Verify an online seller before you pay.

Verifying a seller is a short, concrete procedure. It takes a few minutes, it happens before any money moves, and it is almost entirely about one question: is there a real, identifiable party on the other side of this transaction?

Everything else — the listing, the photographs, the reviews — is material the seller controls. Their identity is the part they cannot invent cheaply.

Recordwell works from a first and last name. So the procedure begins with asking for one.

How that request lands is the first piece of information you get, and often the most useful.

A private seller giving up a couch will hand over a name without thinking. A trader shipping goods will give a business name and usually a registration number.

Evasion at this point — a refusal, a change of subject, an offended tone — has told you what you needed to know before you spent anything.

What you check next depends on which of two things you are dealing with, and mixing them up is the common error.

For a private seller, run the name and look for an ordinary adult footprint: an age that fits, places lived, nothing filed that contradicts what you have been told.

A quiet result here is not a warning. People who rent, who are young, or who have moved recently leave very little behind, and most private sellers are exactly those people.

What matters is consistency. If the name returns a person in a different state from the one the listing claims, that is worth asking about before you travel anywhere.

For a business, the registration is the anchor, and it is free to verify in the register for the state or country named.

Check that the entity exists, that it is in good standing, and — this is the part people skip — that its registered date matches the history the seller claims.

A company incorporated three weeks ago describing itself as long established is the single clearest contradiction you can find, and it takes a minute to find it.

Registration proves existence, not honesty. A registered company can still be a poor counterparty; what registration gives you is someone identifiable to pursue.

Then check the name of the person you are actually dealing with, not only the company. A business is a shell around people, and the people are who answers your messages.

Whatever the seller type, confirm any match on two independent details before you rely on it. Names repeat, and attaching a stranger's record to a seller is both unfair and misleading to you.

Now the account itself, which carries its own evidence.

Look at how old the account is and whether its history is uneven in the way real activity always is. Steady, recent, uniform positive feedback is easier to manufacture than a decade of ordinary use.

Read the negative reviews specifically, and read the seller's replies to them. How someone handles a complaint is the most predictive thing on the page.

Check whether the reviews describe the category of goods actually on sale. Feedback earned selling small accessories says little about a seller now listing expensive electronics.

With identity settled, the rest of the work is structuring the transaction so that a mistake stays recoverable.

Keep the conversation and the payment on the platform that would handle a dispute. Protection schemes only cover what they can see.

Pay by a method with recourse. A card payment or a platform's own protected checkout can be disputed; an instant transfer between people generally cannot.

Write down what you actually agreed: the exact item, its condition, what is included, the price, and when it ships. A one-line description in a message thread is worth more than a memory later.

For anything with a serial number, ask for it before paying and check it against the manufacturer or, for a phone, against the network blocklist.

For a vehicle, get the identification number in advance and run the history and title check yourself rather than accepting a report the seller supplies.

For anything expensive enough to hurt, use an escrow service or a professional inspection. Both cost a fraction of the loss they prevent.

If you are collecting in person, the logistics matter as much as the checks.

Meet in daylight, in a public place — many police stations now have a marked exchange area for exactly this purpose.

Bring someone with you, tell another person where you are going, and do not carry more cash than the agreed amount.

Inspect the item before you pay, not after. Test whatever can be tested on the spot, and be willing to walk away over something that does not match the description.

Once the transaction is done, keep the record for longer than feels necessary.

Save the listing, the message thread, the payment confirmation and any photographs of the item as received. Dispute windows are shorter than most people assume, and they close quietly.

Check the item properly within the first day or two, while every route still available to you is open.

If something has gone wrong, act in that order: the platform's dispute process first, then your card issuer or bank, then the fraud-reporting channel where you live.

Our page on uncovering online scammers covers reporting and recovery in detail, including what to do when a payment cannot be reversed.

For the catalogue of marketplace scripts themselves — on both the buyer and the seller side — see the guide to avoiding marketplace scams.

And if the seller is a company you will deal with repeatedly rather than once, the deeper version of this check is on the verify a business contact page.