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Comment by stefandesu | Hacker News Reader

Germany's biggest Craigslist-like service recently added a service like this for purchases that are shipped. I sold my previous MacBook using the system and found it really stressful to wait for the buyer to confirm the item. In my case, it was just someone who was a little bit slow and just forgot, but I can imagine abuse in the system. Same thing happens with PayPal buyer's protection.

I can't think of a better system though, to be honest.

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Yeah, other than having someone manually inspecting the transfer, that's kind of the best way.

I've noticed that most sites end up implementing "automatic confirmation", but after a while they shorten the confirmation deadline because lots of buyers just "forget" to approve.

I've also seen others (MercadoLibre) who have a "reputation" for sellers where they can get the money even before confirmation.

Mercari and Poshmark work the same way (they do release funds after a default amount of time if there's no response)

A better system would have some agreed upon holding period. Two weeks perhaps? Enough time at least that the buyer has received the goods. As much as I hate Paypal, that's essentially what they do. They hold the funds until they've confirmed the item was delivered.

No, a better system would give the buyer incentive to release funds in a timely fashion while still offering the escrow company incentive to implement. Maybe you pay escrow 110% of the cost, you get 10% back when you release funds, 5% if you take more than 10 days, 1% after that.

What's the name of the service? I suppose you're not thinking of ebay kleinanzeigen, or?

Not the parent, but I think they do actually mean eBay Kleinanzeigen. A few months ago they added a service like this but afaik it’s still in beta and also not available for all categories yet.

Sorry for the extremely late reply! I do actually mean Ebay Kleinanzeigen. I don't know when they added it, but it's called "Sicher bezahlen".

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