How to read a Tor vendor review page
The star rating is almost useless. Everything you need to know is a level down, in the shape of the reviews and when they were written.
Look at disputed orders, not stars
Every vendor page shows two numbers, orders completed and orders disputed. The completed number is easy to inflate with self-buys. The disputed number is not. If a vendor has 400 orders and 3 disputes, that is a real vendor. If a vendor has 400 orders and 55 disputes, that is a vendor you do not want.
Ratios above about 5 percent are a red flag. Above 10 percent means something is wrong and it is either the product, the shipping, or the seller ignoring messages. Any of the three ends with you filing a dispute too.
Recent reviews matter more than the total
A vendor with 4.9 stars overall and their last twenty reviews at 3 stars is going through something. Maybe their supply source changed. Maybe they got hit by a bust and are rebuilding. Maybe they stopped caring. Whatever it is, the number you should trust is the last twenty, not the lifetime average.
Scroll to the bottom of the reviews. Read the ones from the last week. If a pattern appears (late shipping, weight short, wrong product) you are about to enter that pattern.
The clean streak after a bad review
Watch for this exact pattern: one honest bad review, followed immediately by four or five glowing five-star reviews with generic wording, followed by regular mixed reviews again. That looks like the vendor bought a cluster of fake reviews to bury the real one. Almost every product I have watched this happen on ended up in a dispute for the next buyer.
The fake reviews often have giveaway lines. "Fast shipping quality product." "Trustworthy vendor, will buy again." "A plus vendor, thanks." Real reviews are messier and mention specifics.
Product-specific complaints stack
If reviews across three different listings from the same vendor all say the same thing (stealth was thin, package arrived open, tracking never updated) that is a vendor problem. If reviews on one listing say the product was weak but reviews on other listings say the products were great, that is a single bad batch, not a bad vendor. Different response.
Sort by listing when you can. Some markets let you filter reviews to just the item you are considering. Do that.
Timing tells
Look at when the reviews were left. A vendor at 300 orders where 250 of them landed in the same four days is not a vendor. That is someone spinning up a profile for a scam. Real order flow is spread out over months.
Similarly, if a review says the order shipped Monday and got delivered Tuesday but the buyer is on another continent, either the buyer is lying, the vendor faked the review, or the shipping method is illegal enough that the buyer will never post honestly again. None of those help you.
Read the dispute-related reviews carefully
Some markets flag reviews from disputed orders. Read those first. They tell you what the vendor does when things go wrong. A vendor who reships or refunds during a dispute is a vendor you can risk. A vendor who ghosts, or who argues in the dispute thread that the buyer is lying, or who threatens the buyer, is a vendor you back away from no matter how good their listings look.
Look at how the vendor writes
The listing text says something. If it is polished, has stealth information, ships-from and ships-to countries, average delivery times and an explicit refund policy, that is a vendor who takes the operation seriously. If it is one line and a product photo, they are treating it as a side project. Side projects vanish overnight.
The two minute rule
Read at least twenty of the last thirty reviews. Skim the disputed count. Check the last message from the vendor in a review thread. Look at how spread out the review dates are. Two minutes. If anything you find during those two minutes makes you pause, close the tab and look at a different vendor. The two minutes is what saves people from filing disputes for a week afterward.