How the new sharing economy has changed consumer behavior

We currently live in a Digital Age, which, unlike a couple of decades ago, gives us the ability to leverage one another, like never before, as resources for support in just a few clicks or taps. Nowadays, we congregate online to do so many important things, none more important than sharing our precious resources. Whether we're setting up a ride on Lyft or booking a room on Airbnb, we, as consumers, are putting our trust in the fact that we will get great service and a fair deal, even when we are dealing with people we do not know. It's a fascinating time when what used to quaintly be called "stranger danger" has rapidly given way to consumers learning to trust complete strangers to provide everything from reliable transportation, to comfortable lodging, to transparency into how donations are being used.

The aforementioned companies are now, probably much to our parents’ disdain, household names. And with this kind of brand familiarity comes an implicit sense of trust. We know that if our Lyft driver fails to show, there is a company we can contact to complain about it. We also know that if our Airbnb host doesn’t provide clean accommodations upon arrival, we can go complain on Yelp. Every day, each of the crowdfunding, crowdsharing, and crowdsourcing companies that we're becoming increasingly reliant upon, in turn, relies on one important thing to make sure their business is running as well as it ought to be: consumer feedback.

How to Protect Your Assets in This Digital Economy

While companies gather up reviews and input, what can we do as consumers to protect ourselves from making a bad deal in this current economy? And while these "crowdsharing" (ridesharing, roomsharing, etc.) companies have easy-to-access reviews, consumers increasingly rely on the news to identify scams: and often, by then, it’s too late.

There are several simple steps each of us can take to protect ourselves from online "crowd" scams, specifically harder to track crowdfunding sites:

Trust Your First Impressions: 

• Do photos on the site look fake, doctored, or too good to be true?  Then they likely are. Keep searching for a service that feels more trustworthy and real.

• Does the story feel authentic and sincere and like it's written by a real person, rather than by a bot or a freelancer based in Nigeria?

• Is the fundraising page receiving lots of support or has it never received a single donation? This is probably the most useful feedback loop: if a page is live but has not received even one type of support, caveat emptor...

• Are there updates, user comments and experiences posted? Feedback from page organizers as well as other comments by consumer’s builds credibility and can be helpful verification.

Ask Questions

• Is there a way to contact the organizer of the page, either by email or phone?
  

• Is there transparency into how funds donated will be used? If not, ask for more information. You should easily be able to see the impact of your support. *

• If you need even more granular information, such as a tax-deductible receipt for donations to charity, is that information also accessible?

• Can you contact the parent company that maintains the site you’re on to ask questions or report a suspicious page or user?

*Note: This is probably one of the most important questions. When we give a donation, that emotional feedback is our return on investment. Knowing that our support went somewhere tangible and measurable is key.

All in all, it is important for us to do our social digital due diligence if we want to be prudent consumers these days. More than that, our due diligence will offer us a sense of safety in a space that's defined by vulnerability and which, by necessity, demands a degree of blind-trust.

Image credit: Arthimedes/ Shutterstock

Nicholas Emerson-Mazzone is the co-founder of Supportful, a unique crowdsupport tool for consumers looking for practical help during times of need. Unlike GoFundMe or MealTrain it is essentially gathers all social support elements under one umbrella, so during times of grief, people can easily get help with things like grocery shopping, child care, mowing the lawn, pet sitting, etc.