Chinese buyers: no CC payments for now.
Escrow.com has temporarily disabled credit card payments from Chinese buyers, due to high decline rates.
The top domain payments facilitator announced that domain name buyers from China will have to use bank wire transfers, until the measure is reversed.
Here is what Escrow.com announced:
“We have noticed unusually high decline rates on credit cards from China, and are investigating this further. We have temporarily disabled Credit Card as a payment option to ensure transactions don’t get delayed by unnecessary failures/declines in Credit Card payments. We suggest Chinese Buyers use wire transfers instead. “
The rule does not affect the the disbursement method for a seller in China, which remains as an international wire transfer.
Here is a general outline of the current rules regarding credit card and PayPal payments:
Although we accept EU and USD, Credit Card payment options are only available on a limited basis on US Dollar transactions.
We currently accept American Express, Master Card, Visa, and PayPal.
Credit card and PayPal payments are protected via SSL to encrypt your information when you send it to us. (We do NOT take CC payments over email or phone).
Credit card and PayPal payments are subject to an additional Express Deposit Fee of 3.05%, have a maximum allowable amount of $5,000.00 (including Escrow fees in transactions), and are subject to Escrow.com approval.
Credit card and PayPal are only available once both parties have completed a transaction before.
Credit card and PayPal are not available for Vehicle Transactions, Milestone Transactions, and Merchandise Transactions. Additional restrictions apply.
Buyer payments submitted to Escrow.com by credit card or PayPal, while guaranteed secured to our trust account, are subject to a mandatory three business day hold for funds to fully clear to our account. By law, Escrow.com is prevented from releasing funds until they have fully cleared. We apologize for any delay or inconvenience and will release funds the first business day funds are available.
Escrow.com may refuse to allow a credit card or PayPal as payment for any reason at our sole discretion. Any rejection of credit card or PayPal as a form of payment is not necessarily determined by information provided by the cardholder.
We can accept PayPal and CC payments for shortages except for payments coming from Washington State and for Euro Transactions.
We temporarily disabled Credit Card as a payment option for credit cards from China.
In the situation where the Buyer or third party needs to complete their verification before we can accept the funds that have arrived, Escrow.com can only hold credit card funds for 3 calendar days before rejecting the funds.
Why not Washington State, a tech hub Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft ?
Kris – “payments for shortages” most likely local laws. This has nothing to do with tech hub for companies.
There are also other rules against credit cards that are not published here as well. I haven’t been able to use Escrow.com for any domain transaction for months, because of these new policies.
I can’t see Escrow.com being competitive as a domain name escrow service for much longer. Apparently, they’ve been having trouble with charge backs on domain name purchases, and their response has been to make it harder for people to use their service – rather than trying to figure out how to address the chargeback problem.
Long term, I think a registrar is going to be in a much stronger position to run an escrow service, as long as they are smart about domain name investing (for instance – flagging suspect transactions – such as 4 figure sales for a newly hand reg’d name), and can lock up domains for the duration of the chargeback period.