Your money is held until you have what you paid for

Buying from a small business you found through a friend's WhatsApp message asks a lot of a stranger. You are being asked to send money first, to an account you have never sent money to, for goods you have not seen, on the strength of a referral from someone who themselves only knows the seller a little. Most of the time that works out. When it does not, the buyer has no recourse at all: the transfer has cleared, the phone number stops answering, and there is no third party who was ever holding anything.

That risk does not only fall on buyers. It suppresses sales for every honest seller, because a buyer who has been burned once stops buying this way entirely — and the seller who gets punished for it is usually not the one who did it. It also sits on the person who shared the link. An amplifier is spending their own reputation with people who trust them; one bad order costs them more than the commission was worth.

Escrow moves the risk off all three of them and onto a process. Nobody has to decide whether to trust a stranger, because nobody is being asked to send money to a stranger in the first place.

You pay through the checkout page, not by bank transfer to the seller. The payment is taken by a licensed payment processor and the order is recorded against the campaign you bought from. The seller is told the order is paid — and is told exactly nothing about how to reach your money, because at that point they cannot.

The amount you are charged is the product price plus the delivery fee, if you chose delivery. That figure is shown to you in full before you pay, and the delivery fee is set by the business, not added by us. Choosing to collect in person removes the delivery fee entirely, and the checkout shows you both totals side by side so you can see the difference before you commit rather than after.

Once payment succeeds, the order enters a hold. Which hold depends on how you are receiving the goods.

A delivered order is held for 3 days. During those 3 days, three things can happen.

You confirm receipt. The order page has a Confirm receipt button. Tapping it releases the money to the seller immediately. If your order arrived and it is what you expected, doing this is a real kindness to a small business — it is the difference between being paid today and being paid at the end of the week — but it is entirely your choice and nothing is withheld from you for not doing it.

You do nothing. After 3 days the hold expires on its own and the money is released. The window is deliberately short, because a delivery either arrives in a couple of days or it has gone wrong, and a longer hold would punish sellers for a problem that does not exist.

You open a dispute. This pauses the release. The money stays held while the problem is looked at, and it does not quietly release out from under you because the 3 days happened to elapse mid-conversation.

A pickup order works differently, because there is no delivery event to time the release against. Instead you get a pickup code. When you collect the goods, the seller scans or enters that code, and that scan is what releases the money. No code, no release.

This is the strongest form of protection on the platform, because the release is triggered by something that can only happen while you are physically standing there with the goods in your hand. A seller cannot claim you collected an order you did not collect — the code is yours and it only leaves your possession when you decide it does.

Pickup orders have a collection window, shown on your order page. It is 14 days by default, and the business can set it anywhere between 2 and 30 days depending on what they are selling — fresh food cannot sit for a fortnight, furniture can. If the window passes and you have not collected, you are refunded automatically. You do not have to ask, and you do not have to argue: goods that were never handed over are not goods the seller gets to keep money for.

Every order page has a button that says something is wrong. It asks you what the problem was — not as a formality, but because a dispute with no stated problem cannot be resolved by whoever has to look at it, and an unresolvable dispute helps nobody including you. The common reasons are one tap: nothing arrived, the wrong thing arrived, it arrived damaged, it is not as described.

Opening a dispute freezes the order. A disputed order can only end in one of two states: released to the seller, or refunded to you. It cannot time out into a release while the dispute is open.

There is also a chat thread on every order, connecting you and the seller directly. Most problems are a delivery running late or an address that needs correcting, and those are solved in two messages without anyone needing to adjudicate anything. The chat is attached to the order, so the conversation is on the record rather than scattered across personal WhatsApp threads that nobody can refer back to.

Buying does not require signing up. When you pay, you get a private link to your order — keep it, because that link is how you check the status, message the seller, show your pickup code, confirm receipt or open a dispute. It is sent to you at checkout. Anyone holding that link can act on the order, which is exactly why it is not guessable and why it is worth not forwarding to people who have no business acting on your order.

Sellers are not left in the dark by any of this, and it is worth saying plainly because a protection that only works by treating every seller as a suspect would not last. A seller sees that the order is paid and held, sees the hold window, and sees the same chat thread you do. They know when the money will land and what would stop it. The information is symmetrical; only the ability to take the money early is not.

The person whose link you used earns a fixed commission on your order, and it is worth knowing that this does not come out of what you paid. The business funded that commission upfront, before the campaign went live, and the amount is fixed per sale. Your price is not inflated to pay the referrer, and the referrer has no way to change what you are charged.

That matters for a reason beyond fairness on the receipt. Because the commission is fixed and pre-funded, the person sharing has nothing to gain from talking you into a larger order or a worse one. They earn the same whether you buy the thing you actually wanted or the thing they would rather sell you — so the incentive to oversell simply is not there.

The amplifier is also not paid at the moment you pay. Their commission follows the same escrow as the seller's money: 80% of it becomes available when your order releases, and the last 20% is held for a further 7 days while your dispute window runs. If your order is refunded, the commission is reversed too. Nobody downstream of a bad order gets to keep money from it.

A chargeback raised with your bank reopens the order even if it had already released, and claws the commission back from the amplifier's held reserve first. This is the one case where money has genuinely already moved, and the system is built to unwind it rather than to shrug.

It is worth being precise about the edge of this, because a protection promise that quietly does not apply is worse than none. Escrow covers orders paid through LocalAmplify checkout. If you take a referral link and then arrange payment with the seller privately — a bank transfer, cash on delivery, a payment link they send you directly — the order does not exist on the platform, nothing is held, and there is nothing to refund. It is the same transaction you would have made without us, with the same risk.

Sellers occasionally suggest this, usually to avoid the campaign fee. It is worth recognising for what it is: an arrangement that removes your protection to save the seller money. If a seller asks you to pay off-platform, you can report it from your order page.

Pay on delivery is the familiar answer to this problem in Nigeria, and for a lot of purchases it is a perfectly good one. It has real limits, though, and they are worth naming rather than pretending escrow is the only workable idea.

Pay on delivery protects you only up to the doorstep. You inspect the box, you hand over cash, and from that second the protection is gone — a fault you find an hour later is between you and a seller who has already been paid. It also protects you at the seller's expense in a way that eventually reaches your price: a business absorbing failed deliveries and refused parcels prices that loss into everything it sells, including the orders that go fine. And it does not travel. A seller two states away cannot offer it to you at all, which quietly limits you to whoever is close enough to send a dispatch rider.

Escrow keeps the protection running past the doorstep, costs the seller nothing when the order is good, and works the same whether the business is in your area or at the other end of the country. What it asks in return is that you pay through the checkout rather than into someone's account — which is the one step that makes everything above possible.

• Your payment is held, not passed to the seller, from the moment you pay.
• Delivered orders release after 3 days, or sooner if you confirm.
• Pickup orders release only when your pickup code is scanned.
• An uncollected pickup order is refunded automatically when its window ends.
• A dispute freezes the release until it is resolved one way or the other.
• The referral commission is pre-funded and never added to your price.

The rules on refunds specifically, including timings and how money returns to your card, are set out on the refund policy page.