This suggestion has prolly been made before, but I don't know how to check that, so...

As you know, people use points and cash for buying and selling art on dA. We use the points on anything from buying a prem-mem to buying art from others, and the cash on...well, anything we want. It promotes making art, gift giving, etc.

BUT the nasty underbelly is that sometimes, people abuse this. I recently was waiting over a year for a commission that I had already paid for, only to have the deviant deactivate recently--taking my payment with them.

My husband also recently explained, in detail, a commission that was meant to be two rivals fighting one another. What he got was a yaoi picture of the two all but cuddling. No refund. No offer to fix it. And eventually, they stopped responding.

You could make a system for it. I was talking about it with a friend weeks ago, and I think it's fairly well thought out. As the commissionee, you fill out a dA sheet, saying your price for what. It gets posted, and someone clicks it. They click on the things they want (ex: cell colored, two characters, waist up, 500, or $6), and fill in the details of the commission (pose, reference images, etc.). You accept or decline, and once you accept, it checks to make sure they have the points/cash for it. If they do, it takes the the commissioner's payment and holds it. If they don't have the points/cash, it rejects the commission for you.

At this point, you do your work, and post it into a form that states it's for that commission. It pays you the points/cash, the person has their commission, everyone's happy. If you aren't happy with the work you got, it allows for a, like...complaint, or something, requesting a few things be altered. The commissionee looks this over, and decides if these alterations are viable. If the fault is on the commissionee, for examle for not reading properly the details etc, and is too big to just alter, you could make a complaint, and may be entitled to a refund.

If the commissionee deactivates, the points/cash get automatically refunded to the commissioner. If the commission takes longer than an agreed on amount of time (they may decide on a month, or a year, or anything in between), to make said commission, a prompt is brought up, asking both sides if they are still interested in the commission. If the commissionee says no, the points are refunded. If the commissioner says no, the artist is informed, and further action is needed (the artist may have almost finished said work. It would be unfair for them to do all that work, and not get payment If the commissionee doesn't answer for a month, they are again refunded.

And of course, to make it worth their time, dA would take a pinch of the points/cash as well. Say, 10%. It would also make better use of the dA cash, which is actual money that can be sent to us as a check, or we can use on the site, and many don't even know exists.

It gives more order to the commission system we've made, and is over all more professional. Every business has a receipt/refund clause. Why not dA for commissions?