What escrow means here
Escrow means a third party holds the money while a deal is completed. On PayIQ, that third party is us. The seller can see that your payment has arrived and can start preparing your order, but they cannot spend it until the conditions below are met.
You do not pay extra for this. It is how every order on a PayIQ store works, whether you have a PayIQ account or not.
When your money is taken
Your payment is held from the moment it reaches us.
If you paid by bank transfer, that is when the transfer lands in the account shown on your order. Until then you have an order waiting for payment and nothing has been charged to you. If you never send the transfer, nothing is taken and the order simply expires.
If you paid from a PayIQ wallet, it is at the point of checkout.
When the seller gets paid
The seller is paid when the order is complete. That happens in one of two ways.
**You confirm you received it.** Once the seller marks your order as delivered, you can confirm receipt. Your payment is released to them immediately when you do.
**Or 24 hours pass after delivery.** If the seller has marked the order delivered and you have not confirmed or raised a problem within 24 hours, the payment is released automatically. This exists so a seller who has done their job is not left waiting indefinitely.
If the order is never marked delivered, the money is not released.
If something is wrong
Raise a dispute before the payment is released, and the money stays where it is. It is not sent to the seller while a dispute is open.
A member of the PayIQ team looks at it and decides one of two things: the payment goes to the seller, or it comes back to you. We may ask you and the seller for photographs, delivery records or an explanation of what happened. We will tell you what was decided.
Raising a dispute after the payment has already been released is still worth doing, but it becomes a conversation with the seller that we can help with rather than money we are still holding.
Cancelling and refunds
You can cancel an order before it is delivered. Your payment is returned to you.
A cancellation fee may be withheld from the refund on some orders. Where one applies it is shown to you before you cancel, and it is never more than what you paid.
Refunds go back the way the money came. If you paid by bank transfer, it returns to the account you transferred from, and we may need a moment to confirm those details with you.
What this does not cover
Escrow protects the payment. It is not a guarantee about the goods themselves.
Whether an item can be returned, how long you have to ask, and what condition it must be in are set by each seller in their own returns policy, which is on their store page. Escrow does not override what a seller has promised there, and it does not add to it.
Delivery is carried out by an independent courier. Where a parcel is delayed or damaged in transit, we will help you and the seller resolve it, but the courier's own terms apply to the delivery itself.
Who is holding the money
PayIQ holds funds for orders in accounts kept separately from the money PayIQ uses to run its own business. Your payment is not the seller's until the conditions above are met, and it is not ours to spend at any point.
Reaching us
If you are unsure where your money is, or a dispute is not moving, contact PayIQ support with your order reference. The reference is on your order page and in every email we have sent you about the order.