lockwood77
Advanced Member
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- 1,160
I thought this might be of interest to some people buying stuff to be delivered (rather than by collection), as I'm doing at the moment.
Last night I had a look into escrow services and found these two:
https://www.pppay.com/index.php - 99p additional cost
http://auctionchex.com/escrow-s.html - 2.5% additional cost
As a buyer, you pay into the escrow account and the seller is notified that the funds have cleared. The seller then uses one of the approved couriers (Royal Mail, City-Link.co.uk, UPS or Parcelair.com in the case of PPPay.com) and enters the tracking number in the escrow site.
The escrow site then verifies with the courier company that the parcel has been delivered and the buyer has a period of time (24 hours with PPPay.com I think) to check the goods, after which the seller is alerted that the money is available (just like PayPal).
This protects both parties - the seller knows the buyer can't claim their money back a week later (as you can with PayPal) and the buyer gets to check the parts. If they're not happy, they have to return the parts to the seller at their cost before the escrow site will refund them (verified with a tracking number as before) - they can't just cancel and keep both the parts and the money!
I'd be interested if other people have used similar services before, it seems like a good way to deal with expensive remote purchases.
Last night I had a look into escrow services and found these two:
https://www.pppay.com/index.php - 99p additional cost
http://auctionchex.com/escrow-s.html - 2.5% additional cost
As a buyer, you pay into the escrow account and the seller is notified that the funds have cleared. The seller then uses one of the approved couriers (Royal Mail, City-Link.co.uk, UPS or Parcelair.com in the case of PPPay.com) and enters the tracking number in the escrow site.
The escrow site then verifies with the courier company that the parcel has been delivered and the buyer has a period of time (24 hours with PPPay.com I think) to check the goods, after which the seller is alerted that the money is available (just like PayPal).
This protects both parties - the seller knows the buyer can't claim their money back a week later (as you can with PayPal) and the buyer gets to check the parts. If they're not happy, they have to return the parts to the seller at their cost before the escrow site will refund them (verified with a tracking number as before) - they can't just cancel and keep both the parts and the money!
I'd be interested if other people have used similar services before, it seems like a good way to deal with expensive remote purchases.