The vendor left and did not put a note on the door

Orders stop moving. Messages go nowhere. The profile may still be sitting there looking perfectly normal, which is the confusing part.

A vendor can stop operating without announcing it, without closing anything, and without any visible change to what a buyer sees. There is no mechanism that forces a notice and no penalty for not leaving one.

Departure and exit are different things

An exit means taking money that was held and disappearing with it. A departure means somebody stopped working. They overlap in appearance and not in substance, and the difference shows up in what happens to funds sitting in escrow.

If the market holds the funds, a departure is recoverable through the ordinary dispute route. It is annoying and slow and it usually works. An exit is a different animal and belongs with the market level page if it is happening at scale.

The reasons are usually boring

• They stopped because it was not worth it any more.
• Something happened in their life that has nothing to do with this.
• They lost access to the account and had no recovery set up.
• They moved to another market and did not tidy up behind them.
• They were arrested, which does happen and is never announced.

None of these produce a notice. Four of the five involve somebody who is not thinking about your order at all.

What to do about an order in flight

1. Establish whether the funds are still held by the market rather than released.
2. Open the dispute inside the window rather than waiting for the vendor to reappear. This is the whole game.
3. Say plainly in the dispute that the vendor is unresponsive and give the dates of your unanswered messages.
4. Stop ordering from that profile, even if it comes back to life. A vendor who vanished once has shown you the shape of things.

What follows from getting it right

You use the recovery route that exists instead of waiting for the person who is gone. You also avoid the wider panic, which is where this attribution really pays. A buyer who reads a single vendor departure as the market collapsing will start withdrawing, hunting for new addresses and accepting worse information, and all of that carries far more risk than the original order ever did.

The reverse error is on the removal page, where a market decision gets read as a vendor running. These two mistakes are mirror images and both are common.

Signs that come before the silence

Departures are rarely instant. Looking back afterwards, people usually find a week or two of drift that meant nothing at the time.

• Listings quietly reduced to the items that are easiest to fulfil.
• Replies getting shorter and arriving later, without anything being wrong.
• Stock marked unavailable and never restored.
• A message mentioning a break, phrased as if it were temporary.

None of this is a reason to avoid a vendor. It is a reason to keep an order small and to be quicker off the mark if it stalls. Attention is cheap and it is the only advantage available before the fact.

• Back to the cases the vendor caused
• When the market removed the profile
• The attribution rule