How we use payment and escrow mechanism to ensure security of projects at SoftwareSupp

We can often hear (and have also experienced) situations of dishonest contractors, not transferring the money your way once the project has been completed or transferring only part of the payment, despite all the scope completed and delivered.

The same happens with customers sometimes being scared that the funds/payments they transfer to the contractor have vanished and the work will not be delivered.

Some of the common issues including in transactions between 2 parties include:

• Lack of delivery
• Partial delivery
• Delays outside of the acceptable delay period
• No customer's payment or customer's collapse
• Extraordinary event

Let me show you how we address these issues by using an escrow payment mechanism and how you can use it to make sure that basically any work you contract is processed securely.‍

Escrow payment process

Escrow is the system that allows you to deposit the funds on the intermediary account before it is transferred between the entities.

So what’s the use case? The most common use case for escrow is e-commerce, where you want to make sure that the goods are delivered your way in a secure and timely manner.

Let’s say you’re purchasing a product but want to make sure that you pay only on successful delivery. You can either actually pay on delivery or use an escrow mechanism to secure the transaction. In the 2nd scenario, you pay for the products to the intermediary account, while the funds are actually transferred to the supplier when you mark the products as delivered.

A good example can be Alipay operating as a separate entity to Alibaba, acting as an intermediary and allowing you to securely purchase goods @ Alibaba.

Similar system can be applied to services, where you want to make sure your services are delivered in a timely and quality manner. In this case the funds are deposited on the escrow account before the launch of the service and paid to the supplier on successful service completion (indicated by the party ordering the service or intermediary).

Our payment process

So how do we work at SoftwareSupp ensuring the quality of provided services, safety of payment and delivery of the actual scope of the work performed?

For every offer we send to customers we provide an option to process the first payment securely using an escrow account. So once you start the project with us, you will have a few payment options:

• Payment by credit/debit card
• Invoice sent to your email address
• Installment payments for selected projects

You can choose the preferred option once you accept your project and start your work/service/task.

At SoftwareSupp we deliver software projects, so it’s especially important for us to ensure the quality of provided services and safety of the whole process.

First way of ensuring quality service is our certification process which comprises of multiple steps.

Second one is processing the payment securely using our escrow mechanism.‍

Our escrow mechanism in practice

Our escrow system is hosted by Stripe, allowing us to run the payments securely through the 3rd party and at the same time, a reliable institution.

Stripe also covers our identity verification process as all experts joining SoftwareSupp need to connect their bank accounts and provide identity documents to be able to join any projects we run for customers.

Once the party successfully verifies their identity and connects their bank account, they are connected to our escrow system and we can then start running the secure transactions with them participating in the process.

Once the customer pays for the services the participant’s remuneration becomes locked on his connected account, awaiting for the project to be completed.

The project can be marked as completed by the customer anytime, simply by using a dedicated option created for the customer in the “My projects” section. Once the project is marked as completed, the funds are released and sent to the party delivering the service.‍

Benefits of the escrow mechanism

Escrow mechanism brings multiple benefits to all parties of the process:

For contractors:

• Insurance that the customer will pay for the services
• Easy way to collect the payment for the realized work
• Multi-currency transactions and conversion

For customers

• Payment only on project’s completion/realization
• Quick, easy and secure payment
• Adjusting to the customer’s payment method

For overall process

• Facilitating the business relationship between 2 parties
• Safe and secure payment for services
• Inter-exchange of multi-currency payments

There are probably many more but most importantly escrow or semi-escrow mechanism (e.g. 50/50 payment) allow to deliver high quality of the delivered services as escrow mechanism can be used both for full as well as partial payments.

To sum up, escrow mechanism provides an effective way of managing transactions between 2 parties, ensuring the actual delivery of services, acting in the best interest of both customer and contractor and maximizing efficiency of the whole transaction process.