Thinking about selling
This is not buying with extra steps. The exposure is different in kind, and the parts that are hardest are not the parts people ask about.
How the risk differs
| Buyer | Vendor | |
|---|---|---|
| Exposure duration | Per order, ends on delivery | Continuous, for as long as the account exists |
| What a compromise costs | A balance | Years of reputation, an order flow that can be redirected, and the ability to talk to many buyers as a trusted party |
| Attack pressure | Occasional and opportunistic | Constant and targeted, because the account is worth far more |
| Capital at risk | What you spend | A bond, held stock, and unsettled orders at the same time |
| Time | Minutes per order | Messages, disputes and packing are a job with hours attached |
| Exit | Stop whenever | Winding down without abandoning open orders takes weeks |
The part nobody asks about
Customer service. The overwhelming majority of the work is answering messages, most of them from people who are anxious, some from people who are wrong, and a few from people trying to manipulate the dispute process. It is repetitive, it is time sensitive, and being bad at it costs you rulings.
People imagine the hard part is the product or the operational security. The hard part is that the job is mostly correspondence, done under a deadline, where every reply becomes evidence in a process you might later be judged in.
Why vendor accounts get attacked harder
Because a compromised vendor account is a phishing platform with the credibility already built in. It can message buyers who trust it, redirect payments, and trade on years of accumulated standing before anyone notices. That makes it worth far more than a buyer account and it means the verification habits have to be stricter rather than equal.
- Assume every unexpected message is hostile until it verifies, especially ones referencing fees, policy changes or settlement problems.
- Nothing legitimate ever asks for credentials or a wallet seed. Vendor targeted forgeries lean on urgency about money, because that is what works on somebody running a business.
- The vendor channel is impersonated constantly precisely because vendors expect operational messages, so an unexpected one clears the suspicion threshold more easily than it would for a buyer.
Before you commit anything
- Read the fee structure and the bond terms in full, and work out what happens to the bond in every way this could end, not just the good one.
- Read the dispute rules from the vendor side. They are not symmetrical with the buyer side and the differences matter.
- Work out your time cost honestly. Messages and disputes, not packing.
- Decide how you will wind down before you start. A vendor who cannot exit cleanly ends up abandoning open orders, which is how otherwise honest people end up looking like an exit scam.
- Generate a fresh identity and key for this. Reusing anything from a buyer identity links them permanently.
If you are still interested after that, the cost page puts the same reasoning against the buyer side, and the comparison is instructive.