Every time you conduct a transaction on an auction site, your trading partner rates your performance. This is called feedback, and it is the foundation of the trust that must be present in order to buy and sell online with perfect strangers.

However, feedback you accrue on one site is not visible to members on other auction sites. And the largest auction site - eBay - does not let its users tout their feedback profile anywhere, other than on eBay itself.

A company called Virtual Feedback has created a service to get around this problem. And these days, with many buyers and sellers not wanting to be tied down to one single venue, the time could be ripe for "mobile feedback."

We first wrote about Virtual Feedback in July 2000. The service is alive and well and available at http://www.virtualfeedback.com. You must register in order to leave a rating, but you can look up someone's rating without being registered. There is no charge to either read or leave a rating.

If you register with Virtual Feedback, you can put a logo on your Web site and auctions to show how many times you've been rated; when users click on the logo, they will be taken to the Virtual Feedback Web site where they can read the ratings.

ePier's ProfileRate.com ProfileRate.com is a brand new service for "mobile feedback." ePier launched the service last week. While the site will apply to transactions on all auction sites, not just ePier, currently the only option listed is for rating ePier transactions. James Kim, ePier CEO, said that, "eventually, when there is a critical mass of users, we would like to nail one's identity to an immutable ID such as the social security number so that one's true colors will be shown." http://www.profilerate.com

Note that with the two above-mentioned services, people must leave feedback twice - once on the auction site where the transaction took place, and once on the feedback site itself.

Reliable Merchants - A Different Approach to Feedback Edith Reynolds introduced Reliable Merchants to AuctionBytes readers in February. The site was founded by then 17-year-old whiz kid Steven Ebin, who developed a mathematical algorithm to analyze an auction-seller's "reputation."

The system rates sellers - specifically, eBay sellers. Participating sellers display a "Reliable Merchants" seal if they can meet the Reliable Merchants standards. The system ranks a seller's feedback as 95 or over, the seller is eligible for inclusion in the Reliable Merchants family.

Reliable Merchants is a tool that sellers can use to show potential bidders that they are reliable, and is basically a marketing tool - one that the company says is effective, since it accurately shows people that you are a "reliable" seller. There is a fee for using the Reliable Merchants service ($12/quarter which equals $48/year), and they are currently offering a free two-month trial. http://www.reliablemerchants.com

Whatever your approach to feedback, it is an important part of the online buying and selling process. And you can be sure that there are entrepreneurs out there right now trying to come up with new systems to make it better! --- A note on reviewing these services: none of these services have a way to easily see what a review will look like. I would urge these sites to have a button where new users can click and actually see a sample listing.