How pasal.biz protects customers — reporting, signals, and a security-first marketplace

The default posture: customer first, not seller first

On most platforms, sellers are the product the marketplace is selling — to advertisers, to investors, to themselves. Customers are the supply of attention that pays for it. That priority shows up in small ways: reports buried four menus deep, support chatbots that loop, "trust badges" that are paid placements, and policies that conveniently favour the bigger merchant in any dispute.

pasal.biz is built the other way round. We don't take commission. We don't sell featured slots. We don't broker payments. Our incentive isn't to keep a bad shop online — it's to keep the customers using the app. That alignment is what makes the protection mechanisms below work. They're not a department; they're the product.

A flag (🚩) button on almost every page that shows you something

Open any product, any shop, any order, even any market-rate page in pasal.biz and look for the small flag icon. It's there on purpose. Tapping it opens a single dialog — no email client, no copy-paste, no "describe what happened in 5 separate fields." If you can see it on pasal.biz, you can flag it.

The flag button appears on:

• Every product page — for fakes, misleading photos, prohibited items, suspicious pricing.
• Every shop page — for fake shops, impersonation, repeat no-shows, abusive behaviour.
• Every order details page — for items not delivered, items not as described, payment disputes, harassment in the order chat.
• Every market-rate page — forex, gold/silver, mandi vegetable rates, NOC fuel prices. If something looks wrong with the number we're showing, flag it; we'd rather hear from you than mislead the next person.

What happens when you tap the flag

1. The dialog shows you exactly what you're reporting (the product name, the shop, the order ID, the data point) so you don't report the wrong thing by accident.
2. You write what's wrong in plain language — Nepali or English, both are fine.
3. You hit Submit. The report goes to the Seti Projects moderation team as a tracked feedback ticket.
4. You get back a reference number — keep it handy if you need to follow up.

The report never goes to the seller. The seller never sees who reported them. That's deliberate — it removes retaliation as a deterrent to reporting.

And one more silent protection: customers can block any shop from contacting them again. The block is immediate on your side and silent on theirs — the shop is never notified.

Signals that act before a human has to

Reports are the visible layer. Underneath, our systems quietly count what each account is doing. The moment a threshold is crossed, that action is disabled for that account. No queue, no review, no waiting for a moderator to wake up.

A snapshot of what runs today:

• Message spam — accounts firing messages at spam-bot velocity get muted, and a moderation ticket is auto-created.
• Rapid order cancellation — bursts of cancellations in a short window disable placing new orders.
• Discount-request spam — repeatedly hammering the same shop with discount asks disables further requests.
• Quote spam — quote requests from a low-trust account piling up in a short window are paused.
• Appointment no-shows — a pattern of no-shows disables appointment booking.
• Per-action rate limits — every action you can take in the app (placing orders, sending messages, uploading payment proof, reporting) has a ceiling. An automated bot trying to fire a flood of reports to bury a competitor gets stopped at the door.

We don't publish the exact thresholds — that would be a playbook for anyone wanting to pace themselves just under the limits. We tuned them by watching what real abuse looks like, and they run on the server with atomic counters, so they hold up even under bursts and can't be bypassed by spinning up a fresh client.

Karma — a trust score that follows the account, not the shopfront

Every account on pasal.biz has a karma score grouped into four tiers:

• Gold — consistent, long-running history; reports almost never upheld.
• Standard — the normal active user.
• Caution — signals are accumulating; ranking is suppressed.
• Restricted — hidden from search and discovery surfaces; effectively shadowed from new customers.

Karma moves on real events, not vibes. Completing an order earns positive karma (with a daily cap so no one can farm it). Verifying your account is a one-time boost. Cancellations, message harassment, repeated revoked offers, and no-shows all subtract. An upheld report against you is a significant penalty. Old negative events decay over time — people are allowed to change. We keep the exact weights and decay window internal so no one can min-max the score, but the direction is consistent and predictable.

Crucially, karma is visible to the other side of the trade. When a shop looks at a customer's karma, they see the tier (not the exact score, to prevent gaming). When a customer browses, ranking and discovery already factor karma in — Caution and Restricted shops simply don't surface. You don't need to know what karma is to be protected by it.

Crowdsourced moderation, by design

One report is information. Five reports from five unrelated customers is a pattern. pasal.biz treats the second case very differently.

When several unrelated accounts report the same shop or user in a short window, the system auto-promotes the case to an urgent moderation queue. The original individual tickets are linked together so the reviewer sees the full picture in one view, not separate inboxes. This is how crowdsourced reporting actually catches scams — not by trusting any single report, but by trusting the convergence of many.

To make sure this signal isn't itself abused, reports are throttled — the same reporter can't repeat-report the same target during a cooldown window. Mass-report campaigns against a competitor don't get amplified; they get rate-limited.

The architecture of "we don't touch your money"

The single biggest customer-protection design choice we made is the one people notice last: pasal.biz never holds payment. The customer pays the shop directly — cash on delivery, eSewa, Khalti, IME Pay, FonePay, or bank transfer.

This sounds like a smaller feature than it is. Consider what it removes:

• No platform wallet that can be hacked or frozen.
• No "payout window" where the shop waits 7–14 days for their money and can pressure you for a fake completion.
• No incentive for pasal.biz to side with the bigger merchant in a dispute because they generate fee revenue.
• No "we'll release the funds when…" hostage situation in either direction.

For orders that need a stronger payment trail, the app supports submitting payment proof — a screenshot plus a transaction reference. The upload is rate-limited and only accepts files from our own trusted storage, so an attacker can't smuggle in a fake. The seller verifies the proof before claiming delivery; the order cannot jump straight to "completed" without it.

Order chat is evidence, and we treat it that way

Every order on pasal.biz has its own conversation thread. Every message in that thread is stored with sender, role, type, and timestamp. If a dispute ever happens, that chat is the record — not your memory, not screenshots that can be cropped, not "they said this on WhatsApp."

A few quiet protections built into messages:

• Messages are automatically cleaned before they reach you — hidden code, malicious scripts, and disguised links that try to pull you out of the app and into a fake payment page get neutralised before you ever see them.
• Messaging is rate-limited at the function level, so a hostile account can't flood your inbox.
• You can block any shop, any time. The block is silent on their side and immediate on yours.
• Conversations linked to reported orders are preserved through the moderation process — they're the first thing the reviewer sees.

The order goes through real steps — no skipping

A common scam pattern on platforms with weak order tracking is the seller marking an order as "delivered" the moment they accept it, then stalling. The customer chases support, the platform shrugs.

Orders on pasal.biz follow a strict, defined sequence: pending → accepted → ready for pickup or out for delivery → completed, with rejected and cancelled as final outcomes. The seller cannot skip steps. The seller cannot mark the order complete from pending. Cancellation is role-aware too — a customer can only cancel before the seller has accepted; after acceptance, the seller is on the hook for delivery.

Moderation is staffed by humans, not magic

Every report becomes a tracked moderation ticket, categorised by what was reported (product, shop, order, or an auto-escalated pattern alert) and moved through a defined status pipeline from intake to resolution. The internal admin dashboard surfaces these in priority order, with the related shop, product, order, conversation, and karma history all linked in.

Outcomes a moderator can apply:

• Suspend a shop — removes it from search and blocks new orders, reversible via appeal.
• Hide a specific listing — the product disappears from discovery without touching the rest of the shop.
• Disable specific abilities on an account (messaging, ordering, etc.) without nuking the whole account.
• Permanent removal — reserved for clear, repeat fraud.
• Karma adjustment on upheld reports, written to a tamper-evident audit log.

There is no shadow-banning in code. Visibility is binary and recorded. If a shop is hidden, they can be told why and they can appeal — the appeal also goes through the ticket system, so nothing is lost.

Why we think we're the only one in Nepal designed this way

Most Nepali e-commerce platforms started as listing pages or chat-driven groups and bolted on safety features when scams forced their hand. The result is what you see: reporting hidden behind menus, payment held by the platform with no clear policy, no public-facing trust score, no automatic abuse rules, and "trust" treated as a marketing problem.

pasal.biz was designed differently from day one:

• Reports are first-class — one tap, on every page, routed to a real ticket queue.
• Abuse rules run server-side and automatically, the moment a threshold is crossed.
• Karma is a real number, computed from real events, and it shapes who gets surfaced.
• Crowdsourced patterns are detected and escalated, but throttled so they can't be weaponised.
• Payment is direct between buyer and seller, by architectural choice — there's no platform wallet to compromise.
• Order state is enforced on the server, not suggested by the client.
• Conversations are preserved as evidence, and cleaned of malicious content before they reach you.
• Moderation outcomes are reversible, audited, and applied by humans.

None of this is glamorous. You probably won't notice most of it on a good day — which is the point. Protection that works is invisible to the people it protects.

What you can do as a shopper

1. If a shop, product, or order feels off — tap the flag (🚩) icon on the page. Submit the report in 30 seconds. Save the ticket ID.
2. Use the in-app order chat for everything that matters. Don't move conversations to WhatsApp; that's where evidence goes to die.
3. For higher-value items, prefer prepaid via eSewa/Khalti to a shop with a clear karma score, or insist on cash on delivery with inspection.
4. Check the shop's karma tier on the profile page before placing an order with a brand-new account.
5. Block any shop that is harassing you. The block is silent and instant.

Common questions