Instagram is one social media platform that so many people have used to create an online store, I don’t really use Facebook so I can’t compare Facebook to instagram. But I heard that there is a Facebook marketplace, which is also a great idea. But transacting through social media platforms can be scary, one of the reasons I don’t like ordering stuff online except I check their reviews or comment section to see if any has ordered through them before. This is because, so many scammers are on social media, fake pages get created everyday, vendors are getting scammed and customers are getting scammed too.
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But customers are getting scammed more than vendors getting scammed. A customer could send funds to the instagram vendor and only hope that they are genuine enough to send the item they paid for. We have seen and heard cases of customers buying items online through instagram only to either receive a low quality item or get blocked by the instagram account. When this happens, the best thing you can do is report the page and beg people to help you report that page, but your money is gone. What do you do?
Before the Nigerian government banned financial institutions from accepting crypto transactions, I refused to use the P2P section of crypto exchanges. This is because I didn’t want a situation where I will send money to a merchant and won’t get my coins and verse vasa. But when the Nigerian government banned crypto transactions, I had no other option but to use P2P. Only then did I understand the role of escrows. Now imagine the escrow technology used when doing social media transactions?
Imagine a platform like cash app, or payment method but it serves as an escrow. If you want to buy anything from an online vendor you met online, you send the money to the escrow, this escrow holds your money, when you receive your item, you can notify the escrow to release the money to the vendor. This way less people will get scammed by online instagram vendors.
