Guide · updated 2026-10-27

How to Pick a P2P Merchant: Orders, Completion Rate, Limits

On a P2P market you choose who you trade with. Every ad comes with a handful of numbers about the person behind it: how many orders they have completed, what share of their orders went through, how fast they usually release, and the smallest and largest order they will take. This guide explains what each of those numbers actually measures on Binance, OKX and Bybit, what it leaves out, and how to combine them with the ad's limits and price to pick a counterparty in a few minutes.

What "merchant" means on each platform

Not everyone who posts an ad is a merchant. A merchant is a user who has gone further: applied to the platform's merchant program, passed a review and, in each of the three programs below, put up a deposit. The badge next to a nickname tells you that much. It does not tell you how this particular trade will go.

• Binance marks verified merchants from its P2P Merchants Program with a badge next to the nickname, and says the program exists to add trust and protect users from common scams. Verified merchants start at Bronze and can move up to Silver or Gold, reassessed in the first week of each month from the previous month's record. Silver and Gold both require a completion rate of at least 98% in the previous month, a minimum trading volume, and a larger deposit: 130% and 200% of the basic deposit respectively.
• OKX runs three tiers. A user who has finished verification becomes a Lite Maker, able to post sell ads with up to 5 pending orders and up to 10,000 USD per sell ad. To become a regular merchant in the P2P Merchant Program, OKX lists video verification, an order completion rate of at least 90%, at least 20 orders and a merchant margin of 10,000 USDT held in the funding account; its Super Merchant page adds an account registered for more than 90 days. Diamond Merchants need a 100,000 USDT margin and three full months in the program, followed by a one-month assessment.
• Bybit calls them Verified Advertisers and splits them into Bronze, Silver and Gold, each with its own badge. The tier depends on trading volume and completion rate over the last 30 days and is upgraded or downgraded automatically. Verified status involves a deposit that is returned when the status is given up, once any open appeal is settled. A separate Block Advertiser status exists for block traders.

These are the "merchant requirements" people search for when they want to become one. As a buyer or seller you can read them the other way round: a badge means the person locked up money with the platform and met a completion and activity bar to get it. That is useful evidence, and it is still only evidence.

Completion rate: what it counts and what it skips

Completion rate is the number most people look at first, and each platform calculates it slightly differently.

• OKX defines it as completed orders divided by completed plus cancelled orders. It shows two versions: a 30-day rate, meant as a reference for counterparties and updated at 9 AM the following day, and a total rate across all past orders, updated in real time and used to assess merchant applications. Once a user has traded 5 orders with the same counterparty on the same day, OKX stops counting further orders with that counterparty that day. A cancelled order whose appeal is later approved drops out of the calculation.
• Bybit divides completed orders by total orders over the last 30 days. When a buyer cancels, the buyer's rate takes the hit and the seller's does not, unless the buyer picks a seller-side reason and the seller accepts that the cancellation was their fault.
• Binance shows each user's completion rate together with average payment and release times and comments from counterparties, which it describes as part of keeping trading data transparent. Its transaction policy also closes ads that stay online for a long period with a completion rate below 20%.

Two lessons follow. First, a seller's rate mainly records orders that failed on the seller's side, so it is a reasonable filter for sellers who disappear or refuse to release, but a high rate does not prove anything about the payment account they will give you. Second, the rate means little without the order count beside it. One hundred percent from four orders is a guess; 97% from several thousand is a track record.

When this site builds its averages, it leaves out ads from sellers whose completion rate is below 90% or who have fewer than 50 recent orders, wherever the platform reports those figures. Those thresholds are ours, set out on the methodology page; treat them as a floor, not a recommendation.

Order count: the size of the sample

The order count, usually shown for the last 30 days and sometimes in total, tells you how much evidence sits behind the other numbers. A new account with a handful of trades is not necessarily dishonest, but you have far less to go on, and a first order with a stranger is exactly when you want more.

The platforms know these numbers can be inflated. OKX's same-counterparty rule exists to stop two accounts trading back and forth to build a record, and Binance's merchant program warns that it may suspend or end the P2P activity of merchants it catches wash trading to improve their monthly performance. A big count is a good sign, not a certificate.

Payment and release times

Binance shows a seller's average release time and a buyer's average payment time. For a buyer, a short average release time means less time with your money sent and your coins still in escrow. For a seller choosing which buy ad to answer, the counterparty's average payment time matters in the same way. Read these alongside your own payment method: a seller who releases quickly cannot help if your transfer takes hours to arrive, and OKX's P2P FAQ recommends a real-time payment method for exactly that reason.

Limits and available amount

Every ad has a minimum and a maximum order, usually in your local currency, and a quantity of USDT still on offer. Your order has to fit inside both. This is where the top of the list misleads most often.

• On Bybit, the first slot on the ad page goes to "Top Picks for New Users" ads, which must come from a Verified Advertiser, have a limit of 100 USDT or less (HKD excepted) and beat competing prices. If you want more than that, the first ad you see may simply not be open to you.
• Bybit also says an ad's estimated ranking is based on price, while actual ranking can change with factors such as merchant identity, and its system hides ads whose price deviates sharply from the market.
• On OKX, if the ad you picked no longer has enough USDT for your order, its guide suggests choosing another ad with a suitable amount, or entering your amount in Express so the system matches you with a fitting ad.

On this site, the "1,000 in one order" column on each currency page shows the best price from an ad that can take 1,000 USDT in a single order, and Find a seller lists only ads whose limits and payment methods fit the amount and method you enter.

Price: when cheap is a warning

A price far better than the ads around it deserves a second look before a click. Sometimes it is a merchant with a high minimum; sometimes it is bait. This site's rule is to compare each ad with the median of the top 20 prices on the same side; anything more than 3% cheaper is marked as possible bait and excluded from every average. Binance's appeal rules point the same way from the other end: when a seller who has been paid in full tries to renegotiate, support releases the order unless the agreed price was abnormally low, which it defines as more than 10% below market, tightening to 5% for orders over 1,000 USD; past that line the order gets cancelled. A price that looks too good can therefore end in a cancelled order rather than a bargain.

Terms, extra checks and the chat

Read the ad's terms before you place the order. That is where merchants put their payment rules, and where some ask for more than the platform does. Bybit lets Verified and Block Advertisers require takers to provide verification before trading. Binance's merchant guidelines encourage merchants to ask users for additional identity verification but say users have the right to refuse, in which case the merchant should end the trade by refunding or cancelling. A request for an extra document inside the order is normal; a request to move the conversation to WhatsApp or Telegram is not. Binance lists the man-in-the-middle scam, which starts with a fake "reputable merchant" contacting victims on messaging apps, among the schemes to watch for.

Whatever the merchant's badge, the name rule binds both sides. OKX says the payment account holder's name must be identical to the OKX account name, and Binance's guidelines tell merchants not to release crypto when the payer's account does not match the verified name.

If you are selling, one badge is worth knowing about. Binance's Shield Merchants agree to compensate a seller with part of the order amount if the seller's bank account is frozen after receiving the merchant's payment. Only verified merchants with a clean record, including no reports of counterparties' bank accounts being suspended within 90 days of trading with them, can join.

A five-minute routine for choosing an ad

1. Filter by your exact amount and the payment method you will use, so every ad left can take your order.
2. Skip ads whose price sits far from the others until you have checked why.
3. Look at the order count first, then the completion rate. Prefer a long record with a slightly lower rate to a perfect rate built on a few trades.
4. Check the badge and, on Binance, the average release or payment time.
5. Open the merchant's profile and read recent counterparty comments where the platform shows them.
6. Read the ad terms. Accept extra verification inside the order; refuse any move off the platform.
7. Pay from, or receive into, an account in your own verified name, and nothing else.

The live table at the end of this guide shows how many ads each platform lists for the Bangladeshi taka and how many of them this site filtered out. For the full buying process, see the step-by-step guide to Binance P2P; for the patterns that cost people money, see the guide to common P2P scams.

Sources

• Binance Support – Introduction to Binance P2P Trading (accessed 2026-10-27)
• Binance Support – What Is the Binance P2P Merchant VIP Program? (accessed 2026-10-27)
• Binance Support – Binance P2P Merchant Guidelines (accessed 2026-10-27)
• Binance Support – Binance P2P User Transaction Policy (accessed 2026-10-27)
• Binance Support – How to Lift My Binance P2P Account Suspension? (accessed 2026-10-27)
• Binance Support – Binance P2P Appeal Handling Rules (accessed 2026-10-27)
• Binance Support – How to Avoid Common P2P Scams (accessed 2026-10-27)
• Binance Support – Binance P2P Shield Merchant Program (accessed 2026-10-27)
• OKX Support – How do I check the P2P order completion rate? (accessed 2026-10-27)
• OKX Support – What's the P2P Merchant Program? (accessed 2026-10-27)
• OKX Support – OKX P2P Merchant Program application requirements (accessed 2026-10-27)
• OKX Support – How do I buy crypto on OKX P2P trading? (accessed 2026-10-27)
• OKX Support – P2P buy crypto FAQ (accessed 2026-10-27)
• Bybit Help Center – FAQ: P2P Trading (accessed 2026-10-27)
• Bybit Help Center – FAQ: P2P Advertisers (accessed 2026-10-27)