Sell on ShadowVault
Vendors are admitted on evidence, not on a form. The bar is dispatch reliability: if you can post accurate stock and ship it inside your stated window, the vetting is short. If you cannot, the bond is what pays the buyers you disappoint.
Bond
Every vendor posts a bond before their first listing goes live. It is sized to the category and to your declared monthly volume, held in escrow alongside order funds, and returned 30 days after your last open row closes if you exit clean. Against a ruling that finds you at fault, the bond pays out before anything else — the buyer is made whole from it rather than from a queue.
Bond is not a subscription and it is not burned on a first mistake. A single forfeiture is survivable. Two inside 90 days puts you on probation, where your listings stay up but new orders route behind everyone else in search. Three removes you from the market.
Vetting
Bring a verifiable history. A vendor from another market is checked on their PGP-signed feedback thread, not on a screenshot of a profile page. New vendors with no history start in one category at a low bond ceiling and earn their way out of it — that ceiling is a limit on our exposure, not a judgement on your product.
You will be asked for three things and nothing more: a PGP key that matches your listing signature, a dispatch window you can actually hold, and a sample order shipped to a check address. The sample is bought by us at list price and confirmed like any other order.
What gets you delisted
- Selling stock you do not have. The commonest fault by a wide margin. Reprice freely; letting a listing oversell silently does not.
- Missing your own dispatch window twice in a rolling 30 days, with no signed notice to the buyers.
- Substituting product without flagging it on the order — a different vintage, region or batch than the listing revision the buyer paid against.
- Answering the docket in prose instead of evidence. A rebuttal with no tracking string, postmark hash or signed manifest is a rebuttal that loses.
- Off-market settlement. Asking buyers to pay outside escrow, which forfeits the only leverage they have on you.
Fees
| Line | Rate | Charged |
|---|
Bulk listings
Listings of 25 units or more price down automatically. The discount is applied to the escrow fee on each settled order in the listing, not to the sticker price, so buyers see one number and you keep the margin.
| Units listed | Fee discount | Effective escrow fee |
|---|---|---|
| 1–24 | — | 4% |
| 25–99 | 5% | 3.8% |
| 100–499 | 12% | 3.52% |
| 500+ | 20% | 3.2% |
Bulk stock is priced at post, not at upload. The tier you enter is bound when the listing goes live; editing the unit count afterwards re-binds the tier and re-quotes the listing.