How to Buy & Sell

How-to-Buy-and-Sell-on-Privacy-Interface

Basic Privacy Interface – Market Interface use.

The Privacy Interface is safe, ethical, easy to use and has unrivalled ethical and conduct standards to maximize the efficiency and quality of your online shopping experience.

This is a practical guide to selling and buying on this marketplace. Consider also reading the Ethical and Efficient Rules guide and read the Ethical Terms and Conditions prior to listing items for sale as a store. The Ethical and Efficient Rules contain essential information on how this marketplace protects buyers & sellers.

The Privacy Interface’s: ‘Market Interface’ enforces professional accountability, integrity, purchasing clarity and ethical conduct rules for sellers and buyers, ensuring that sellers and buyers abide by fair, honest, effective standards. As the Privacy Interface’s name suggests: all whilst enabling customer sought-after privacy protection standards and provides a platform for purchasing efficiency for all users whilst simultaneously catering to and empowering environmental buying choices and specific country location & manufacturing origin choices. This has a unique appeal to millions of emerging customers and sellers.

The process of sign-up to first Purchase and incoming delivery.

  1. A Customer places an order: this automatically creates a buying account. Alternatively a customer can sign up with an email, completes a reCaptcha, reads an email, clicks a link & logs into a new account.
  2. When Buying → When at the checkout you only need a (debit) card payment method and delivery address to facilitate the buying of and delivery of a bought item at the checkout. Order, delivery, email, phone and payment info is all completed on one quick loading secure page. Transactions are conducted securely via an inline secure payment gateway.

Item Buying Account Setup / Purchase complete.


Your money never goes directly to a seller, ever, Apex Interface Ltd pays the seller the equivalent amount (minus 5% & 25p) from Apex Interface Ltd. So Apex Interface Ltd acts as your refund protection.

Privacy Interface upholds the integrity of sales payments, initially sellers do not receive payment until after 15 days (+delivery time, when longer than 15 days) thus Privacy Interface acts as your order protection to ensure a worry free environment.

Additionally your card details do not go directly to a seller, ever. This is both a privacy protection measure and an effective security measure. All transactions appear with the reference PrivacyInt, PrivacyInterface.com / Apex Interface Ltd instead of your name from the perspective of the seller.

Privacy Interface transactions are 70%+ more secure than other marketplaces’, coming directly via debit card sources alone through Privacy Interface. Internet wide: a reported 70% of online fraud occurs via loan based Credit cards so Privacy Interface does not allow the use of loan based (Credit) cards this protects Privacy Interface sellers from hastle & fraudulent users. This ban on solely Credit cards (all Debit cards are accepted) also means sellers can trust new buyers and dispatch without hesitation or waiting periods. Enabling the efficient 38hr dispatch rule.

Both parties in every single transaction (Buyers & Sellers) are known to Privacy Interface whilst protecting the privacy of buyers and sellers from eachother. This is highly valued by non-business individuals who have items to sell and do not want their private home address public and buyers who do not want the risk of having their data sold or their home address, phone number or email address signed up to spam lists by shady companies potentially everytime they buy online.


Additional functionality and guidance:

  • Remember: Buyers can input an order name/pseudonym at checkout for extra privacy.
  • Remember: Buyers can use a secondary email for the email sellers receive to protect their primary email from potential contact. The Privacy Interface system delivers all necessary automated order status emails. Note: Unnecessarily attempting to contact customers or sellers may lead to the termination of an account.
  • Remember: when buying, postage is based on weight, so it is more efficient to buy less often and when you do buy, buy in weight-bulk, this enables you to buy multiple items within one postage cost level (example: up to 2kg = 1x £3, Royal Mail 2nd Class Small Package) saving you money and saving the environment packaging whilst reducing the carbon footprint and cost of your shopping deliveries overall if you take advantage of this weight based postage system.

As an ethical ecommerce website Privacy Interface advises you to combine orders. Plan ahead when purchasing and save on long term costs.

The weight based postage system enables you to buy items without the unethical practice of ‘hidden’ postage costs incorporated into their base item prices as found on markets that allow the misleading notion of ‘free postage’.

Educational Note: This is what makes ‘free postage’ a misleading notion and has been a banned, unethical practice here at Privacy Interface from the start, unlike almost everywhere else where it is unethically considered ‘normal’, with customers left uneducated as to the reality of what enables it.


  • How to see postage costs: Shipping weight classes and at what weight they go up to the next weight class can be seen in the shipping rates tab on all products when setup properly by a seller in strict accordance with solely their national postage providers’ postage stamp costs with no extra costs permitted.
  • The postage auto-calculation system combines multiple orders into one in the basket and at checkout within the weight range for a postage level (per seller, if ordering from multiple sellers in one order).
  • Which country you manually set as your delivery address determines which national or international postage rates you see. Assuming the seller has setup their postage zones for x country. If you see no postage rates for an item in the shipping rates tab the seller of that item does not sell to the country of your address.
  • Make an account and set it with your delivery address to see delivery rates for your specific country. The website assigns a theoretical default UK to the calculation for shipping for non signed in users. You can also calculate delivery costs yourself by checking the national postage provider for x location to x location with the item weight. This works for us as Privacy Interface sellers all use the base, lowest prices found on their national postage providers price lists.
  • You can manually search for items by their country location to see items that are within your country to get items from more local sources with lower postage costs, this enables you to patriotically support your national sellers whilst simultaneously lowering the carbon miles of your orders.
  • If you do not find the product you want to buy then find the external manufacturer, company or wholesaler that sells that product and encourage them to sign up and sell here to reduce your purchasing costs and enable them to sell with lower payment processor rates (and subsequent prices) and better standards, holding them to account, unlike when using the manufacturer or shop’s own website. Getting a seller onto Privacy Interface to then buy from them through this system as a ‘privacy interface’ also prevents them from being able to unethically sell your purchasing data.
  • Privacy Interface can in effect be used as a safe, neutral platform to arrange buying & selling where no ethical violations, exploitation, unethical practices nor low standards occur, enforced through strict, enforced standards and a safe, pure evidence based return and refund policy. Additionally you will not get spam when purchasing here and sellers do not have to engage in the stressful chore of moderating feedback or shop profiles against spam.
  • Companies selling on Privacy Interface must abide by strict ethical guidelines preventing them from selling or even obtaining your name and purchasing history data. Companies must also abide by quality performance standards: the 38hr dispatch rule and have no allowance to spam customers & more benefits. By getting a Company/Person/Wholesaler/Shop owner to signup to use Privacy Interface to sell here likely means that you can buy their products cheaper, faster, without data privacy theft and with less stress .

*Note: Privacy Interface protects sellers with strong anti-fraud measures. New buyer accounts are subject to strict anti-fraud measures, such as the seller requested cancellation of orders with unreasonably high values or destinations. Privacy Interface determines the validity of seller cancellations after they occur. If found to be invalid or as a result of a seller covering a mistake, a seller will receive an account strike.


The process of sign-up to first Sale and Outgoing delivery:

  • If Seller > The account starts as a buyer account functional for buying (requires payment method and delivery destination at checkout) and is open but requires verification to create product listings.
  • Accounts opened on behalf of external companies must have the company full legal name as the store name which becomes the URL extension.
  • Only Selling Accounts opened by individuals not legally associated with or working for any registered company may have a custom name and URL set that is not bound to a company identity. Individual seller accounts should have reasonable names relevant to the products they intend to sell or a name which does not belong to any other party and does not make them out to be an official category of item type. This name should be composed of 2 or 3 words and cannot include terms such as ‘quality’ or ‘value’ or any term designed to manipulate buyers.
  • The Seller submits verification details securely: A Privacy Interface staff member checks this information. The Seller is now permitted to sell.

Have these basic tools ready:

Kitchen Scales (or other Weight/Mass Measuring devices)
Ruler/Measuring tape (or other Size Measuring devices)
Basic Camera / Phone Camera (or any Image capturing device)

  • The Seller should take the time between signing up and becoming verified to setup the postal rates relative to weight for your country and any international methods you ship to: for all weight categories from 0→20kg or up to an amount after which you have setup your maximum shipping weight setting. Note: If you are a UK seller you can copy the Royal mail settings used by the Apex Interface store, these are the default UK Royal mail online prices. Each postage speed class is a separate table input in the above manner per value. It takes approx 20-30mins to setup your entire postage table (see below for time saving logic).
  • Once your weight tables for postage are setup the auto-calc will automatically do all of the postage costs for all of the items you ever list, for you with no need to input or select postage methods for individual items. This initial setup will save you hours in the future when listing items over time.
  • If you update your national or international postage cost tables, if/when national or international postage costs change in your specific country the system will automatically apply this change for you on all your prior and future listings. Convenient!
  • When customers add items, the auto-calc will accurately select only the weight-applicable postage rates for the customers’ total order weight at the checkout! Note: You will read how to correctly configure your item weight, that this system uses, further down the page.
  • Check the websites of your national postage provider for a PDF or list of their prices relative to weight. You will need to input these in the format ‘equal to and above’ meaning the right-hand column value (cost) is 1 below the left-hand column value (weight) when copying the tables from the way it is presented in most national postage provider cost lists (below and up to). You must start at 0 with a price for 0.0kg, then 1 & 2kg (or whatever intervals are available with the given postage speed or distance method) then upwards. You must input the rates up to 20kg or set a maximum weight setting limit to cap your upper postage weight limit. If there is no 20kg rate with your national postage provider, either set the weight limit to the last rate available or manually multiply upwards from the highest classification (and do not sell oversized things that might use the whole 20kg class which cannot be shipped in multiple 2kg packages or that have a high size/weight ratio exceeding any normal postal package size limits).
  • These numbers cannot differ from the listed national postage costs. The postage providers cannot be any of the banned postage couriers: (e.g. PD, DHL, MyHermes, UPS, TNT, GLS) as listed in the Ethical and Efficient Rules. You must use only the national postage provider for your country (e.g. Royal Mail) or the private company that fulfills the national postage contract as they have been deemed most capable of fulfilling such to have been awarded the national service contract. Any seller reported as using banned postage couriers by customers or in their postage rate settings will recieve a strike on a per-instance basis and will likely exceed 3 strikes and become banned. Note: Sellers who have their own personal couriers are the sole exception to this, where the seller can personally and legally guarantee the safety of items in delivery. Sellers cannot charge higher rates for their personal courier efforts or company drivers above that of the national postage provider rates for the same weight ranges.

Note: Setting any postage profit making margins or adding in hidden ‘packaging’ costs onto the postage prices and engaging in the de-facto ‘sale of postage’ will result in the closure of your selling and buying account and the deduction of all amounts made from such. You must setup a weight postage table for the lowest price or economy postage speed within your national postage provider area available to you for the delivery of items. Setting up additional higher speed or protected postage rates for customers to choose from such as 1st class, express, insured, tracked or signed is optional. Selling internationally is also optional. The lowest cost option must always be available.

Postage cost must reflect the postage cost (alone) of transporting a defined weight range of items to a destination. All physical deliveries must have a postage cost that is as cheap or cheaper as the national standard for that size and speed of postage.

Note: weight settings are equal to and above. List methods all the way up to 20kg / use the maximum weight input limiting value option or end up paying out of pocket for postage above your last rate. The Checkout auto-calc prevents orders above 20kg.
  • The Seller clicks add product and then edits product details fully on the next page. The product enters a pending list: Apex Interface staff members check it is set up properly and publishes the product.
  • Before listing your 1st product ensure that you understand and abide by the Product advertising/listing name rules as detailed in Section 47 and 48 of the Terms and Conditions: No misleading terminology…
  • You must assign the weight and national location for every order. The ‘Item Location’ attribute is essential as this makes it easier for customers to know which items are in which country and to search by country so as to only see items with domestic postage cost levels. If you do not put which country your item is in currently you will miss out massively on sales. Weight: The weight must always be input and should be rounded up by 0.01kg to account for packaging. For items that require a box you should factor in the weight of the edge wall of a box it would rest against in a theroetical multiple-item order. Together this ensures that multiple-item orders collectively equal the correct weight of the items and a box. This is important if and when the order total weight is close to a postal weight/cost rate boundary. This additional weight amount cannot exceed more than 1/10th of the item weight. For reference a thin cardboard box at the maximum possible size for a UK small package (45cmx35cmx16cm) is only 0.2kg. Some boxes can be as light as 0.01kg. Some items only require a padded card envelope or bubblewrap and waterproof paper covering with a thin card insert (such as stronger modern retail books & DVD cases) or occupy an insignificant volume area when inside a multiple item order of larger items.
  • Additional Item Attribute Criteria: The Item ‘Made in’ attribute is very important to enable ethical shopping choices. This does give advantage to items made in the country of the buyer and not certain other countries. However do not be reluctant to input ‘China’ as the item ‘Made in’ attribute, as most items are made in China. (Remember: items with inherently low manufacturing quality, as assessed visually, cannot be Condition 1 even when fresh from a factory or import…). Customers will avoid sellers that withold obvious information and any obvious effort to manipulate buyers over item origin or conceal item origin systematically will result in account strikes if deemed systematic and misleading in intention.
  • Fill in as much information as you can on the item so that your item appears in more criteria searches: This is especially important for the Environmental and QC Certification attributes. The Icons such as WWF, FCC, FSC or RoHs can be found stamped on the bottom of items or on the sales tag or sales cards of products and can have a big impact on whether your item sells. For some customers they will only buy items from sustainable sources. ‘Item colour’ is very optional and is primarily for use with clothes, fashion items and other items where buyers may wish to have the option to search by colour as well as seeing item colour in the description or item title where appropriate.
  • If you do not have a size reference or gauge in the picture you must specify the full 3x item dimensions. This is to ensure customers can accurately see what they are buying. Size references should be universal and size gauges must have atleast 1 dimension measured.
  • The pending product listing status for new sellers is very important for new sellers as it prevents you from listing until you have your postage and order details set up correctly. You can edit your item when it is in pending status and are encouraged to do so if you need to fill in more details. This pending order status helps reduce the number of errors as well as prevents spam listings.

Remember: Market Psychology Practices such as pricing items at any decimal variation (the keyboard input of decimal points does not work via conventional typing input on this website, making this rule clear and hard to accidentally violate), including the infamous .99p/.50p etc or any decimal based visual price perception manipulations will result in account strikes or account closure.

3 account strikes results in account closure. This maintains the high selling standards environment and the importance of reading the ethical guidelines and terms and conditions. Privacy Interface will always display in pounds to avoid the potential for visual manipulation employed in lower value currencies.

  • A seller receives an order: The seller must dispatch this order within 38hours. The seller marks an order as ‘completed’ from their perspective only once an order has been dispatched and proof of dispatch is gained, which can be requested of them by Privacy Interface. Where a tracking service is used the seller must input the tracking number into the order details from the order form. When orders are made after 7am (seller timezone) on the calendar day before a day when postal services do not operate (e.g. Sunday) the order must be dispatched on the calendar day immediately afterward (e.g. Monday) and within postal collection time for that postal collection system.
  • After a Seller has listed 50 items correctly over several days and sold 10 they can publish products without oversight: however a seller must ensure that after clicking to ‘add product’ with basic details input, the seller must then designate the listing as a ‘draft’ until all form fields are entered and checked, especially weight and item location.
  • After 15 days (or until the end of a maximum delivery date, if beyond 15 days) a seller can request the withdrawal of generated income. Selling on Privacy Interface you receive 95% & -25p of your earnings paying just 5% & -25p per sale (listing is always free and there are no hidden defacto listing fees). This fee is for the act of final sale.

This low, ethical commission rate, is just one of the huge advantages earned by the ethical and high standards sellers on the Privacy Interface Market Interface.

Note: This is a privacy protecting platform. Currently solely your bank, Stripe payment processor and Privacy Interface are the parties who handle your information in the processing of orders. Privacy Interface further development will seek to create a full Privacy Interface payment processor system and Apex Interface Bank Accounts in order to create a further degree of privacy in the future, whilst retaining full internal security and verification to prevent exploitation.


Sell your items here with clear descriptions, clear-cut prices, cost efficient multiple-item delivery potential and reward your selling efforts through supplying our customers by saving our customers money.