🏪 Vendor's Complete Guide

Start with a standard buyer account and build genuine history through real purchases before applying for vendor status through the dashboard — an account with zero track record applying to sell immediately is itself a pattern markets and buyers alike treat with suspicion. The vendor bond, paid at application, is a refundable deposit that exists specifically to raise the cost of setting up a fake shop purely to scam and vanish; it's not a fee, it's a filter. Your application should describe your product category and shipping capabilities in enough concrete detail that a reviewer can tell you actually understand the logistics involved, not just that you want an account — vague applications get more scrutiny, not less.

Accurate, detailed descriptions — weight, quality, origin, packaging method — do more for your reputation long-term than any amount of marketing language, since a listing that undersells or overstates what actually ships is where negative reviews come from regardless of how good the product itself is. Strip every photo's EXIF metadata before uploading (ExifTool or MAT2 handle this) — a photo's metadata can carry GPS coordinates, device information, and timestamps that have nothing to do with the product and everything to do with identifying where and how it was taken. Price by actually checking what comparable listings charge rather than guessing, and give buyers real shipping options with honest delivery windows for both domestic and international orders — an optimistic estimate that's routinely wrong generates exactly the kind of "where's my order" messages and disputes that a realistic one avoids.

Your reputation score is the single asset that determines whether buyers choose you over a competitor selling the same thing, and it's built slowly and lost quickly — ship within 48 hours of payment as a consistent habit, not an occasional best effort, since processing speed is one of the few things buyers can compare objectively across vendors before ever placing an order. Respond to messages promptly, and when something genuinely goes wrong, resolve it proactively with a replacement or refund rather than making the buyer fight for it — the buyers who get treated well after a problem often leave more detailed, more credible reviews than the ones whose order simply arrived on time. The asymmetry that matters here: one badly handled negative experience does measurably more damage than one positive review does good, so consistency matters more than occasional excellence.

Vendor OPSEC carries higher stakes than buyer OPSEC, because a vendor account generates a sustained pattern of activity rather than a single transaction — use a dedicated device running Tails OS exclusively for vendor operations, never mixed with anything personal, so nothing on that device can ever be cross-referenced with your real identity. Keep every communication inside encrypted channels, and destroy customer shipping addresses immediately after dispatch — holding a growing database of buyer addresses is pure liability with no upside once a package has shipped. Withdraw in Monero specifically to avoid leaving a traceable blockchain history tying your vendor income together over time, the same logic covered in the Bitcoin privacy guide for anyone still handling BTC. Rotate PGP keys on a schedule (every 3-6 months is reasonable) and always announce the rotation to buyers with a signed transition message — an unannounced key change is exactly what a compromised account looks like from the outside.