People / Pair 34 of 41
An empty history and a claimed history
Fresh account, no ratings, and a line in the profile saying they have been doing this for years. Two very different sellers produce exactly that page.
Both profiles are blank in the same way
Nothing behind them yet
Somebody starting out. No record, no ratings, nothing to go on. This is not an accusation and it is not rare. Every seller with a long history spent a while looking exactly like this.
A history you cannot see from here
Somebody who traded before under another account and has started again. The history may be genuine and extensive. From your side of the screen it is still a sentence in a profile, sitting on a page with nothing else on it.
The screen gives you the same thing for both: an account with little attached to it, a handful of listings, and a claim about the past that the account is making about itself. The claim is the only difference, and a claim is free to type.
There is a third figure standing in the same doorway, which is somebody who never traded at all and has picked up the name of a seller who left. That party produces the identical page and has more reason to write the profile line than either of the other two. Any reading that cannot separate the second from the third is not a reading.
What anchors a claim of continuity
An anchor is anything outside the new account that would have to be forged as well. That is the whole of the concept. A profile line has no anchor, since the account is vouching for itself. A statement signed by a key you already had is anchored, though only in the narrow way set out at a signed message or a claim to be somebody. Something you saw announced from the old account while it was still standing is anchored by your own memory of having seen it at the time, which is worth more to you than to anybody else.
| What is offered as continuity | What it is worth to you |
|---|---|
| A line in the new profile | Nothing. The account is describing itself |
| Old totals pasted in as text | Nothing. Retyped by the party they flatter |
| A screenshot of an old page | Nothing. A picture made by whoever benefits |
| Somebody vouching in an open thread | Little. An account you also cannot anchor |
| A message signed by a key you held first | The strongest available, and it proves authorship rather than honesty |
Remove the account from its own case
Take away everything the new account says about itself and see whether any claim of continuity is still standing. If nothing is left, then for your purposes this is a new vendor, and treating it as one is simply an accurate statement of what you know.
One case sits between the two and deserves naming. An account can be handed on, sold with its history attached, or run by somebody who was not running it last year. Then the record is genuine and belongs to a party who has gone, which is worse than an empty profile in one respect: the empty profile at least admits what it is. Nothing on a page will show you that has happened, and it is another argument for letting the size of an order track what you can stand behind rather than what you have been told.
Calling it a new vendor is not a verdict on anybody. It is a description of your information. The seller may well be everything the profile says, and you can still only act on the part you can stand behind, which is the account in front of you and nothing older than it.
The asymmetry here is unusually wide
- If you treat a returning seller as new
- You go slowly with somebody who deserved better. Small first order, no particular loyalty, perhaps a slightly worse price elsewhere while you make your mind up. The cost is patience and a little money, and both are yours to spend.
- If you treat a new account as an established one
- You hand over trust nobody in the exchange has earned. That usually shows up as a larger order than you would otherwise place, on the strength of a sentence the seller wrote about themselves. The mistake is priced at whatever you sent.
One side of this pair costs you a fortnight of caution. The other costs an order, and it is the side that feels generous while you are doing it. Genuine returning sellers understand the position and expect to be treated as unknown for a while, which is itself a mild signal, though not one to lean on.
Where to go from each
- If it is a new vendor
- Order at a size you would not mind losing, follow whatever protections the market provides rather than any arrangement offered around them, and let the account build a record with you before you raise the stakes.
- If it is an anchored return
- Behave slightly better than you would with a stranger and not much. The anchor tells you who is writing, not how the next parcel will go, and the size of your order should still fit what you can actually verify.
The general habit of separating what a page asserts from what it demonstrates runs through feedback or evidence. The full set of pairings on this site is indexed at pairs.
Questions readers send about this pair
A vendor says their old account was lost. Should I believe them?
Believe it or not as you like, and order as though the account is new either way. The claim may be entirely true. It still gives you nothing you can check, and what you can check is what sets the size of a first order.
Are new sellers worse than established ones?
They are less known, which is a different thing. Everybody starts somewhere. The sensible response to not knowing is to lower what is at stake rather than to avoid the account entirely.
What would count as real proof that two accounts are the same seller?
Something the new account could not produce alone. A message signed by a key you held before any of this began comes closest, and even that establishes who is writing rather than how they will behave.