Two questions decide whether a marketplace is worth using: will the seller get paid, and will the buyer get what they paid for. Escrow is how both answers stop depending on trust.
The sequence
- Acceptance funds it. When a booking is accepted, the buyer pays the full amount and the platform holds it. Nothing is in the seller’s account yet, and nothing is in the buyer’s either.
- Delivery does not move money. Submitting work changes the work’s status and nothing else. Payment never advances the delivery, and delivery never advances the payment.
- Approval releases it. The buyer approving the work is the event that moves the hold. The platform takes its commission and queues the rest for payout.
"Released" does not mean "in your bank"
This is the part most platforms are vague about, and the vagueness is always in their favour. Releasing a hold here creates a pending payout and marks the hold as releasing — a human still confirms the actual transfer. A refund is queued the same way rather than sent.
Which is why every notification on this rail says queued, never paid. Telling somebody their money has moved before it moved is the one lie a ledger cannot recover from, and the wording is deliberate.
Commission and tax
Prices are quoted tax-exclusive, and the commission is taken on the agreed price — not on the tax collected on top of it. Both rates are stamped onto the record at the time of the booking, so a rate change next quarter cannot retroactively rewrite what a completed deal was worth.
When something goes wrong
Raising a dispute freezes the hold where it stands, including against the automatic release sweep. The work status freezes with it, and resolving the dispute restores exactly the state the work was in when it was raised — so an escalation costs you the argument, not your progress.
A dispute should pause the clock, not reset the project.
Only the party who raised a dispute can withdraw it, and only a resolution can close it. Rulings run through one path for both sides, so "the seller was right" and "the buyer was right" cannot be implemented two different ways in two different corners of the product.