The Nexus vendor system, structural report
How the vendor system is organised, how new vendors get on, how buyers read the numbers.
The vendor system on Nexus Market is what most buyers actually interact with day to day. This report walks through the structural pieces, how a new vendor gets on, what the numbers on a vendor page mean, and how a buyer reads them.
Getting on
A new vendor posts a refundable bond in coin before the first listing goes live. The bond is calibrated by the operator and adjusted periodically as market conditions change. Its size is meaningful enough that a scam-bait vendor considering a single open-take-vanish sequence has to weigh the bond loss against the expected haul. In practice this filters out most casual scam attempts because the expected haul on a single new-vendor account is usually less than the bond.
The bond is returned after a clean thirty-day probation period during which the vendor completes at least a handful of orders with no unresolved disputes. Bonds are not withheld indefinitely, they are returned on a schedule.
What appears on a vendor page
Vendor name (and any past aliases if the vendor migrated from another storefront), order count total, disputed order count, finalisation ratio, average shipping time, published PGP public key, current active listings, and a review feed sorted by date. This is the standard layout on any current Nexus mirror.
Reading the dispute ratio
Dispute count divided by total orders. A vendor with 400 total orders and 3 disputes runs at 0.75 percent, which is healthy. A vendor with 400 orders and 40 disputes runs at 10 percent, which is not.
The Bureau's rule of thumb: below 5 percent is healthy, 5 to 10 percent is a yellow flag (read recent reviews for what is happening), above 10 percent is a red flag (skip). The exception to the last rule is a vendor whose product category naturally produces more disputes (fragile packaging, ambiguous quality metrics, complex configuration), where a higher baseline is normal. But even for those categories, above 15 percent is uniformly a bad sign.
Reading the finalisation ratio
Orders that closed cleanly divided by all completed orders. Cleanly means both parties signed the release without a dispute. A healthy vendor sits above 95 percent. Below 90 percent means one in ten orders required a moderator to arbitrate, which is worth investigating.
Reading recent reviews
Scroll to the last twenty reviews. Ignore the lifetime average, it hides recent decline. If the last twenty are noticeably worse than the vendor's older reviews, the vendor is going through something. Read the review text, not just the star rating. Look for consistent complaint patterns (packaging quality, shipping delays, product weight or purity).
The PGP key requirement
Every vendor is required to publish a PGP public key at registration. This is not a legal requirement, it is an operational one enforced by the storefront. Buyers are expected to encrypt shipping details to the vendor key before sending anything sensitive through the on-storefront message system. Even though the message system is itself encrypted by the storefront, layering a personal PGP key over the top means the storefront database sees only ciphertext for the address fields.
The average shipping time
Calculated from the last thirty days of successfully completed orders. Vendors with a low average that suddenly spikes are worth extra caution: something changed on their side (maybe they got busier, maybe they lost their supply source, maybe they are dragging out shipments to buy time). A vendor with a naturally slow shipping baseline (some international shipping windows are inherently long) is not automatically worse than a fast one, if the reviews say the vendor communicates through the wait.
Read time before order time
Two minutes on a vendor page saves a week of dispute mail. The Bureau's standing recommendation for a first order with any vendor: read the dispute ratio, read the finalisation ratio, read the last twenty reviews. Two minutes total. If anything you see in those two minutes makes you pause, choose a different vendor. That is the whole vendor-selection workflow.