Vendors are vetted
Vendors are properly vetted before they can sell
What vetting actually does
Application screening exists and it does something real. It filters out the laziest attempts, adds a cost to setting up, and means an account cannot appear and start listing within a minute. That is not nothing, and platforms without it are visibly worse.
What it screens for is commitment rather than honesty. Somebody willing to spend effort and money on an application is more likely to intend to trade than to run a quick scam, and that correlation is the whole mechanism. It is a filter on seriousness, not on integrity.
What it cannot do
- Predict a future exit. The classic failure is a vendor who trades honestly for a long time and then does not. Nothing at application time sees that coming, and a vendor with a long clean record is the one with the most accumulated trust to spend at once.
- Detect an account changing hands. Accounts get sold. The vetting happened to whoever applied, not to whoever is answering messages today.
- Assess what is actually supplied. No platform inspects anything.
- Survive a compromise. An account taken over is a vetted account in somebody else's hands, and vendor accounts are attacked far harder than buyer ones precisely because they carry accumulated standing.
Reading a profile instead
The vetting happened once, in the past, to somebody. The profile is continuous and it is where your attention belongs.
- Volume behind the rating. A perfect score across nine orders tells you almost nothing. The same score across nine hundred tells you a lot.
- Recency. Reputation built two years ago describes a vendor who existed two years ago. Weight the recent window heavily.
- Dispute rate rather than count. High volume vendors accumulate disputes as arithmetic. The rate is signal, the count is noise.
- How disputes resolved. Losing one occasionally is normal. Losing them the same way repeatedly is a pattern.
- Consistency. A long record in one category plus a brand new listing in an unrelated one deserves more caution than either fact alone.
The limit of all of it
Reputation predicts behaviour until it does not, and the failure mode is always the same shape. That is why escrow arrangements matter more than reputation does. Reputation tells you who to deal with, and escrow limits the cost of being wrong, which is a different job.