Trust Profile: A Reputation You Can Actually Audit

B2B platforms have a trust problem that consumer marketplaces do not. On a consumer marketplace, “this seller has 4.7 stars” is often enough. In B2B ITAD, a single transaction can be EUR 60,000, a failed handoff can become a compliance issue, and the new procurement officer will not accept “they seemed fine” as evidence.

The trust profile is ReVend’s answer: not a star rating, not a popularity contest, and definitely not a mood ring. It is a recomputed snapshot with six components that can be explained deal by deal.

The six components

Completion rate measures whether deals actually finish against agreed terms. It carries the highest signal because a seller who follows through is the seller buyers come back to.

Volume gives context to the track record. One perfect transaction and one hundred perfect transactions should not weigh the same.

Recency keeps the score current. A heroic 2022 performance does not automatically excuse a sleepy 2026.

Those three form the base score, by default weighted 55, 25 and 20. The remaining three adjust it.

Dispute fault folds resolved disputes into the score when the party was at fault. That covers escrow disputes that ended in a release, refund or split, and also non-escrow disputes closed as acknowledged, agreed remediation or rejected — a rejected claim counts against the party who filed it, not the one who had to answer it. The penalty is multiplicative and capped, by default at half the score. A clean record helps; a pattern of avoidable disputes does not get to hide in a separate drawer.

Response time looks at how quickly the party reacts to offers and deal-room activity, in bands, once there are enough samples to say anything. Slow replies are not always bad, but in trading they usually create expensive fog.

Verified certifications add a category-weighted bonus when certifications such as R2v3, ISO 14001, NAID AAA or e-Stewards are verified by the platform. Lapsed certificates stop helping the score when their status changes.

Tier badges

The numeric score maps to a tier: platinum from 85, gold from 70, silver from 50, bronze from 25, and unrated below that. Tiers and scores live on the trust page at /market/trust, where your team can search by company, country, tier or score, and on the profile page behind each row, which shows the score breakdown, trade history, certifications by category, and a clean-record or active-dispute badge. A tier is not the only buying factor, but it gives two procurement officers the same starting point instead of two separate folklore collections.

Why this is not hidden

Sellers can see their own breakdown. If response time drags the score down, the team can fix the operating habit. If a dispute fault matters, the record points to the underlying dispute. Platform admins tune the weights, the recency windows, the dispute penalty, the response-time bands, the certification bonus and the tier thresholds from the trust-scoring settings, so the model can follow evidence instead of committee poetry. No stars. No adjectives. A number with a receipt.