How to Use Escrow.com for a Website Sale

When you'll use it

Escrow.com is the go-to service for private, off-marketplace website and domain sales — deals you've arranged directly rather than through a platform that builds escrow in. It acts as the neutral middleman that makes a stranger-to-stranger transaction safe, holding the buyer's money until the assets are transferred and verified. If you're closing a deal you found yourself, this is how you do it without risk.

Starting the transaction

One party starts a transaction specifying the sale terms: the assets, the price, who pays the escrow fee, and the length of the inspection period. Both buyer and seller agree to those terms in the platform, which locks in what everyone has committed to. Getting the terms right here — especially exactly which assets are included — prevents disputes later, so be specific.

Funding, transfer, and inspection

The buyer deposits the funds into escrow, and only once Escrow.com confirms the money is secured does the seller transfer the assets — domain, files, accounts. The buyer then has the agreed inspection period to verify everything was delivered as described. This sequence — money in first, then transfer, then inspection — is exactly what protects both sides from going first without protection.

Releasing the funds

If the buyer confirms everything is in order (or the inspection period passes without a valid dispute), Escrow.com releases the funds to the seller and the deal is done. If there's a genuine problem, the platform has a dispute process. Used properly, Escrow.com turns the scariest moment of a private sale into a routine, protected step — never transfer assets or send payment outside of it on a deal of any real size.

What it costs and who pays

Escrow fees on the transaction sizes typical of website sales run to a low percentage of the deal, tapering as the amount rises, with domain-name transactions often priced separately from general merchandise. The convention is an even split between buyer and seller, though it's negotiable and sometimes carried entirely by the buyer as a goodwill gesture on a competitive listing. Agree who pays before you open the transaction rather than after, and confirm current rates on the provider's own fee schedule, because the figure belongs in your net proceeds calculation either way.

Where escrow transactions actually go wrong

Three failures account for most of them. An inspection period too short to verify anything, which pressures the buyer into either accepting blind or forcing an extension mid-deal. A domain still inside its sixty-day transfer lock after a recent registration or registrar change, which no amount of good faith resolves and which should have been checked before listing. And a seller who hands over assets outside the escrow process to be helpful, which removes the only protection they had. Check the lock, set an inspection window that fits the diligence, and transfer nothing until the funds are confirmed held.

What escrow does not protect you from

Escrow guarantees that the money and the assets change hands together. It doesn't verify that the revenue was real, that the traffic wasn't purchased, or that the site will perform after the handover. Buyers sometimes treat the inspection period as though the escrow provider is checking the business, and it isn't; the inspection is your own work on a clock. Do the verification during diligence, define in the agreement exactly what the inspection covers and what constitutes a failed transfer, and treat escrow as settlement infrastructure rather than as due diligence.

Work it out: Net proceeds calculator