I believe the main original concern was protection for the buyer. Buyer would only need a screen shot of paypal showing their purchase and a screen shot showing what they ordered. This is essentially the same information that would be needed here thus the buyer should receive support in the unlikely event of a dispute with a website choosing to make a forum profile here and rely on it for feedback as I have.
I see more than just protection for the buyer to be an issue , but when it comes to protection:
The second a sale is conducted on another site and all messages are done on another site I lose all ability to see the discussion, the agreements and the transaction taking place, that's hardly as secure as a transaction taking place here. Given 3rd party sites have a history of receiving a question here then giving nothing but a copy/paste response with a link to their website..... there's literally nothing but a link to a website for me to go on in these messages.
Another massive security concern is 3rd party sites
that have hired users that we have banned here to do services for their company .
Something about a banned users being given our user's account info for services after scamming , acting like a loose cannon , or having poor selling techniques is pretty un nerving.
As for "thus the buyer should receive support" ,
In what world is it fair to the staff here to basically provide a place for 3rd party sites to plaster their link and use our forums as a means to advertise, take business and traffic away from us and
then on top of it provide support relying only on screen shots from the very places I think we should be avoiding? We are more than happy to provide 3rd party site owners a place to conduct business and gain additional sales under the agreement that they maintain the business here where its mutually beneficial and where I can provide proper first hand investigations into support issues.
This site was created with a vision of it being a safe place where power sellers and average joe that's got some extra currency to sell have an equal shot at making a sale, working on an equal playing field. Redirecting traffic away from those users is simply unfair to the smaller sellers, being unable to provide proper first hand support to the community is unfair to the buyers, the staff working tirelessly to gain traffic and advertise .... just to give 3rd party sites a better platform to advertise is unfair to us.
I could go on and on and on.... but for me, I can sum it all up simply. There's nothing for us to gain and plenty for us to lose from allowing it. All that being said, it's whatever Redbot and the community wants.