Survey shows Escrow.com is leader at facilitating large domain purchases.
34% of respondents in Domain Name Wire’s third annual survey said they prefer to use Escrow.com to safely pay for high dollar domain names they buy.
Escrow.com is popular with domain owners because it was designed as a fully automated platform for escrow and has a particular focus on domain names. Pricing is also reasonable:
$0-$5,000 3.25%
$5,001-$25,000 $162.50 + 0.26% of amount over $5,000
$25,0001+ 0.89%
Escrow.com set its escrow service up to be in full compliance with all state requirements. I believe it is a licensed escrow service agent in all 50 states at this time. That’s more challenging than it sounds given that laws vary from state to state.
Here are the complete results for this survey question:
1. Escrow.com 34%
2. PayPal 23%
3. Sedo escrow 22%
4. Wire Transfer 13%
5. Other 5.4%
6. Afternic escrow 3%
Of course, one’s definition of “high dollar” domain purchases may vary.
A number of domain buyers still transact using PayPal. This is dangerous, as a seller can disappear with the money and PayPal won’t help you get it back because it’s a non-tangible good.
Next year we’ll add Moniker’s escrow service to the list. Moniker pioneered domain escrow in the late 90s and has increasingly become a dominant player in the space (outside of transactions from its auctions).
EBay and PayPal have proven to us that they have the worst customer support you can ever find on the Internet, and listing a domain name through eBay is very risky.
We recently sold the domain name tvshowsonline.com for $11,000, using eBay to list the domain name among other high profile domains we own, like lifeforce.com, ustv.com and a few others. We clearly specified in the listing that we would be using Escrow.com to handle the closing of the auction. This was our first experience to sell any of our domain names through eBay. We made sure not to use PayPal in order to gain the buyer’s confidence in us, since PayPal does not protect buyers when the auction is for non-tangible goods like domain names. We are happy to let you know that Escrow.com closed the auction with a great efficiency and protection for both buyer and seller, and we highly recommend them for all domain sale transactions.
We were shocked, when the moment the auction ended, eBay and PayPal suspended our account for unknown reasons. First they asked us to follow certain steps to find out why the account was suspended. They provided a link that led us to opening an account with PayPal and also a link that took us nowhere. We have found that neither eBay or PayPal has a customer support phone number for frustrated customers to contact them, so we had no way to find out why our account was suspended for no reason. We have sent 15 -20 emails to both PayPal and eBay explaining to them that we need to know the reason for the suspension, and each and every time we send an email we receive the same auto responder email that leads you nowhere. PayPal charged us for the commission on the sale of the domain name but failed miserably to let us know what we had done wrong. If I wish to grade the customer support on both eBay and PayPal for companies that charge hundreds of dollars when selling a product, I would say that it is the worst I have ever seen so far offered by a small or large company. I am hoping by writing this response that someone from eBay will hear about it and at least let us know why our account was suspended.
Mansour, it appears that eBay now **requires** you to use PayPal when selling domain names. As you point out, PayPal provides no protection to domain sellers. Using PayPal instead of escrow for a large transaction is not tenable.