Hi All, I would like to know what escrow services are best to use ? I have to pay some heavy amounts(around $1000) to someone, and i want to be on safer side. Thanks
Yep escrow.com is the best or if you piked up the guy from a freelance site use that freelance site escrow service all freelance sites must have this feature
What exactly is escrow? I've heard of if it, and may need to use it in the future (someone has offered to buy a site of mine outright and naturally I'd want to be sure it's done right!) OK, I know I can Google for that info, but what I'm really after is what I should look out for here (in terms of potential nasties!)
Escrow acts as a third party, holding the money until the deal is finalised, then they release the funds to the seller.
I always hear escrow.com is the best, but does anybody know the alternative to it, that is equal to it?
if you are buying/selling an established site, or domain then i would recommend sedo, i did a $24,000 transaction not long ago and everything was very smooth and fees were reasonable. sedo will do paypal transactions over $5000 whereas escrow.com wont, otherwise escrow.com is just a good a service
Sedo charges 3% of the transaction price with a minimum of $50, and escrow.com charges a sliding scale, but minimum is $25, and is 3.25% of transaction price (for transactions under $5000). If you want to get your money through paypal via escrow.com, you need to do a premier transaction which is a 6.3% transaction fee for transactions under $5000, and not available for transactions over that. For standard escrow.com transactions over $5000 and under $25000, the fee is $162.50 + 0.26% over $5000, and for transactions over $25000 the fee is 0.89%. Just a couple of examples below for different transaction values and comparisons between them. $1000 transaction Sedo (3%) = $1000 x 0.03 = $30 --> Minimum of $50 so will actually be $50 Escrow.com (3.25%) = $1000 x 0.0325 = $32.50 Escrow.com with PayPal (6.3%) = $1000 x 0.063 = $63 $5000 transaction Sedo (3%) = $5000 x 0.03 = $150 Escrow.com (3.25%) = $5000 x 0.0325 = $162.50 Escrow.com with PayPal (6.3%) = $5000 x 0.063 = $315 $8000 transaction Sedo (3%) = $8000 x 0.03 = $240 Escrow.com ($162.50 + 0.26% > $5000) = $162.50 + $3000 x 0.0026 = $170.30 $50000 transaction Sedo (3%) = $50000 x 0.03 = $1500 Escrow.com (0.89%) = $50000 x 0.0089 = $445 As you can see, Transactions under $5000 are cheaper to be done with sedo (for domains or websites) as paypal allowed. But you should note that if paying with something via sedo escrow (not sure about escrow.com) you will have to pay the extra amount to cover the paypal fees as the money goes to sedos account first then gets sent to yours. But i would most likely recommend escrow.com for nearly everything that doesnt involve paypal.
I have never messed with sedo, but the last 2 transactions I did through escrow.com were nice and smooth.