Better protection for your users. A new revenue line for you.
calmlyresolve.com is dispute cover you offer at your own checkout, on transactions worth £200 to £25,000. It gives your users the confidence to buy and sell things they otherwise would not.
You set the cover fee. You collect it at your checkout, and you keep the larger part of every one.
This transaction is covered, backed by calmlyresolve.com.
You sell the cover. We take the dispute.
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You offer the cover at your checkout
One sentence above the pay button, backed by calmlyresolve.com. That is what gives your users the confidence to buy and sell things they otherwise would not.
You set the cover fee and you collect it. Cover applies to every transaction inside the band, so it is not an extra your user has to opt into. Your own dispute process stays your own.
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A dispute is valued on what the law says it is worth
When a dispute arises we check the documents can settle the question, then value the claim on what the law entitles the claimant to: the Consumer Rights Act 2015, read with the contract terms. Both parties receive the same report at the same time.
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The method is published and the record is audited
The valuation method is published and versioned. Anyone can read the rules and check a valuation against them, which is what lets both sides see the process is even-handed. Read the method in full.
A defendant who disagrees is not arguing with our judgement on their case. They are arguing with a public rule — and if they are right, we fix it for everyone.
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We take the claim on and pay your user
Cash up front, a share of what we recover, or both, as they prefer. No claim is ever presented to your site for payment, so a dispute never reaches your accounts.
Cover runs on transactions worth £200 to £25,000, for sites trading in England and Wales. Some claims are valued but not taken on: a party in insolvency, dissolution or strike-off, a claim below the minimum value, and a claim outside the three kinds this cover takes. The exclusions are stated at the point of purchase and set out in the written agreement.
And what comes back.
It costs you nothing. You are the one selling it.
You set the cover fee at your checkout and you collect it. We charge a wholesale price out of what you have already collected, and you keep the larger part.
What it would earn you
Put in your own numbers. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored.
The fee as a share of the transaction is the number that decides it, not the annual total. It is what your buyer sees. For comparison, Vinted charges buyers a protection fee on every order and event refund protection is typically a single-figure percentage of the ticket.
You keep 60% of what you collect as standard. We charge the rest as a wholesale price out of money already in your account, so nothing is invoiced to you and nothing is charged per dispute. Founding sites are on different terms. The fee level is yours and we do not recommend one.
Two things decide the right fee
What it is as a share of a typical transaction on your site, and what comparable cover costs elsewhere. Marketplace buyer protection and event refund protection both publish their prices. We put those comparators next to your own numbers when we build your benchmark.
Who pays it is your decision
- Your buyer. An itemised cover fee at your checkout. This is how marketplace buyer protection is normally charged.
- Your seller. Inside the fees your sellers already pay you.
- You. From your own margin, with nothing shown to either side.
The arithmetic above holds on all three. Cover applies to every transaction in the band whichever route you pick, because an optional add-on is a different product with different consent rules. Which route suits your site is your call, and we have not decided it for you.
How your own figure gets made
From the first covered transaction, transactions are assigned at random to a covered arm and an uncovered arm. Your buyers see no difference. At the readout you have your own number, on your own data, under a protocol agreed in writing before it runs.
That is the only figure that will ever settle this, which is why we would rather build it with you than argue you into ours.
What the published evidence says, since you will ask. Nobody has measured whether dispute cover makes more people buy, on any marketplace, including ours.
What you earn does not rest on it. You are not buying an uplift. You are selling a product at a fee you set, and keeping the larger part of what you collect. That holds at any volume, whether or not one extra person buys.
The closest study is eBay’s platform-wide switch to buyer protection in 2010 (Hui, Saeedi, Shen and Sundaresan, Management Science, 2016). Buyers’ willingness to pay rose 2.9% — and 3.7% where the seller had no top-rated badge, against 1.3% where they did. Nearly three times larger where the buyer does not already trust who they are dealing with.
The two facts that sit next to it. The closest structural match to a marketplace like yours — a used-equipment marketplace, Roberts 2011 — found no effect at all. And how much this is worth differs by site, because it depends on how much protection your buyers already have. A single number across every marketplace would be wrong, and we are not going to publish one.
Want the version with your real numbers in it?
The calculator above runs on what you type. We will build the same thing from your own figures — how many of your transactions fall inside the band, what a fee at your average transaction value looks like next to published comparators, and what you would collect and keep. One page, no meeting needed to get it. Email tom@calmlyresolve.com with your marketplace and we will send it back.