Building The Trust and Safety Rules Engine
Whatnot is one of the fastest-growing marketplaces in the world, and with that growth comes increased responsibility to ensure safety at every stage of the buying and selling experience.
The Whatnot Trust & Safety team’s mission is to help keep our community safe and create a trusted and friendly space for people to share their passions. To do this, we need to be able to address fraud, behavioral or logistical issues quickly and at an ever-increasing scale. Today, we’ll discuss how we’ve developed technology to automate Trust & Safety actions through the Whatnot Rules Engine.
Moving to Automation
Historically, our investigation team has reviewed each case manually and actioned on violations one at a time. As we grow, we’re investing in automating some of our enforcement mechanisms to allow us to scale.
How the Whatnot Rules Engine Works
The Whatnot Rules Engine leverages statistical thresholds on top of user data and threat signals to automatically determine an action (warning, suspension, ban):
Statistical thresholds: We’ve identified thresholds for what we consider violations in each abuse vector (ie what % of shipments need to be fulfilled incorrectly in the last 30 days for us to warn a seller)
User information and threat signals: We consider the user history, in-app signals like livestream activity, seller reviews, and user reports, and external signals like shipment tracking information
We fully automate all warnings sent to buyer and sellers. We add an additional review by the Whatnot Trust & Safety team for any suspensions or bans. As with all Trust & Safety actions, users are able to appeal the team’s (or Rule Engine’s) decision.
Example: How the Rules Engine is reducing the volume of shipping delays
If a seller starts to consistently ship late, we have to act quickly to make sure we (1) mitigate the impact on buyers and (2) notify the seller that they need to fulfill per our seller guidelines (in this case, ship within 2 business days) and if this pattern continues, they could be suspended.
Prior to the Rules Engine launch, the Whatnot Trust & Safety agents would manually pull data every month, identify which sellers were over the shipping delay threshold, and email each one individually.
Now, the Rules Engine automatically identifies sellers over each threshold, checks the user history to determine if they’ve been warned for the violation before, then notifies the seller via email.
App notification and email
To learn more about our guidelines and frequently asked questions, visit the Whatnot Help Center and explore our community guidelines, shipping FAQs, and missing hit card policy.
We’ll continue to share updates on how we keep the Whatnot community safe. As always, we’d love to hear from you about what you’re interested in learning from the Trust & Safety team at Whatnot. Please contact us at trustblog@whatnot.com with what you’d like to learn about next!
