How the Accountability Record and Trust Score works.

There is one — a Trust Score, explained below. But by itself, a single number can't tell exceptional from merely not-terrible. On marketplaces that use thumbs-up systems, almost every seller ends up at 100% positive. The signal disappears.

Every completed transaction produces four ratings on named dimensions of seller performance:

• Item condition accuracy — did the gear match the listing?
• Communication — responsive, clear, honest?
• Packaging — properly protected for shipping?
• Shipping speed — did it leave when they said it would?

Sellers rate buyers on a parallel set: payment promptness, communication, use-case accuracy. The dimensions are always shown together, never averaged into a star. A 5 / 5 / 3 / 5 seller is a careful describer who's slow to ship. A 5 / 5 / 5 / 5 across 40 transactions is genuinely rare, and genuinely meaningful.

No. Ratings are bilateral and blind.

Neither side sees the other's submission until both have rated, or 14 days have passed. On platforms where you can see the other party's rating first, the natural reaction to a negative is to leave one back. An arms race starts. Honest signal degrades.

Submit your assessment. The other side does the same. Both publish together. If the other party never rates, yours still publishes at the 14-day mark — silence is not a way to hide a bad transaction.

It counts, but recent activity weighs more. Profiles show lifetime and last-12-months figures side by side.

In the weighted aggregate: last 12 months count fully, 12–24 months at 50%, older than 24 months at 20%. A seller who was exceptional in 2022 and unreliable in 2026 shouldn't look the same as one who's exceptional today.

No. Exact prices stay private. What appears on a seller's profile is the transaction class — the band the deal fell into:

A seller who's done forty $500 trades is excellent at their volume. But that doesn't tell a buyer whether they've packed a $40,000 amplifier. Showing the class distribution without showing prices lets buyers calibrate trust to the size of their decision.

Sellers earn a ✦ High-Value Verified badge automatically after five or more rated transactions in the $10,000+ class. It cannot be claimed or paid for. Only earned.

HiFi Registry doesn't have negative ratings in the abstract — it has specific named issue tags that buyers can flag during rating:

Condition not as describedCommunication issuePackaging issueShipping delayPayment or refund issue

A profile showing 0 condition issues across 47 transactions tells you something definite. “100% positive” doesn't.

Flags don't appear when seller and buyer privately resolved the issue and both agreed the resolution worked. They reflect unresolved friction, not transient frustration that got worked out.

From your first completed transaction on HiFi Registry. Ratings from external platforms (Audiogon, US Audiomart, eBay) are not imported — they live as separate, clearly-labeled external context on your profile.

Reputation is verifiable, attributable, and earned here — not transferred in from elsewhere.

A single number, 0–100, on every seller profile. HiFi Registry's quick-read summary of the accountability record above — rated transaction performance, issue tags, tenure, verification.

The score answers “should I look closer at this seller?” in two seconds. The record answers “should I send this person $40,000?” with full diligence. Both live on every profile. Never one without the other.

What's deliberate about the number:

• Volume gates the ceiling. A brand-new seller with three perfect transactions caps in the high 70s, not 100.
• Negative signals weigh more than positive. A single condition-not-as-described costs more than five perfect transactions add. Trust is built over years, spent in a single bad shipment.
• Recency matters. A great year in 2023 doesn't carry forever.
• The breakdown is one click away. “See how this is calculated” opens every input with its current value.

Five inputs, each scored 0–100 internally, combined by weight tier. The components and tiers are public commitments; the exact arithmetic stays internal so it can be tuned without breaking the public contract.

Exact weights aren't published because they invite optimization — sellers chasing one component instead of being good across the board — and because the math gets tuned as we learn what matters. What's stable is the components and their relative weight tier. Those are the commitment.

The chip has four states. Same shape, same size across all four — no alarms, no traffic-light colors. The state tells you how much history is in the number.

• New/Building — before the first completed transaction, and through the first 1–9. New sellers see “Awaiting Reviews,” not “0 / 100.” Once ratings start arriving, this same tier shows an estimated score with a confidence band, like 72 ± 8 / 100. At 3 transactions the band might be ±8; at 15 it's ±4; at 50+ it drops off. Neutral and non-scaring either way — new sellers are never shown a warning by default.
• Trust Established — 10+ completed transactions, score 75 or above. The band is tight enough that the number stands alone. Steady state. High-Value Verified pill auto-appears here when earned.
• Elite/Exceptional — sustained excellence at volume, score 90+. Rare by design.
• Caution — an overlay, not a tier. Triggered by an upheld condition flag, an unresolved dispute, or a listing completion rate below 60% after 3+ completed listings. Never by a low number alone. A new seller with three clean transactions shows New/Building, not Caution. Reserved for documented problems.

An inactive profile will drift back toward whatever its last-24-months record supports. Quiet, not punitive.

Named bands, deliberately wide:

Caution is not a fourth score band — it's a separate overlay, shown alongside whichever tier applies, and only when a concrete negative signal exists (see below). A low score by itself, with a clean record, is New/Building — never Caution.

The number is always shown alongside the tier: “78 / 100 · Trust Established.” Most active sellers live in 75–89. That's normal, not exceptional. 90+ requires sustained excellence at volume. Don't read 82 as mediocre — read it as a solid Trust Established seller doing the work.

Yes — the appeal is to the underlying inputs, not the score itself. The score is a calculated output; each input is appealable.

If a rating was inaccurate or in bad faith, request review. If an issue tag was filed for something demonstrably not your responsibility, that tag is reviewable. If verification or transaction history shows something wrong, that's a record correction.

Every appeal goes to a human at support@hifiregistry.com. No automated rejection. Bad-faith ratings are removed on discovery. Chronic bad-faith raters lose the ability to rate. Good-faith disagreements are documented but the rating stands.

Once an input changes, the Trust Score updates automatically, usually within a day.