DrugHub Monero XMR Invoice Payment System Explained

How invoices work here

Invoice markets are not exotic; what matters is where money can sit between steps. Here: nothing. There is no deposit wallet you top up, no standing balance the vendor can front-run, and no market-held trading float — the only persistent wallet is yours and the account-level refund wallet, which the wallet page defines precisely (quoting from-thread): “invoice-based, so you do not need to deposit funds in advance of an order; the wallet exists only for refunds, overpayments, underpayments and late payments”.

The privacy side follows automatically: you pay a stealth-ish one-time destination, so the vendor sees a payment, not your wallet graph, and a seized or breached box sees invoice records without recoverable sitting XMR. Community line on the same property: “love the forced PGP and one-time XMR deposit per transaction — the money is sent and done, nothing left in the market wallet”.

Checkout → paid — what actually happens

1. Cart: storefront browses login-free (spec: browsing_without_login true); cart spans vendors.
2. Quote: checkout prints amount + the 5 % customer fee + a fresh invoice destination.
3. Transfer: your wallet sends exactly that amount to that address; nothing extra is owed.
4. Escrow/AF: vendor-controlled auto-finalise 5–45 days; customers may extend — one vendor complaint in-thread about an eighteen-day wait, plus the market-side escape (a “customer will not release escrow” dispute, “resolved quite quickly” with tracked proof).
5. Settlement: vendor receives the listing price; the fee did not touch their margin (spec: commission_paid_by customer).

Fee arithmetic — one XMR worked example

The complaint that exists in-thread is exactly the fee-on-top line — a buyer noting vendors keep cross-market prices and so the fee reads as “everything 5 % more expensive” — and staff have not shown signs of moving on that. Fine numbers and who pays what also sit in the FAQ table.

Wallet picks — market + community line

• Official Monero (GUI) — named by staff in-thread as a default recommendation; self-custodial, full-featured.
• Feather — second staff name; lightweight; community thread users report no problems (“CakeWallet and Feather seem good?” “Cake, works perfectly”).
• Vetoed by the users, explicitly: closed-source anything, online/exchange-hosted, KYC wallets — “if you don't control the private keys, it's not your coin”.

Checkout is just one send to one address, so wallet ergonomics are your problem, custody is theirs to lose. If you are also doing message encryption, the market's own reverse-proxy helper (280-line Python / 290-line Go, signed, no binaries, Tails/Whonix/Qubes/Debian) keeps that leg transparent — see the spec entry on the FAQ policy table for the line counts and platforms.

Withdrawals, refunds, disputes — the slow path

Market-side withdrawals (refund/adjustment payouts): offline, ≈24 h, network fee on the market — that is the whole path, and tickets about it wait like everything else (no expediting, by documented rule). Disputes get the same queue; tracked-shipping evidence plus “customer received but will not release escrow” is the vendor's documented lever, and staff say tracked disputes are “resolved fairly quickly”. Refund wallet semantics (above) mean the only money that can ever be held is order-shaped, never pool-shaped.

Notes from the data file, unmodified

• accepted_currencies: ["XMR"]
• type: invoice_based · withdrawal_processing: offline_within_24h
• hot_wallets_on_servers: false · fees_covered: true
• commission_rate 5%, commission_paid_by customer

Next step if you are still assembling the client side: the Tor / Tails page, and the onion + fingerprint block on the top page.