Escrow.com Listens to Customer Suggestions

One minor annoyance I have with Escrow.com is that a buyer can choose to pay via credit card, and his choice can cost me an additional fee when I have agreed to pay half or the full escrow fee. It’s a bit frustrating to expect to pay $162 on a $5,000 deal only to find out the buyer used a credit card and the fee increased to over $300.

For the most part, this fee is a simple inconvenience. However, there have been quite a few times I sold a domain name at a fairly low profit margin and the increased fee makes that margin even more slim. When going into escrow on a smaller deal, I always cross my fingers that the buyer would send a wire transfer and be assessed the standard fee rather than paying double because he chose to use a credit card.

Based on customer feedback, Escrow.com has made a change to the way it charges customers who use a credit card. Instead of having the seller pay the extra fee for credit card purchases (or having the seller pay half on a split fee transaction), the buyer will now need to pay this “convenience fee” for being able to use a credit card for the purchase. This makes sense because using a credit card may make it more convenient for the buyer, and the buyer should have to pay for that added convenience rather than having the seller pay for something that isn’t his choice.

Commenting on why the company made the change, Keith Gettle, Customer Service Manager at Escrow.com stated, “We listened to our customers in the domain community and this was the right thing to do. We encourage all our users to make suggestions on how to improve our products.”

This convenience fee wasn’t that big of a deal, but I would rather have the money in my pocket than have it go elsewhere. If you have any suggestions for Escrow.com – or other companies in the domain investment business for that matter – it can pay to mention it to them and suggest an improvement.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
    • Sometimes yes, sometimes no. For Buy It Now sales there is no communication. For broker sales I am not communicating with the buyer.

      And I don’t like waiting for DNS to facilitate getting the transfer figured out because I’m sure they have a backlog of ones to do so it’s not as fast as I like and can add days to the transaction. And the more time someone has to think the more time they get cold feet and back out.

  1. It should also be noted that a buyer who has never been part of a transaction using Escrow.com may be put off by the “convenience fee.” The process may be a new one and it should be seamless with not too many options. My suggestion would be to “one step” it so the transaction is easy, breezy.

  2. They always listen to their customers and it’s really great to deal with Escrow.com

    I didn’t even noticed Elliot about the fee gets more because I always choose buyer to pay 100% fee šŸ˜‰

    Thanks for sharing though and thanks to entire Escrow.com team šŸ™‚

  3. Buyer pays all the 3rd party fees – that had been my standard over years and not likely to change. When buyer has option to make choices, they chose the best/cheapest option. For smaller amounts, escrow.com comes cheaper than other companies like sedo.

    Not sure what the convenience fees is (unless they have gone up), I have noticed that it was always cheaper for the buyer to pay through credit card compared to wire or paypal.

    • Not cheaper to pay through credit card, presumably because there is added risk for the escrow service. Credit cards can have chargebacks while wire transfers are much harder to retrieve.

      At Escrow.com on a $5k deal, t has been around $162 for a wire and over $300 for credit card payments.

  4. I avoid the fee altogether. Most buyers want a deal and I usually bend on the price like most of us do, but part of that deal is they pay 100% of the escrow fee, no exceptions.. I’m entitled to a deal too šŸ™‚

  5. Buyer has paid all the sales fees if a sale happens outside of my site Sedo, Afternic etc… and escrow for 13+ years on my end. Couple hundred bucks means nothing to them as most of my sales are strong 4-5 figure range.

  6. Great improvement! one more reason for choosing Escrow.com šŸ™‚
    I’ve one suggestion for Brandon: it would be great having the chance of creating Escrow buttons for a website with a Make Offer option, instead of having only the BIN price option.
    This way when the buyer inserts the price and its personal data the transaction automatically starts.
    I think this should limit bogus offers, and on the other hand seller doesn’t have to fix a price in advance.
    I think it’s technically feasible.

  7. If I saw something called a convenience fee I would think it’s just a way for the company to charge me more money. There has to be a better term for it besides convenience fee.

    Since we are talking about suggestions it would be great if Escrow would create a holding account for domain transfers so the seller can transfer to Escrow and Escrow can transfer to the buyer. I would pay a small extra fee for this service. No more having to contact the buyer and telling him to log back in to say he accepted the domain transfer or the headache when the buyer doesn’t return your emails for a few days after you already transferred the domain. What if he decides not to change the Whois right away and the extra work to verify if the buyer actually received the domain. I believe by having Escrow directly transfer the domain would actually save Escrow time in the long run. Escrow would have an exact tracking of the domain from beginning to end.

    Knowing that Escrow directly transferred the domain to the buyer would be great peace of mind.

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