No escrow platform can promise that disputes will never happen. Buyers and sellers disagree about scope, quality, and timing in any transaction, online or offline, and the real test of an escrow service is not whether disputes occur, but how fairly, quickly, and transparently they get resolved when they do. After mediating disputes across more than 10,000 transactions on Thiqaty, a handful of clear lessons have emerged about what actually works.
The first lesson is that most disputes are not really about bad faith — they're about ambiguity. The overwhelming majority of disagreements we mediate stem from a scope or deliverable that wasn't defined precisely enough at the outset, not from one party deliberately trying to cheat the other. A freelance contract that says 'redesign the homepage' invites a dispute in a way that a contract specifying exact pages, revision rounds, and file formats does not. Because of this, one of the most effective things Thiqaty does before a dispute ever happens is nudge users, at the Agreement stage, toward clear and specific deliverable definitions.
The second lesson is that evidence matters far more than argument. When a dispute is opened, our mediation team does not ask either party to simply state their case more persuasively — we ask for the underlying evidence: message logs, delivered files, screenshots, timestamps, and the original agreement terms. Disputes resolve fastest and most fairly when the process is built around comparing verifiable evidence against agreed terms, rather than around who can argue their position most convincingly.
The third lesson is that speed itself is a fairness issue, not just a convenience. A dispute that drags on for weeks punishes both parties regardless of who is ultimately in the right — the seller's funds stay frozen, and the buyer's project stays unresolved. This is why Thiqaty guarantees a median resolution time under 48 hours and commits to a hard ceiling of 72 hours for the overwhelming majority of cases. Behind that guarantee is a triage system: disputes are automatically categorized by complexity and evidence completeness the moment they're opened, so straightforward cases with clear documentation are resolved within hours, while genuinely complex, multi-milestone disputes get routed to senior mediators without slowing down the simpler queue.
The fourth lesson is that milestone-based agreements dramatically reduce both the frequency and the severity of disputes. When an entire project's payment hinges on a single, all-or-nothing delivery, both sides have enormous financial exposure riding on one contested outcome. When the same project is split into funded milestones, a dispute over one stage doesn't put the entire relationship, or the entire payment, at risk — and our data shows milestone-based projects generate meaningfully fewer disputes per transaction than lump-sum agreements of similar value.
The fifth lesson is that transparency during the dispute process matters as much as the outcome. Both parties can see the same evidence, the same timeline, and the same reasoning behind a mediation decision — there is no black-box arbitration where one side is left wondering why they lost. Even users who don't get the outcome they wanted in a given dispute report far higher satisfaction with the process when they can see exactly how the decision was reached, which matters enormously for whether they trust the platform enough to keep using it afterward.
The sixth and final lesson is that a dispute resolution process is only as trustworthy as its independence from either party's influence. Thiqaty's mediation team operates under strict rules that prevent any commercial relationship — transaction volume, account tenure, or platform fees paid — from influencing the outcome of a dispute. A mediator's only inputs are the agreement terms and the submitted evidence, full stop.
Ten thousand transactions is a meaningful sample, but it's also just the beginning. As Algeria's digital economy keeps growing and the volume and variety of transactions on Thiqaty keeps expanding, dispute resolution will keep evolving alongside it. What won't change is the underlying principle: a dispute resolved fairly, quickly, and transparently is what turns a single transaction into a lasting trust in the platform — for both the person who won the dispute and, just as importantly, the person who didn't.
Nadia Ferhat
Head of Trust & Safety at Thiqaty