How Buyers and Sellers Are Protected Here: Five Clocks, and the One That Runs Against You

Every marketplace says it protects both sides. The claim is worth nothing on its own, because the interesting question is not whether protection exists but what it is made of, and here it is made of timers. Five of them run on an ordinary order. Four work in your favour. One works against you, and almost nobody knows it is there.

What follows is each clock, what starts and stops it, and what the site has actually recorded. Every figure below was measured against the live database on 31 August 2026.

Clock one: the money, which does not sit still waiting for you

When you pay, the money does not reach the seller. It is held against the order, and confirming receipt is what releases it. That part is exactly as advertised.

The part that is usually left out is what happens if you never click. Of 86,072 completed orders that reached a confirmed state, only 12,561 were confirmed by the buyer. The other 73,511, roughly six in seven, were confirmed by a background job that runs every hour and releases anything past its waiting period. The wait is counted from when the order was placed, not from delivery, and its length comes from the seller's level, between one and three days.

Two things stop that job dead. A live dispute on the order, and an open support ticket. Neither is a formality: the job checks for an active ticket before every release and skips the order entirely if it finds one.

So the practical rule is the opposite of what most buyers assume. Silence is not neutral. If something looks wrong, opening a ticket is the action that freezes the money, and it takes a few seconds.

Clock two: delivery due, and the refund you can take yourself

Every order carries a delivery deadline anchored to the moment payment completed, currently twenty four hours. If the order is not fully delivered by then you are entitled to a refund, and where only part arrived the refund is worked out proportionally from the line values rather than being all or nothing.

There is also a faster route that needs nobody's approval. On an undelivered stock, automatic or made-to-order product, a short configured wait after payment unlocks a self-serve refund of whatever has not arrived. It is currently set to about half an hour. Buyers have used the two self-serve paths on 1,022 orders, 754 through the early cancel and 268 through the delivery-based refund, with no member of staff involved in any of them.

How order delivery works covers where that button appears and why it sometimes does not.

Clock three: warranty, in hours, from delivery

Warranty here is written and displayed in hours, not days or weeks, and it starts when the order was delivered rather than when you paid. On instant stock those are minutes apart. On anything that sat processing first, the difference is most of your window.

The site-wide numbers look reassuring and are misleading. Across 16,894 listings visible under the storefront's own filter, the median warranty is twelve hours and so is the ninetieth percentile. But 5,562 of those listings, about a third, are under four hours, and 1,548 are short enough that the system treats them as having no after-sales window at all.

Splitting that by seller is where the real finding is. 1,501 of those 1,548 belong to a single seller whose entire visible catalogue carries a five minute warranty. Among the twelve largest sellers, four sit at a twelve hour median, one at twenty four hours, three at about half an hour and one at a single hour. Warranty is not a site standard with a few outliers. It is a policy each seller sets, printed on the listing, and it is the one number on the page that decides what you can do afterwards.

Clock four: the ticket, which is one thread with three parties in it

A support ticket is not a message to us. It is a single thread that the buyer, the seller and support can all see and write in, which is why it works as an evidence trail rather than a complaint box.

Across 11,891 tickets, 11,060 have a recorded resolution time. The median is a little over twenty nine hours, 4,171 closed inside a day and 787 inside an hour. Of those that reached a recorded outcome, 6,057 ended in a replacement, 2,014 in a refund and 18 were rejected outright. A buyer who opens a ticket almost always gets something.

Clock five: the dispute, and the three days that run against you

A dispute is the heavier instrument and it is close to a coin flip. Of 3,967 disputes that reached an outcome, 2,070 released the funds to the seller and 1,897 refunded the buyer. The third possible outcome in the system, cancellation, has never once been used.

The timings are the part worth reading twice. Disputes that end in a refund resolve at a median of about twenty five hours. Disputes that end with the seller keeping the money take a median of eighty six hours, and even the fastest tenth of them take more than sixty six.

That is not an accident of scheduling. Once every ticket attached to a disputed order is closed, a background job waits three days and then resolves the dispute in the seller's favour automatically. No person decides it, nothing tells you the countdown has started, and an order with any still-active ticket is skipped. The sixty six hour floor on seller-side outcomes is that timer showing up in the data.

Which gives the single most useful instruction on this page: while a dispute is open, do not let the supporting ticket close. The open conversation is what holds your position. Opening a dispute covers the form itself, the mandatory screenshot and the warranty deadline that gates the whole route.

The seller's side, which is mostly about how fast money leaves

Protection that only runs one way drives away the sellers worth buying from, so the same timers are published to them, and the payout clock is theirs.

Payouts are reviewed by a person rather than released on a schedule, which sounds slow and is not: of the 1,892 requests paid so far, half cleared in under four and a half hours and all but twelve inside a day. The migration page breaks that distribution down per seller, which is the version that matters if you are the one being paid.

Cost works differently from most marketplaces and the difference is worth stating plainly, because the old version of this page got it wrong. Orders are not taxed. A percentage is taken once, when a seller moves money out, and every payout method has a floor below which it will not run. Withdrawing earnings carries the exact figures. Separately, a buyer opening a dispute charges the seller a small percentage of that order, waived above a certain seller level, so the heavier instrument is not free at either end.

What we do not claim

Trust pages get written by adding reassurances until the page feels complete. These are the ones we could not stand behind, so they are absent.

• That a refund returns to your card or wallet automatically. It does not. The automatic path credits your site balance, immediately spendable. A return to the channel you paid from is real but is arranged by hand after a support request, because several of the routes here, crypto especially, cannot be reversed by software. No turnaround is set anywhere, so we do not quote one.
• Any statement about how the platform is secured technically. There is nothing here we could measure and publish honestly, so the section that would normally exist does not.
• That a replacement is guaranteed. It is a problem category you can select and a seller action on one delivered item. It fails outright when that seller has no unsold stock left of the same product.
• That the star ratings prove quality. Nobody can review an order they did not place and pay for, so the reviews are genuine in that sense. What the average does not survive is silence: a confirmed order with nothing written on it is filed as five stars anyway, which is why the site shows a separate count of the ones somebody typed. That count is the number worth reading. Judging a supplier works through what the two numbers look like side by side.

The short version

1. Check the warranty hours on the listing before you buy. It is per seller, and a third of live stock is under four hours.
2. Test what arrives immediately. The clock started at delivery.
3. If anything is wrong, open a ticket first. It freezes the money and it is the route that ends in a replacement.
4. Dispute only if the ticket stalls, and never let the ticket close while the dispute is live.
5. If nothing arrived at all, look for the self-serve refund before contacting anyone.