Company throws in the towel just two years after entering escrow business.
Payments company Payoneer is informing customers that it is exiting the escrow business.
The company began offering escrow services when it acquired Armor Payments in 2016. Later in 2016, Payoneer began offering domain name escrow services.
Its domain name escrow business was aided by Brandon Abbey, who was president of Escrow.com until being let go after that company was acquired by Freelancer.com.
Payoneer made some inroads into the domain name escrow business. But as others who have tried to tackle the escrow market have learned, it’s a business of thin margins. Scale is required to run an escrow service profitably.
Losing a key domain escrow service will be difficult for many people in the domain name industry. It’s always good to have at least two strong competitors in order to keep prices down and push companies to improve their service and features.
For example, Payoneer had better “know your customer” tools than Escrow, or at least a smoother policy for implementing legal requirements surrounding them.
In an email, Payoneer Head of Enterprise Strategy & Business Development Matt Watts wrote:
While we have been excited and honored to service prospects and partners like yourself, after careful review of our product portfolio have decided to commit our focus to other areas of the Payoneer business.
As of this evening, the Payoneer Escrow site is still operating.
🙁
Best escrow alternatives to escrow.com?
Maybe one of we domainers should have pointed out that their name was a bad one?
I did that, mentioned that the name could have been better.
Also, I pointed out how the navigation and layout could’ve been better, but I feel it was brushed off.
Although much slicker and better designed than Escrow.com, it was confusing to customers who quite often just abandon the sale altogether. I lost several deals I think because of this.
It’s too bad because I think with a little tweaking it could have been a winner.
This is really really sad. Now escrow.com will be monopolist again. And Undeveloped is not quite an escrow, although can be used as one.
It’s a very sad news 🙁 Escrow is a very nice and useful service. They could still co-operate….
What about these guys. I’m some of you must know them:
http://www.escrow.domains
“Although G&L has been providing domain name escrow for many years and will continue to do so by hand on custom and complicated domain name transactions (1031 domain exchanges, multi-party domain name swaps, three or more party financed transactions, etc.) the simpler escrow transactions have, as of late, gone to the larger and fully automated escrow houses.
In an effort to compete and lower prices for such transactions G&L is now offering a more automated system at https://escrow.domains.
Included in the system is the ability to see all emails in and out of the system when not confidential, the ability to upload your base contract or to use contract templates provided for free as well as an affiliate system for those of you who would like to refer transactions to us.”
I see there is a 2015 testimonial on their site from Andrew Rosener accusing one of them of practicing cannibalism. :O 😀
https://escrow.domains…this site don’t look credible.Sorry
After GDPR, escrow companies have a harder time verifying who holds custody of a domain name. In most transactions, the escrow agent doesn’t take custody themselves.
I question whether this escrow agent model is really advantageous. It may be the opposite.
Why not simply create a marketplace listing and send the buyer a link? At Epik, for example, we take custody of both the funds and the domain during a sale. That’s more secure. And, since we’re a registrar, we know who owns / controls the domain name.
In the event of a dispute, as a registrar, we can lock things down in the blink of an eye. An ordinary escrow service cannot do that directly. There would be delays as the escrow agency contacts the registrar and asks for support. The escrow agency would depend on their customer relations with the registrar in question. Effectively, the escrow agent is just a customer. And there are a lot of registrars, implying a lot of relationships to groom. Much simpler to work directly with 1 registrar than indirectly with a bunch of registrars.
ICANN accreditation and registry accreditation provide some assurance that the process will be overseen properly.
Cost is a factor, I recognize. Most marketplaces will eat a 15% or 20% commission. In Epik’s case, the commission is 5% if funds are withdrawn as cash and 0% (zero) if they’re used at Epik. If you’re a domainer, money gets used on renewals and registrations anyway; so the 0% route often makes sense.
Plus, the escrow agencies often charged extra for “Domain Holding” transactions anyway – where they’d take possession of the domain and/or collect payments over time. But Epik’s monthly Payment Plans are now FAR superior to anything offered by other marketplaces, let alone an escrow agent.
Maybe time to ask the question: Do you need an escrow agent at all?
My take on Payoneer exiting the business is that it became clear to Payoneer that it was always going to be a small part of the business. It’s a huge payments company. It was probably hard to get the resources necessary to take a real run at it.
I really don’t want to believe that payoneer is exiting from the escrow business.I think they should really think about it as they are one of my best.