My site, I'll answer - because you're guaranteed to get paid. We handle the payment processing, and only notify a seller that you've sold an item after we've captured payment. There's no PayPal two step.

As a seller, you don't care who your buyer is, only that you can get paid and that the buyer agrees to have it shipped reasonably. We take shipping choice off the table - everyone has to ship USPS within the US only (no foreign transactions yet, we'll add this choice later, but that's the brute force way to solve it for now).

Don't you pretty much open yourself up to fraud? Instead of the seller needing to check the transactions manually and taking the risk that the person won't charge back all the money, you are the one getting the short end of the stick?

We do the standard anti-fraud stuff and have very good relationships with the credit card companies. Knock on wood, it's been a manageable problem so far.

i guess you have the benefit of low value transactions. If you were letting users sell electronics etc, the scammers would come out of the woodwork,

that's a huge benefit/differentiator - I'm surprised you guys didn't put it on your front page or even in the 'how it works' page

You know, that's been our biggest issue - people approach the differentiators very differently depending on their experience. As a result of that, we've had a devil of a time really getting the benefit statement and the elevator pitch down pat. We'll probably go with some version of "safe and easy", but I'm all ears.

from my point of view, your front page (and even your 'how we do it' page) is not really any different from the n number of auction/trading sites that I've seen.

I wouldn't have even known that you guys have system/mechanism of guaranteed payment (and even delivery?), had you not posted it here