Everything that goes wrong in a marketplace has gone wrong to us, with our own money. A worker does not show up. A customer wants a refund after the job has started. Two people disagree about whether the work was finished. None of it appears in a demo, and all of it decides whether people come back.
That is why we ask about payouts and refunds in the first meeting, not the fourth month. On every marketplace we build, the refund policy is written in the first phase and built as a flow, and disputes have a place in the console — because we deal with them on our own platform, and we know what they cost when there is no flow for them.
It is also why pricing set by the worker is a product decision before it is a technical one. When the provider controls the price, the platform has to make that price easy to compare and hard to game.
