Questions people actually ask

By checking it against the PGP-signed canary. The market signs its list of current addresses with a public key, and if the signature verifies, the address is the one the market says it is. The whole check takes a minute once you have the key imported, and it is the difference between trusting a link and verifying one. The verification guide walks through the exact steps.

A flat commission on each sale, currently 3%, plus whatever the vendor charges for the item. There is no fee to browse and no fee to register. The commission is the only standing cost, and it is what keeps the escrow, the moderation, and the servers paid for. It is kept low on purpose, because a high percentage compounds into a tax on the goods themselves.

Monero, and only Monero. The market does not take Bitcoin, and it does not take any other coin, because Monero is the one that is hardest to trace. If you hold a different coin, you swap it for Monero first, and the getting-Monero guide covers the fast way and the careful way, and the threshold where your bank starts asking questions.

About twenty minutes, which is the confirmation window. The payment leaves your wallet, the market waits for the network to agree it is real, and then the order moves into escrow. During that window the order is in a holding state, and that is normal, not a sign of trouble. The most common mistake is sending a second payment before the first one has cleared, which is how people end up paying twice.

Escrow is where your money sits from the moment it clears until the order is done. It is a multisig arrangement, which means the funds are locked behind more than one key and no single party, not even the admin, can release them alone. The window is between seven and fourteen days, scaled to the vendor, and it ends on its own when the timer runs out. You do not have to click anything to finalize, though some established vendors can release early.

You open a dispute from the order, and the vendor gets a window to respond. If the two of you do not agree in that window, an admin steps in and makes a call, usually within a few days. The disputes that win are the specific ones, a named expectation from the listing and a measured reality that contradicts it, and the ones that lose are the vague ones. The disputes guide covers the evidence that actually carries weight.

It depends on the region, and the honest answer is a range, not a date. Domestic orders in the US and Canada commonly arrive within a week or two of dispatch. Intra-European orders are similar, with a border crossing adding a few days where one is involved. Australia and the wider Pacific take the longest of the common destinations, and Latin America is the widest spread of all. The shipping guide has the full breakdown by region.

No. The market is built to work without it, which is one of the reasons it is set up the way it is. If you run Tor Browser at its highest security setting, JavaScript is off by default, and the market still loads, still lets you log in, and still lets you buy. That is a design choice, not an accident, and it means the browser setting that protects you does not cost you the ability to use the site.

Your seed phrase is the password, and it is the only copy of your account. If you have the phrase, you can recover access. If you do not, the account is effectively locked, because the market cannot prove you are the owner without it. The note on losing a seed covers the recovery path, what it costs, and the one thing to do before you lose it at all, which is to write the phrase down on paper.

Yes, and that is the design. The people who run the market are the people who mediate the disputes, and the smallness of the team is deliberate, because a large administration is a large target and a slow one. The trade-off is that the same people who build the rules are the ones who apply them, and the honest answer to whether that is a conflict of interest is that it is, and the mitigation is that the team has been around long enough that its record is the argument for it.

Most of them do, and the specific answer depends on the vendor, not the market. The market is the platform, and each vendor chooses where they ship, so the question to ask is not "does the market ship there" but "does this vendor ship there," and the vendor page shows the regions they cover. If a vendor does not list your region, the order will not reach you, no matter how good the rest of the listing is.