There are two ways a service gets delivered
In a shared delivery, you hand over your login and the seller plays your character. In a carried delivery, the seller plays their own character alongside yours while you stay logged in. Both are sold under the same names — a raid, a boss kill, a minigame — and the listing does not always make the difference obvious.
It is the more important of the two questions you can ask about a service, and it matters more than the price. The two models put completely different things at risk, and only one of them is a risk anybody can protect you from.
What sharing an account actually involves
Handing over a login hands over everything the account can do: the bank, the items, the ability to change the details that control the account. There is no partial access to give. Whatever you agreed the seller would do, what you have actually granted is everything.
It is also worth knowing that account sharing breaches Jagex's rules in its own right, separately from the real-world-trading question. So a shared delivery carries two rule problems rather than one, and neither of them is affected by how the payment was arranged.
Escrow is honest about its own limits here. It governs whether money moves fairly between two people. It has nothing to say about what happens inside an account while somebody else is logged into it, and there is no version of it that could.
What a carried delivery involves
You keep control of the account and you are present while the work happens. The trade-off is that it takes coordination: you have to be online, at an agreed time, for as long as the job takes. For some jobs it is also slower or more expensive, because the seller cannot simply work through it on their own schedule.
What you get for that inconvenience is that the only thing exposed is the payment — and the payment is the part escrow is built for. If the seller does not finish, you dispute rather than confirm, and the hold stays frozen.
What to settle before you book
Ask which model the listing is, in the order chat, before anything begins. If the answer is shared, ask what the seller expects access to, for how long, and what they will not touch. A seller who does this properly will have answered these questions before and will not mind being asked.
Agree what finished means, too. A kill count, a completed quest, a level — something you can check rather than something you have to take on trust. Keep all of it in the order chat, because that thread is the record of what was agreed, and it is what a dispute is read against.
Where we stand on it
We take the same commission either way, so this is not a recommendation that pays us. If a job can be done carried, that is the version we would rather you bought, because it is the version where the only thing you can lose is money we can get back for you.
Some jobs genuinely cannot be done that way — most skilling has to happen on your character, by whoever is doing it. That is a real reason to accept a shared delivery. Convenience, on its own, is a weaker one than it looks when you are deciding.
The short version
Escrow can return your money. It cannot return your account. If a job can be done carried rather than shared, that is the version where the only thing at risk is the part we can actually protect.