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In December and the months leading up to it, the percentage of scam content on classifieds sites rises significantly. This means that your customers are more likely to have a negative user experience when doing their holiday shopping on your site.
Combine this with the fact that Christmas shopping often brings in new users looking for the perfect present, and you have just upped your chance of dramatically converting a browser to a user.
But with some planning and some insights into what scammers are targeting you can avoid the worst impact of the increase in fraudulent ads.
Here are three tips that can help you keep your content under control during the holiday season.
How to Handle Scams During the Holidays
1. Know Your Seasonal Content
What people search for throughout the year changes based on seasons, high-profile product releases and global events. For scammers, it makes a lot of sense to target highly sought-after items. This gives them a faster turnaround on potential victims before they are removed from the site.
Usually during Christmas you will find a rise of scams in ads for popular electronics, gift of the year items and winter sports equipment in countries where such a pastime is available.
So the bad news is that you have more scam on your site during the holiday season. The good news is that if you know where to look, it is quite easy to spot and remove, which leads us to the second tip.
2. Target Your Efforts Strategically
Chances are you will see a rise, not just in scams, but in volumes in general during this period. You have probably planned for this spike in volumes, either by hiring more moderators or by increasing your automated moderation percentage.
There is nothing wrong with either of those approaches, but make sure you target your efforts strategically.
If you don’t have resources to moderate all volumes, focus on high risk categories such as electronics, pets, rentals and toys.
Also if you haven’t already, it might be time to look into automated content moderation with a good moderation tool you should be able to automate 80% or more of your content.
Finally, if you are hiring new or temporary staff to cover spikes, you should keep them away from categories with a high percentage of scam ads. Leave that to your veterans. If you do let the new guys lose on high risk categories, make sure that you give them very clear and easy instructions on what to look for.
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