Safety & trust
What ships today. What’s being built. What won’t change. We’d rather you have an accurate picture than a flattering one — your money’s on the line, and pretending otherwise erodes the thing we’re building.
Live today
Funds are held by Dealybee via Stripe Connect Custom from the moment a buyer commits until delivery (or pickup) is confirmed. Sellers see ‘escrowed’ status; buyers see ‘protected.’ No tier system — every deal gets the same escrow.
If something goes wrong, a real person reviews the case within 48 hours. We don't outsource judgment to a model when real money is involved. Both parties can submit photos and notes; the mediator decides buyer-favor, seller-favor, or split refund.
Your seller agent filters obvious scam patterns (overpay-and-refund, suspicious shipping requests, account-takeover signals) before they ever reach your inbox. The FTC pegs scam-signal rates on FBM around one in seven listings; you shouldn't have to be your own fraud team.
Every user has a portable reputation score derived from completed transactions, dispute history, and verification status. Shown on every listing and proposal so both sides see who they’re dealing with before they commit.
For pickup transactions, we surface public safe-trade locations near the meetup point — typically police-station lots, public libraries, or other lit, monitored spaces. We don’t partner with police departments; we just surface their published safe-exchange-zone lists.
No passwords to phish, reuse, or breach. Sign in is magic-link only. Sessions are HTTP-only secure cookies; we never see or store passwords.
Roadmap
These are real gaps. Tracked in our engineering known-gaps log; honest-by-default rather than smoothed over.
The 48-hour SLA is a public commitment. If we miss it, the case is supposed to escalate to a senior ops queue with separate alerting. The escalation copy is in place; the second queue + alerting is being built. Live by the time we have meaningful dispute volume.
The Dealybee Score is portable in principle (and shown on dealybee.ai today). The Chrome extension that surfaces it next to seller handles on FBM / eBay / Mercari / OfferUp / Craigslist is in MVP — works for the major surfaces, polish pass + Chrome Web Store submission still ahead.
High-value transactions (≥$500) should require a verified phone number on both sides. The verification flow ships next; the threshold and friction tradeoffs are being tuned against real dispute data.
Today most marketplace integrations run on realistic mock adapters so the end-to-end flow works locally and in development. Real adapters land one at a time, ordered by API stability (eBay → Mercari → Etsy → Craigslist → FBM → OfferUp → Poshmark). Status per-adapter is honestly labelled on each listing.
Structural commitments
No paid escrow tier. No ‘premium’ protection. The safety floor is the same for every user — that’s the whole brand promise. If we ever need more revenue, we won’t take it from trust.
Not an algorithm. Not a model with a confidence threshold. A real Dealybee team member with sight of both sides’ evidence. We’ll use models internally to surface signal, but the decision is human.
Dealybee is not a marketplace, so we don’t have inventory to push, listings to favor, or sellers to protect. Our incentive is for the transaction to close cleanly — that’s where the 1% comes from.
No payment-processing markup. No shipping-label margin. No dispute-handling charge. The 1% on sales over $100 is the entire revenue model.
Practical safety
The agent handles a lot. These are the human-side habits worth keeping anyway — they apply on any platform.
Police-station lots, library parking lots, busy coffee shops. Many local police departments publish ‘safe-exchange zones’ with cameras — we surface those on Dealybee for in-person pickup.
If someone asks you to switch to Zelle, Venmo, cash, or a different platform ‘to avoid fees,’ stop. The fees are how the protection exists. The ask itself is the signal.
On Dealybee, escrow only releases when you confirm delivery or meeting. Take 60 seconds to verify the item is what was described before tapping confirm — that window is the entire point.
High-value pickups (electronics, bikes, instruments) — bring another person if you can. Tell someone where you’re going and when you expect to be back.
Something’s wrong with a transaction?
Use the dispute button on the transaction page. Photos, notes, and the timeline are all preserved automatically. A mediator will reach out to both sides.