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Want to display the feedback you've accrued from Amazon and Etsy buyers right inside your eBay listings? It's now possible thanks to a new service called eRated.co, which is working to make seller feedback completely portable.

Online sellers are proud of the positive ratings they receive from customers, and they know it can help increase sales by giving would-be buyers more confidence in their reputation. But it's never been easy to display feedback from multiple marketplaces in one place - never mind on your eBay listings - even though companies have been working on ways to make online sellers' feedback portable for years. One example is TrustPlus, which closed in 2012 citing a lack of support among marketplaces and merchants.

Skeptical that eBay would let a seller display the feedback earned on Amazon or Etsy on its marketplace? eRated's cofounder Dan Benjamin shared some examples of listings on eBay that display the eRated widget such as this listing, and this one.

Above: A partial shot of eRated.co's widget inside an eBay listing. This one highlights the seller's feedback from eBay buyers.

Above: A partial shot of eRated.co's widget inside an eBay listing. This one highlights the seller's feedback from Amazon buyers.

Benjamin also provided a link to eRated's listing in the eBay Solution Directory that shows it is a "compatible eBay application."

The directory listing on the eBay site claims 80% of eBay buyers consider seller reputation as the most important factor in their buying decisions and that 70% of buyers will not buy from a seller with no reputation. "With eRated you can import the existing reputation you have in other marketplaces and display within your eBay listings. Sellers who already joined enjoy an increase in their conversions and sales of up to 20%."

eRated has over 30,000 registered sellers, with over 2,500 sellers on eBay.com and eBay UK. Right now the program with eBay is in the pilot stage, and while that's a big win, eRated.co is not just about the major ecommerce marketplaces - and that's the point. "Rather than being a stranger to a new marketplace, you can finally take your hard-earned history with you," Benjamin explained.

"Today there are over 1000 online marketplaces and 100+ million sellers, 90% of whom operate in more than one marketplace," he went on to say. "No matter how responsible a seller may be in one marketplace, they start from ground zero in another. Users cannot take their hard-earned reputation (their online brand) with them from one marketplace to another, which is an unfair penalty."

There's another advantage to using eRated besides boosting conversion rates, according to the company. Sellers can generate insights about behavior on different marketplaces using the data eRated collects. "This functionality will be released to general public by New Year's," Benjamin said. "Till then, it is still in private alpha stage where we analyze buyer and seller behavior across the different marketplaces and generate insights to help drive sales up."

Right now, Amazon does not allow sellers to display eRated on its listings, but Benjamin said he's hopeful that Amazon and all other marketplaces, big or small, will adopt eRated as their reputation-building tool. "Marketplaces may be in competition with one another, but at the end of the day they all want more transactions. eRated does not advantage any one marketplace in particular against another, what it does is increase conversion rates between 10-30% for all integrated marketplaces."

eRated has partnered with marketplaces based in many countries, according to Benjamin, including Airbnb. "We're partnering with fashion marketplaces like Rentez-Vous and DateMyWardrobe, because they are giving new life to items that no longer get any attention. We're partnering with GoCarShare and SidelineSwap, because they're connecting people through shared interests and needs. Marketplaces like Kinderfree are partnering with us, because for parents, nothing is more important than trusting the people you leave your children with. We are an easy solution and one that can be adopted by almost any marketplace."

For now, eRated is free for marketplaces, but Benjamin warns that won't always be the case. And the service is free for buyers, sellers, swappers and traders - but sellers must use either a Facebook or Linkedin account to sign up. Why? "As with many similar services, adopting eRated through a social media account is simply much easier for our users. It turns a 5 minute form into a five second click," Benjamin said.

The eRated founder team is comprised of three TechStars and Zell Entrepreneurship Program graduates from Israel, Boaz Cohen, 28, CEO; Dan Benjamin, 27, Head of Business Development; and Yoav Artzi, 29, Head of Product. eRated, headquartered in London, closed its initial funding round after graduating from TechStars.

"Our investors are a group of high-profile angel groups in London," Benjamin said. "These supporters have been great to us and have been pushing us forward since the very beginning of eRated."

You can learn more about the company on the eRated.co website.

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About the author:

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com.

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