Ebay style website to evaluate quality of local tradesmen

THE internet auction service Ebay has provided the inspiration for a new website which will allow the public to rate the work of plumbers and other tradesmen.

The idea, called Guaranteed Electronic Market (GEM), is the brainchild of TV presenter and entrepreneur Wingham Rowan and will be presented at a seminar in London this week.

"Ebay is old hat but its success shows that technology for online local markets has huge potential," Rowan told the Sunday Herald. "The real market is not for objects but for the sale of people's time. Ebay is just an indication of what is to come."

The new website will offer the verdicts of previous customers on quality, availability and price of tradesmen, who will be given a grade based upon what other customers have said about their work, which will be continually updated.

Rowan said the idea would help people who have been struggling to find a quality tradesman in their area. The service would let people find the most suitable tradesman to do a job and instantly compare them to their competitors. "An emergency plumber who can be there in twenty minutes won't be the cheapest but they might be the best for the job." GEMs will allow a customer to evaluate the extra cost.

However, Alan Wilson, commercial and contracts officer for trade body the Scottish and Northern Ireland Plumbing Employers, said there were serious concerns about the idea of customers "scoring" a plumber's work. "I'm not sure whether customers will be able to decide if the work was done in a proper manner."

A boiler fitting may look neat and tidy on the outside, he explained, but it could be a "mess of pipes" under the covering and "many customers wouldn't know the difference".

Wilson said he welcomed the GEM idea but only up to a point. Customer grading should be combined with a professional benchmark so that no rogue traders could take advantage of the system, he said.

Will Davis, senior researcher at the Institute for Public Policy research, the government think tank hosting Friday's seminar, said the GEM idea had been warmly welcomed. "A lot of people who have used Ebay said what a fantastic thing it is. A place where total strangers can trust each other over buying and selling second hand goods. They've been asking whether we can develop something like this," he said.

He said the government was interested in funding the site which would then act like a "dating agency" between customers and tradesmen but not in regulating it.

GEMs were only one area of internet development the government was looking at, he said. The seminar was set up to see how the internet could be used as a "social tool" bringing citizens closer to the products and services already available within their area. "There is still lots of unexplored territory where government funding could be used to support successful decentralised spaces," he said.

Copyright 2004 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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