Well, the buyer is out of the money in any case, which is a pretty big protection.
It's not a matter of whether it's possible but whether the seller had the foresight to use the service in such a capacity.
Because at the end of the day, an escrow is a trusted third party used to facilitate a trade. We typically think of them in terms of money because that's typically what they hold, but there's no good reason they can't be trusted with any good.
I was in a similar situation to the parent commenter. The buyer had deposited the funds into Escrow.com and received their assets. I notified Escrow.com that the business assets had been handed over and they awaited the response from the buyer - which never came.
Escrow.com sends notices after 3, 7, and 10 days of inactivity.
After 15 days the buyer requested a cancellation and Escrow.com notified me via email that I had 48 hours to provide proof that "the domain" had been transferred or the transaction would be cancelled and the buyer would received their funds back.
My issue was that there was no domain transfer associated with this purchase. The buyer was receiving software that they intended to use under a new brand and thus had no use for the domain.
I raised hell with Escrow.com. Calls, emails, assurances that someone would get back to me. The cancellation came on a Friday and no one contacted me until Tuesday. They called to ask if I had spoke to the buyer and then politely explained that they couldn't do anything because there was no domain attached to the sale.
This is how it works, they don't get to just decide the outcome or they'll get shutdown during their audits.
This is a good thing in transacting on the internet.
I can't think of a better system though, to be honest.
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.
The inspection period can last for up to 30 days, and is agreed upon by all parties at the beginning of the transaction.
https://www.escrow.com/support/faqs/what-if-the-buyer-forget...
https://www.escrow.com/support/faqs/what-is-an-inspection-pe...
It's definitely a do things that don't scale idea. You need humans in the transaction confirming what's actually occurring. That tends to be expensive, because you also need them to know what they're doing, understand the broad details of the exchange and be trustworthy. That cost and difficulty of scaling is exactly why Escrow.com doesn't try to do it for every transaction across their system.
if (delivered) pay();I never used it in any of my projects nor I know anyone using it. I just had an itch of learning Clojure and building libraries for android, and iOS, so I made them.
Since it's "just" so simple, can you better explain what those done/delivered conditions might look like? And preferably how that would also be more secure than Escrow.com?
[1] I wrote more about my experience in my ebook - https://gum.co/side-project
I sold a website on Flippa once. The buyer put the money on Escrow.com, I transferred everything over, and they went AWOL. What I found out is that there is no straightforward way to obtain the funds when it happens. Apparently there is no way at all except via the court system. Which would mean the only real protection Escrow gives is against the buyer going bankrupt (or using false identity, I suppose).
Fortunately, they came back several weeks later with some nonsensical excuse and closed the transaction, but I will never use Escrow.com again.