This is an interesting article that covers the Russian market RAMP. We don't hear much about it here. I some of the future darknet market proprietors could learn a thing or two. I think this style would be very beneficial to large vendors since sales figures are hard to determine. Another strength is dealing over IM (w/ OTR) provides encryption for everything and its probably easier than PGP.
Silk Roads come and Silk Roads go. But after every law enforcement crackdown shakes the dark web, one Russian black market always seems to survive.
For more than two and a half years, the Russian Anonymous Marketplace, or RAMP, has maintained a thriving business in the Dark Web drug trade, offering one of the Internet's widest arrays of narcotics to its Russian-speaking clientele. That's roughly as long a tenure online as the original Silk Road achieved before it was seized in an FBI bust in October of last year. And it's far longer than the new generation of anonymous drug markets that followed the Silk Road, including more than a dozen sites taken down last week in a massive coordinated police action. The largest of those seized sites, Silk Road 2, lasted exactly one year to the day.
RAMP, which like those sites runs on the anonymity software Tor, has outlived its western counterparts to amass more than 14,000 members. But the exact amount of uppers, downers, and psychedelics of every description it sells can't be easily measured--and not just because the site is exclusively in Russian. RAMP functions less like an eBay-style e-commerce site than a loose-knit, Craigslist-like web forum where buyers and sellers can find one another.
It oulived SR because nobody outside Russia cares about Russia.