Consulting engagements don't fit the single-payment transaction model that works fine for a product purchase or a ride. Scope evolves, work is delivered in phases, and payment is naturally tied to milestones rather than a single moment of "delivery."
Zuma Consultants runs on a contract structure that supports milestone-based escrow: a client and consultant agree on defined deliverables and payment split across those milestones, funds for each milestone move into escrow when the client approves the scope, and release when that specific milestone is marked complete and accepted — rather than the platform trying to force a multi-month engagement into the same one-shot payment flow used for a marketplace purchase.
Building a genuinely different transaction model for genuinely different transaction types, instead of forcing every category through the same generic "buy now" flow, is a design discipline that's easy to skip under deadline pressure and expensive to retrofit later. Consulting, freelance work, and one-off purchases are different enough economically that they deserve different contract primitives, even on a platform built for maximum code reuse elsewhere.