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Another important issue to factor in is that there may be many buyers. Say for example I have a classified ad about a time share/ house, 30 people could potentially have a transaction with me and all have the right to leave feedback. At a bare minimum the system should require a url to the transaction used. This is "loose" in that you can say you had a transaction and cite a valid url when no business occured but it is still better than nothing. A few days ago we had a problem with someone abusing the vbulletin hack "trader ratings" in which they were posting negative comments about a few users because they disliked them, not because of any transactions... making them enter a url at least means they have to work to lie.
I suppose this leaves the system in one of two places. Either you keep things relatively open requiring a url or other easily false information or you make it an invite based system as Michael described. Because there could be problems with sellers skewing the results you would want to make it something either person can opt in to use. Buyers and sellers would bother have to be registered and after a transaction was completed they would have to have a way to respond to the other person. From a technical standpoint this could mean coding the system to check if the user is the seller, and if so let them enter the userid of the buyer and leave them comments. If they are a user it could have a link saying "transaction completed" or "leave feedback" in which they bind themselves to the message. In either case the buyer or seller would be able to link the transaction to both parties and while you cant check if anything really was paid for, you can be certain that only registered users are in the system and both parties have equal access to post about each other.
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