No escrow?

Many of the members here use Paypal.

Since you might not have a paypal account and if you see something that you are interested in buying, offer to pay with a money order.

Look at the sellers rating. If he/she has a high rating you should be ok.

Personally, I don't ship until I have been paid and I have always been ok to pay upfront. In many years of dealing on Audiogon I have not had any big issues ... yet.

Regards
Paul

I've used escrow as a seller. It works but does slow the transaction process which turns many sellers to use it. If the amount is substantial and a buyer wants it I will do it but prefer not to.

Thanks for the response.

I have paypal which is fine for small transactions of maybe a few hundred dollars. For larger sums though, using paypal seems dangerously gullible. I've been burned myself so know from experience, paypal will do close to nothing if a transaction goes bad. What happens if nothing is delivered? The seller perhaps gets a slap on the wrist from audiogon and has his account suspended. What do I get?

There are some great deals here and I'd love to be able to use this site. I can understand that escrow might be too slow for some sellers, but the reasons I've been given so far by sellers is that they don't trust it, but then, as a buyer, I am expected to either send a money order or use paypal and thus take on a huge risk. I did see some comment here on another thread to always use a credit card with paypal, so maybe that offers some level of protection for the buyer, via the credit card company?