Customizing the settings

The last step you have to take in order to finish your OB setup is customizing the settings a little bit. To get there go to your “Home” tab and click on the “Customize” button. Then switch to the “General” tab located on the left side and set the option “Display Mature Content” to “Yes”. Click on the “Save” button again.

Then jump to the “Store” tab and set the option “Store” to “Off” since you are not a vendor and want to keep your attack surface as low as possible. Click on the “Save” button at the top right.

After that switch to the “Shipping Addresses” tab. DO NOT ENTER YOUR ACTUAL ADDRESS THERE! Only create a new one with the “Name” being your OB username and the country either being the default one or the one you are actually in. Leave out all the other options! The vendor will later receive all the shipping information in a PGP encrypted text you include in the order notes during your order. You can set your country if you want since it is not giving away much sensitive information which may be better for the vendor so he can work more efficiently (e.g. if he declines all orders coming from country x and he sees that you are coming from that country, he can decline it without having to decrypt your order note first).

Click on “Save” button after you added your dummy address.

You are now ready to buy in peace without any seizure banner greeting you! All you need is a vendor and you can follow the usual process with encrypting your address. If you already have a vendor with an OB store link you can visit his store now.

An OB store link should begin with “ob://” and then a long sequence of random letters and numbers, ending with “/store” or not, it does not matter as you will visit the same vendor any way. Simply copy that link from their market profile for example and paste it at the address bar on the top (they layout is similar to browsers like the Tor browser).

Note: be careful with random OB vendors! There is no guarantee that they are legit and actually selling the products they advertise. Maybe they are even LE and / or manipulated their feedback. Make sure you research your vendor properly before buying from him.

Tip: Whonix users can create an OB shortcut on their Desktop by clicking on the Start-Menu at the bottom left, typing “open” in the search bar -> right clicking on the OpenBazaar entry and selecting “Add to Desktop”.