We're wide awake

Just so everyone is aware what we're up to, here's a list of some of the stuff we've been working on in 2014:

To improve the quality of the people listed, we've called every single applicant - well over 2000 people - to check that they are active in the industry (remember how the forum used to be dominated by stupid questions from people asking if anyone could give them work in the family car at the weekends?). Only a minority of the new applicants we speak to are now accepted for membership. The rest are invited to come back when they are "mission ready" i.e. they have a van and are insured for courier work.

To get more information on each Profile, we've improved the Join page to get more detailed information about new applicants.

By phoning and emailing people, we've massively increased the number of people showing GIT insurance on their Profiles.

We've introduced Insurance renewal postcards to help keep peoples’ insurance details up to date.

To improve trust and networking, we've made it easier to Trust people you know, on the courier directory.

To get more people posting empty, we've made doing that more obvious on the Newsfeed page.

To improve the professionalism of the membership, we've made the "Public Liability" tab work on the Insurance Page. We'll soon add the other two tabs.

To increase security, we've introduced Postal Address Confirmation postcards, so you can be more sure about who you're trading with.

To improve security for couriers, we've increased the information required from new Vendors (e.g. VAT number, Company Number, Proper Ltd Co name, and so on).

We've continued to remind people about our "Safe Trading Guidelines", so people don't extend too much credit to new Vendors, or give work to people they're not sure about.

To improve the feel of the site, we've moved the site to faster more secure more reliable more expensive servers, and modernised the backups. This took a lot of effort and expense, but only shows in the lack of downtime, i.e. It doesn't really show, touch wood.

Hope this helps.

Comments welcome. (no Haters, as they say on Pistonheads :))

Tim

I dont see a problem with people using the family car there enough work about for them by the looks of it. as lomg as they have the correct insurance

I dont see a problem with people using the family car there enough work about for them by the looks of it. as lomg as they have the correct insurance

You could have a point there, but what we have found, in 1000s of phone calls, is there are very few people wanting to do courier work (part time) in the family car who can afford to buy the right insurance, so it's safer to draw the line this side of them.