 2025).
- European Union – Digital Services Act. Article 30 requires platforms that let consumers buy from traders to collect each trader's name, address, phone, email, ID, payment account and trade-register number. They must make best efforts to check it before the trader can sell. Micro and small enterprises are exempt from these duties (Article 29), unless they are designated a very large online platform.
Whether either law applies to your site depends on what you sell, where and how much. Ask a lawyer before you assume you're exempt.
A practical checklist for small marketplaces
- Add a "report this listing" route and a visible contact page, and answer reports quickly.
- Ask business sellers (dealers, agents, shops) for a company name and address, and show them on their profile.
- Publish safety tips: meet in public, never pay by bank transfer or crypto to strangers, and be wary of anyone who wants to move the chat off the site.
- Hold new users' first listings for approval, and block disposable email domains.
On Yclas, the moderation queue, reCAPTCHA, Akismet, blocklists, blocked email domains, and seller ratings cover most of this list. See the features page.
5. CURATE your content carefully.
To be more particular, you must carefully and properly curate your supply. Content curating is a typical technique for almost all major markets, and it's done to maximize the platform's appeal to users. True, the odd "questionable" listing can still be found on some of these larger platforms, such as Airbnb, but they usually only appear after some digging!
What are you waiting for? Let's start creating your online site and create trust in your marketplace. Join our growing users and start your free trial now at https://yclas.com/
