Trust and safety moderation for an Australian online marketplace

Listing volume had grown faster than the platform's in-house moderation team, a group of 6 based in Sydney. Backlogs of flagged listings, ranging from suspected scams and prohibited items to duplicate and misleading ads, regularly ran past 48 hours before review, and the Sydney team was spending most of its time on high-volume, low-complexity triage rather than the genuinely hard escalations and policy edge cases that needed local judgment.

The engagement started with a pod of 10 moderators and 1 team leader handling first-pass triage on the highest-volume categories. It scaled to 40 moderators, 3 team leaders and 2 quality assurance specialists over six months as coverage extended to every listing category, with a named policy liaison sitting between the Manila operation and the client's Australian legal and policy team for anything requiring escalation, such as suspected fraud rings or content referred to police. Manila was chosen for a follow-the-sun roster that gave the client coverage well beyond a single Australian business day.

Offshore delivery from Manila, Philippines, working the platform's moderation queue on a follow-the-sun roster with a documented escalation pathway to the client's Australian legal and policy team.

Moderators reviewing user-generated listings routinely handle personal information, including seller names, contact details and, in some disputed listings, identity documents uploaded to resolve a complaint. The client's disclosure of this information to Manila is subject to Australian Privacy Principle 8 and section 16C of the Privacy Act 1988, and the client retained accountability for any mishandling regardless of where the review took place. Reasonable steps included restricting moderator access to the specific fields needed for a review decision rather than full account records, and a documented escalation matrix so anything ambiguous or potentially unlawful went to the client's own legal and policy team rather than being resolved offshore. Given the platform's revenue, the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme applied, and a 30-day assessment clock for any suspected eligible data breach was written into the operating procedures both teams followed. Corpshore's security posture is aligned with the Essential Eight framework.

Median time to review a flagged listing fell from around 51 hours to 6 hours once the full team was live. The proportion of listings actioned within 24 hours rose from 34 percent to 89 percent. Cost per listing reviewed fell by approximately 57 percent compared with the prior in-house-only model, allowing the Sydney team to redirect roughly 70 percent of its time to policy development and complex escalations rather than first-pass triage. Figures quoted exclude GST.

Volume no longer dictated what the client's own team spent its day on, because the offshore team absorbed the high-volume triage and the escalation matrix meant nothing genuinely ambiguous was ever resolved offshore.