Every acquisition reaches the same standoff. The buyer will not send $80,000 to a stranger and hope. The seller will not hand over a domain, a codebase and a customer list and hope. Escrow is the mechanism that resolves it, and it is the reason online business sales work at all between people who have never met.
The sequence
Terms agreed. Price, what transfers, how long the buyer has to inspect.
Buyer funds escrow. The money goes to a licensed third party. Not to the seller, and not to the marketplace.
Seller transfers the assets. Domain, repo, processor, accounts — each one confirmed.
Buyer inspects. A defined window — typically a few days — to verify everything works and matches what was described.
Buyer confirms; escrow releases. The seller is paid.
What the inspection period is for
It is not a second diligence period. You already did diligence. The inspection window exists to confirm that what transferred is what was agreed — the domain is in your registrar account, the repo is in your organisation, the processor moved, the site is up, the revenue is landing in your account.
Using it to renegotiate is bad faith, and it is why some sellers keep the window short.
What happens if something's wrong
You raise it inside the window, with specifics. In most cases it's a missed asset or a broken credential and it's fixed in an hour. Where it isn't, the escrow provider runs a dispute process — funds stay held while it's resolved, which is exactly the protection you paid for.
What matters here is that the money is already out of both parties' hands. A dispute is an argument about where held funds go, not an attempt to recover funds someone has already spent.
Who pays for it
Escrow costs a small percentage of the deal, and it's split by agreement — commonly down the middle, sometimes borne by the buyer. The specific split on any given marketplace is part of its published fee terms; on this one, see the pricing page. What's universal is that it is trivial against the amount at risk.
The mistake people make
Agreeing to "escrow" that turns out to be the seller's friend holding the money, or a payment app's buyer-protection feature, or a wire to a third party nobody has verified. Real escrow means a licensed provider, regulated to hold client funds, with a documented dispute process.
If you cannot name the regulated entity holding the money, you are not in escrow. You are hoping.