Benefits of Marketplace Content Moderation in E-commerce

What is Marketplace Content Moderation?

Shopping is more convenient than ever. With the internet and the additional communication channels it offers, you can shop within the comfort of your couch. This was mainly observed during the quarantine in which people had to rely on online shopping and delivery services in order to get food and other necessities.

Thanks to this convenience for both buyer and seller, e-commerce is steadily growing in value. The e-commerce market according to Forbes will total about $6.3 trillion just this year.

Unfortunately, the advancement of technology comes with a couple of setbacks. Online threats like malware, spam, distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, and identity theft also persist in evolving and causing problems for both sellers and customers.

In order to protect your online marketplace and increase customer satisfaction, marketplace owners are turning to marketplace content moderation.

Why is content moderation important?

Content moderation, simply put, is filtering the content according to a set of guidelines. It is a promise of quality and security for both the buyers and the sellers in an online marketplace. Even something as simple as changing low-quality pictures into high-definition can have a tremendous effect on attracting leads.

While adopting a laissez-faire approach to your marketplace makes transactions faster and easier, your online marketplace will become a playground for malicious people. E-commerce content optimization adds a step in the processes and in your expenses, but your users will have an overall positive experience.

Content moderation comes in five different methods:

• Pre-Moderation

In pre-moderation, submitted content first goes through the moderation process for review. Any content which goes against the guidelines is then deleted or hidden from the users. However, the downside is that it can come off as censoring, especially if the online content moderators are too strict.

• Post-Moderation

In contrary to pre-moderation, post-moderation starts the moderation process after the content is submitted. That way, the users can immediately see their submitted content go live.

• Reactive

Meanwhile, reactive moderation includes your users in the moderation process. They are given the power to flag content that is against the rules or they deem inappropriate. It should however be done in partnership with other methods of moderation as your users might go wild with this function due to their own bias.

• Distributed

Distributed moderation involves a ranking system. The number of positive or negative votes determines whether the content will be visible to the majority of users or not.

• Automated

Vastly different from the other methods, automated moderation makes use of AI in online content moderation. It’s the most sophisticated type of moderation currently available in the industry. Though it’s not perfect, it’s ideal for real-time checking, especially on a wide scale.

E-commerce content moderation is even more of a must as your marketplace grows and gains more traffic. Read on to know further how the service can benefit you.

Increased Trust and Safety for Buyers

When a first-time visitor clicks on your site, you should have two major aims. One is for the visitor to make and finish a transaction. The second is for that visitor to come back. For the latter to happen, you need to gain the buyer’s trust.

Once you gain that trust, it’s a constant work of maintaining and even exceeding their expectations. One bad experience, especially in something as important as finances, can lose their patronage to your brand.

Not every seller is trustworthy. It’s even more difficult to assess that in a C2C scenario as the sellers can easily change their accounts and do their scheme all over again.

If buyers see that your site is compromised with scammers and spam, they are likely to click back. With a decrease in the audience, the sellers would also most likely look for greener pastures.

These are some examples of online threats that can be prevented through moderation:

• Spam

This is not the delicious kind of spam. Computer spam is a very much unwanted and annoying kind of spam. It comes in any form of digital communication, usually sent in bulk and via email.

• Phishing

Akin to fishing, a phisher will lure you into revealing sensitive information by sending emails that copy legitimate documents from reputable companies. A target will be contacted through email, telephone, or SMS.

• Fraud

An unmonitored marketplace is like a free-range playground for malicious people to do all kinds of fraudulent behavior. Some may commit identity fraud in order to fool the victim into trusting their words.

• Malware

Malware, short for malicious software, is any piece of code that can do harm to a user’s online experience. Malware comes in different forms and is usually hidden behind seemingly innocent files. When these files are run, the malware is executed and runs in the background.

• Cyberbullying and Racism

With a chat function, there’s always the chance of some kind of cyberbullying and other toxic behaviors. Some people even spew slurs in the review section of the listings.

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Improved User Experience

As a customer, you want to find the product you’re looking for as fast as possible. After finding it, you would want to check the product description if it matches what you want or need. You also need a clear picture of the product to determine its quality.

It can be frustrating to find no results because the product is mislabeled or does not have enough keywords. It’s even more frustrating to see no additional information in the product description.

Content moderation detects these discrepancies and addresses them. Moderation also helps detect any duplicate content, preventing any confusion for the buyers.

Enhanced Brand Reputation

• Brand reputation, simply put, is how a brand is perceived overall, whether it be by customers, employees, or business partners. Reputation may be fickle, but it is a powerful thing in the business industry. The more positive and stronger your reputation is, the more you are trusted by the people.Reputation absolutely plays a role in a customer’s purchasing decision. They check reviews and find other additional information on the internet before making a decision.  The same goes for word-of-mouth recommendations, especially from someone close to them.

  These are the following content moderation best practices implemented to protect the marketplace against harmful content:

  • Publishing Community Guidelines

  The community guidelines are the first line of protection for your online marketplace. It sets the expectations for all users and serves as the basis for internet content moderators. These rules should be clear and straight to the point, but also accessible.

  • Multilingual Moderation

  Inappropriate content does not only come in English. It is created and published by different people from all around the world. Some even use the language barrier as a way to get past the initial filters and disguise the context of their content.

  Multilingual moderation ensures that these types of content are flagged and deleted.

  • Adding a Report Button

  The moderators cannot catch everything. Whether it’s human or AI moderation, there will always be something that gets past the cracks.

  Adding a report button gives agency to your marketplace users and is also akin to crowdsourcing. It keeps your users engaged and alert of any banned activity. User reports also play a role in refining your moderation as the moderators have an idea of the source and content of potentially emerging user threats.

  • Keyword Filtering

  A keyword filtering system contains a database of banned words or phrases. When the filter detects any of these banned words, the content is flagged and sent to the moderators for review.

  It works better as support for human moderators due to its limitations. One, the database has to be regularly updated and reviewed manually. Two, the filter cannot determine the context of where these words or phrases are used, leading to false flags. Last, it can be easy to get past the filters simply by changing the spelling or the symbols used in the words.

  • Hybrid Moderation

  Hybrid moderation is the combination of human and AI content moderation. That way, each can make up for the other's limitations. The content moderation AI speeds up the process by operating in real-time while the human moderators double-check whether the context of the content is inappropriate or not. In addition, human moderators simply cannot moderate everything on such a large scale.

Competitive Advantage

A moderated marketplace gains more trust from users, leading to a lower bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of customers who click away from a site without making a significant action.

With a lower bounce rate coupled with some SEO keywords, your site can rise in the SEO ranking. A high SEO rank can land your site on the first page or even the first result on the search engine results, giving it higher visibility and more traffic.

Increased Sales and Revenue

Of course, with a higher traffic and excellent service, more customers are likely to come back for another transaction. The number of customers then serves to attract more sellers to your online marketplace, creating more opportunities for lead generation and conversion.

A Better Option

The content moderation process is not just about grammar checks and banning profanity, it goes deeper than that. It shows your care for the type of content you let out and fosters trust with your clients.

After all, content moderation protects both the brand and the customers. It helps maintain the brand reputation of the company and ensures that its content adheres to various laws. As for the customers, content moderation shields them from falling for scams, and being exposed to inappropriate content, spam, and other harmful content.

The service comes with additional costs and limitations, but the benefits outweigh the cons at the end of the day.

However, some businesses can’t afford to onboard additional staff. At the same time, you can’t just fully rely on AI to do the moderating. The next best solution is to outsource from business process outsourcing (BPO) companies that offer content moderation services.

To save you the trouble of looking and screening for the right collaborator, consider partnering with Chekkee’s content moderation services.

Chekkee offers all types of content moderation solutions that can be catered to your business needs. We maintain a round-the-clock operation using the combined power of humans and artificial intelligence, ensuring non-stop quality moderation.

Check the list of services we offer above and create a plan that works for you. Thanks to our pay-per-service feature, you only need to pay for the agents’ active hours, saving you a lot in the long run.

Ensure a safe and enjoyable online experience. Contact us!

Stephanie Walker

Business Development Manager

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