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Disclose email address of seller to the buyer (and vice versa)

Gaston.La.BrickGaston.La.Brick
in Closed Suggestions Vote Up0Vote Down
Maybe it's for privacy reasons, maybe it's to avoid having people going under the BrickOwl radar for completing transactions, but it's really annoying I can't see the email address of a buyer (except for his "BrickOwl" address). When shipping as parcel, I can often include the email address of the recipient to be notified of tracking. This field is sometimes limited to a number of characters.
If I buy something at a webshop, I need to disclose my email address.
So my suggestion would be: disclose the personal email address of the seller to the buyer.

Comments

  • 8 Comments sorted by Votes Date Added
  • misbimisbi
    Vote Up0Vote Down
    +1
    Increasingly, recipient email address is required for shipping labels etc. It's simply an annoyance and provides a poor seller experience in my opinion :(
  • StellarStellar
    Vote Up0Vote Down
    What I suggested some time ago was to make that address shorter because I too had this problem with some shipping companies.
  • CalibrickCalibrick
    Vote Up0Vote Down
    +1, similar reasons... though if they go through PayPal, you can see their direct email on PayPal. But of course, that is only one payment method available.
  • Colorado BricksColorado Bricks
    Vote Up0Vote Down
    I can understand hiding the email address of sellers, but once a transaction took place it I don't see the point. 99% of my sales are via PayPal/Stripe, so have it anyway and I include mine in every order I ship...
  • SarbaekSarbaek
    Vote Up0Vote Down
    I suggested this some time ago and was told it wasn't going to happen by Lawrence unfortunately. I agree it's not a very nice experience for the buyer when they won't receive the notification. I've tried using the BO email but it doesn't seem to work at all with my shipping company
  • HoddieHoddie
    Vote Up0Vote Down
    Every country has different laws about giving consent to share personal data with third parties. BrickLink may ride roughshod over legal obligations but I'm glad that BrickOwl doesn't. Giving the other party access to your email address is not necessary in order to conduct a trade, and many may feel uncomfortable doing so. Even if a buyer authorises BrickOwl to disclose their email address to a seller, that's not the same as the buyer authorising the seller to give it to a delivery agent, who may then do god knows what with it. It gets complicated where the buyer and seller are in different jurisdictions with different laws concerning consent and privacy.

    If you have a delivery agent that refuses your custom unless you give them an email address, switch to another delivery agent and let them know why. Or give your own email address or a fake one.
  • Gaston.La.BrickGaston.La.Brick
    Vote Up0Vote Down
    Privacy legislation usually has no problem that personal information is shared if:
    a) all parties have given consent --> could be a user setting in BrickOwl
    b) the purpose is functional in nature (has meaning) --> tracking your shipment and getting contacted by a party where you do business with, is considered very meaningful

    Just like someone's personal address information is shared to be able to send the order. Some shipping companies require (!) an email address of the recipient to have some sort of option to contact them for tracking or when there are issues.

    So in short, I would suggest: share the email address of both parties in the transaction data of the order, and only if the user settings have it enabled.

    By the way: even with mutual consent, the users on BrickOwl can't share their direct email address: it just gets stripped from the contact form. At least disable this feature, since it's clearly a deliberate sharing of contact info. So you might say my message with the information that I choose to share with someone, is being processed by a 3rd party (BrickOwl). In GDPR legislation, this would make BrickOwl accountable for the content (data processing party), since they alter the content of the posted message. For that reason alone, I would suggest BrickOwl changes the content-alterations with posted messages.

    I don't want to start some sort of religious discussion of data processing, sharing, legislation and what not. I only think that sharing an email address as part of a commercial transaction data, only viewable to both involved parties, is really not an issue...

    If you want to contact me directly, you can send me an email at .
    (grin ;-))
  • BrikomaniaBrikomania
    Vote Up0Vote Down
    I think that more about privacy it probably is also about all messages going through BO and people not taking the conversation "offline". I agree, that for sellers, it would be useful to have an email address. I actually provide the one brickowl shows when requested by shipping companies, I hope it works!

    Maybe, as stellar said, we should try to shorten it, or make it unique to the user, as in [email protected] for example, always redirects to him, instead of having one for each order.
This discussion has been closed.