🛒 Buyer's Complete Guide

Search and category filters get you to a listing; reputation score, total completed orders, and a verified vendor badge tell you whether it's worth trusting. Skip the star rating and read the actual review text — a 4.9 average built on hundreds of one-word "great!" reviews tells you less than a lower average with detailed, specific feedback about what actually arrived. Comparing prices across vendors selling the same product is worth the extra few minutes, since a price meaningfully below everyone else's is worth treating as a flag rather than a bargain (see the avoiding scams guide for why). Check shipping country restrictions and stated delivery windows on the listing itself before ordering — finding out a vendor doesn't ship to your country after payment is a preventable frustration.

Verify before you buy, every time, not just for large orders. Account age, completed transaction count, and recent review history (not just the lifetime total) are the three numbers worth checking first — six-plus months of activity and 100+ completed orders is a reasonable bar for "established," though it's a floor, not a guarantee, since selective scammers deliberately build exactly this kind of track record before they pivot. Look for feedback that describes actual product quality and experience rather than generic praise, and cross-check the vendor's PGP key fingerprint against other markets or forums where they're active — a legitimate vendor signs consistently with the same key everywhere, and a mismatch is worth pausing over. Treat a vendor who's recently made a dramatic, unexplained shift in product category or pricing as a reason for extra caution, not curiosity; that pattern shows up before both exit scams and selective-scam pivots. The full vendor verification guide goes deeper on reading these signals.

Fund your wallet with Monero for the stronger privacy default, or Bitcoin when Monero isn't an option — but always route through a personal wallet first, never send directly from an exchange, since that hop is a permanent, traceable line an investigator or chain-analysis firm would love to have handed to them. Wait for at least one network confirmation before treating a deposit as settled; a balance that hasn't confirmed yet can still be reversed by a chain reorganization, however rare that is in practice. Once you place an order, the market moves your payment into escrow automatically — you don't send anything to the vendor directly, which is the entire point of using a market with escrow over a private deal. Double-check the full order total, shipping included, before confirming; a short deposit stalls the order rather than simply failing cleanly.

The dashboard order panel is where every order's actual state lives — check it rather than relying on memory of what a vendor told you. Orders move through Pending → Accepted → Shipped → Delivered, and the auto-finalize countdown starts specifically at the Shipped transition, not at order placement — a detail that matters because it means a slow-to-ship vendor doesn't eat into your response window, but a slow postal service after shipping does. Finalize once the package has actually arrived and you've confirmed the contents match the listing, not automatically the moment tracking says "delivered." If anything is wrong, open a dispute before that auto-finalize deadline — after it passes, the funds are already released and there's nothing left to hold. The dispute resolution guide and order tracking guide cover both scenarios in more depth.