When commissioning an artist, you want to know that your purchase is safe, and as an artist, you want to know that your payment will come through.
In a world where customers charge back and artists don’t deliver, it can be hard to know who to trust.
Artconomy works to provide a trusted service by delivering a stable, consistent service experience when working with financial transfers.
How Artconomy’s Escrow System is Designed
Artconomy is unique among sites for Artconomy Shield, our escrow system which ensures that there is a layer of separation between buyers and sellers to prevent issues such as commissioners performing chargebacks and artists not completing work.
Escrow systems must be designed to ensure that both parties are safe, but how does Artconomy do this?
Picking the Correct Processors
When customers purchase a piece of art from a Shield protected artist, it uses our credit card processor.
Artconomy works with a card processor that specializes in expressive freedom.
Most card processors, such as PayPal and Stripe, have restrictions on adult work. We have specifically selected a processor which permits it.
Likewise, we also have selected an ACH processor so that money is transferred right into your bank account.
Like us and our card processor, they are proponents of freedom of expression.
Card transactions are reversible, so Artconomy is able to refund payments in the event that an artist does not complete the agreed-upon work.
Artconomy uses industry standard AVS and CVV2 systems to combat credit fraud, and meets PCI compliance standards for encryption, cardholder data management, and server security.
We also meet security requirements to authorize automatic transfers to your bank.
We do not store credit card numbers, but instead “tokenize” them so that in the extremely unlikely event that our database had been hacked, your card numbers would remain safe.
Account Management
A common pitfall for escrow services (and one that has often caused them to fold) is the temptation to operate with reserves insufficient to make all customers whole in the event of a disaster.
Artconomy:
- Never places escrow held funds in investment accounts
- Never holds more in escrow than we have reserves to cover in the event of loss
- Does not hold a ‘fractional’ amount of escrow reserves under the assumption that a large number of people will not want their money at the same time
- Has more money in the escrow account than the total amount held in trust, and money in non-escrow accounts elsewhere to pull from in the event of an emergency
- Has no debt, and is self-funded by its CEO
Artconomy contracts the assistance of an outside accountant to advise and inform us of any issues.
We also have breakers in place for transactions to ensure that we do not have a sudden change in account holdings, allowing us to retain the ability to reverse illicit transactions.
To ensure the integrity of the system, Artconomy fights chargebacks so that fraudsters do not get away with skipping payment.
Using Best Practices
Our technology is built with industry best practices.
Artconomy’s software architect has years of experience building services that handle and protect sensitive data, and he has selected libraries, tools, and coding practices that minimize attack surface areas.
Our servers are automatically patched with the latest security updates and use the long term maintenance versions of their operating systems for maximum stability.
We also have security at the network level with a state-of-the-art firewall designed to repel real world attacks such as SQL injections and common DDoS techniques.
Artconomy does not store passwords
We also offer
We Do Hard Work to Protect Your Hard Work
Artconomy promises to keep your data safe and to make you whole in the case of any error in our system or processes.
We will continue to work on more ways to improve our systems and keep abreast of best practices so that you can rest safe and focus on art!