Tips for bidders
A few hundred lots go into every auction and you are interested in perhaps six of them. The difference between a good auction and a frustrating one is almost never nerve or luck — it is whether you found those six, kept track of them, and knew what the evening was costing you before it ended.
All three of those are jobs the site will do for you, and most people never switch them on. Here is what is there, what it is for, and the handful of habits that separate the bidders who sleep well on a closing evening from the ones who do not.
Alerts on new lots
Give us the words, we watch
A watchlist per auction
Everything you are chasing, together
A running total
What the evening is costing you
One maximum per lot
The system does the bidding
Start here
The search box takes a distillery, a bottling name or anything that appears in a lot description. When an auction is live it searches that auction by default and lets you switch to the archive of past ones; when nothing is running it goes straight to the archive, which is where the interesting research happens anyway.
Next to it sits a sidebar of filters, and they are worth learning. Every one of them is built from the auction in front of you, so a distillery with nothing in this catalogue is simply not offered as an option. You are never filtering your way towards an empty page.
Above the results you can sort by price, by the most recent bid or alphabetically, and switch between a grid of photographs and a list. The grid is better for browsing; the list is better once you are down to a shortlist and comparing prices.
New: lot alerts
The bottle you have been after for three years will turn up in a catalogue one day, probably in a month when you were busy with something else. Alerts are how you make sure you are told about it instead of hearing about it afterwards from somebody who was paying attention.
Give the alert a name you will recognise later and a handful of keywords: a distillery, a vintage, a series, a bottler. "Springbank local barley", "port ellen", "caroni 1996" — whatever it is you would otherwise be checking for by hand every month.
Keep as many alerts as you like, side by side. Most people end up with one per obsession, which is exactly what they are for.
When a new catalogue goes live, every one of your keyword sets is run across every lot in it. Nothing to check, nothing to remember, no need to be at a screen on the Friday evening the auction opens.
The matching is done on the name of the lot. All of your words have to appear in it, in any order — so "glengoyne 1978" finds a Glengoyne bottled in 1978 whether the year sits in the middle of the name or in brackets at the end, and does not bother you about the 1965.
A matching lot brings you an email and a notification in your account, with a link straight to the lot. From there it is one click to your watchlist and about ten seconds to a maximum bid.
An alert can be paused when you are not in the market and switched back on later, and deleted when the hunt is finally over. Nothing is sent twice for the same lot.
Every word you save has to appear somewhere in the name of the lot. Where it appears does not matter, and neither does capitalisation or the order you typed them in.
That makes two words far more useful than one. A single word brings you everything from that distillery, month after month; a distillery and a vintage together bring you the bottle you were actually waiting for.
If you are not sure how a bottling tends to be named, run the words through the search box on a past auction first. Whatever that finds, an alert with the same words would have found too.
An alert on "glengoyne 1978"
Alerts live in the auction tools in your account, alongside the watchlist. They are matched against each new catalogue as it opens, so set them up between auctions rather than during one.
Set up an alertThe auction tools in your account
Nobody loses track of a single lot. It is the tenth one that goes wrong — the one you meant to come back to, or the one you were sure you were still winning. Every tool below exists because somebody once found out the hard way that they were not.
Mark any lot as a favourite while you are browsing and it lands in one list in your account. That list is the closing evening in a single screen: what you are following, where the price stands and what you are winning, without hunting through the catalogue for lots you looked at last Tuesday.
You can bid straight from it, which is the point. When you are outbid on three lots at once, the difference between one screen and twelve open tabs is the difference between a considered bid and a panicked one.
A week after the auction closes the list is cleared, so you start the next one with a clean sheet rather than last month's leftovers.
Plenty of lots carry a reserve price, and a lot that does not reach it does not sell — however high the bidding went and whoever was in front at the end. Being the top bidder under a reserve wins you precisely nothing.
This tab collects the bids of yours that are sitting just short of that line, with the reserve, your bid and the current bid next to one another. That is everything you need in order to decide whether one more step is worth it — and lots you have made your peace with can be hidden from the list.
It is the most-overlooked screen we have and it is worth a look before the last hour of any auction you are serious about.
Everything you have bid on in the current auction, in one place, with what you bid and where it stands now. It answers the two questions that come up on every closing evening: what am I actually still in for, and did I ever put a bid on that one at all.
Alongside it, the site emails you when somebody outbids you and when a maximum of yours has been used up. Both can be switched off in your notification settings, though on a closing evening we would gently suggest leaving them on.
No surprises at eleven o'clock
Bidding on eight lots at once is enjoyable right up to the moment the auction closes and you add them all up. A hammer price is not what a lot costs you: there is a buyer's fee on top of it, VAT on top of that, and a parcel to get the bottles to your door.
So we do the adding up for you, while the auction is still running. The running total is a preview invoice for everything you are winning at this moment — the same lines, in the same order, as the invoice you will actually receive.
It updates itself as the bidding moves, so you can leave it open on the closing evening and watch the figure that matters rather than doing arithmetic between bids.
Look at it before the last hour
Not after. The point of a running total is that there is still time to decide you were done two lots ago — and on a closing evening that decision has a way of arriving late.
Shipping to a country with excise duty on spirits? Our page on excise duties sets out where it applies and roughly what it comes to, and it is the one cost that can genuinely catch a buyer out.
Four habits
None of this is clever. It is simply what the people who go home happy tend to have in common, and all four of them are decisions made before the closing evening rather than during it.
Work out what a lot is worth to you on a quiet evening with a database open, not at ten o'clock with the clock running. The figure you arrive at in the middle of a bidding war is almost never the figure you would have arrived at on a Tuesday, and you will be living with the bottle either way.
Write it down if you are chasing several. A list of six numbers settled in advance turns a closing evening from an argument with yourself into an evening of watching.
Every bid here is a maximum bid, and the system spends it as slowly as it can: when somebody bids against you it answers with a single bidstep, never more than it has to and never a cent above the figure you set. A high maximum does not mean a high price — it means you stop having to be at the screen.
It also puts time on your side. A maximum that was set first beats a later bid of exactly the same amount, so the bidder who thought about it on Tuesday wins the ties.
Sniping does not work here and it is not meant to. The auction runs on one clock for the whole catalogue: a bid on any bottle in the final minutes pushes the closing time back for everything, by ten minutes early in the evening and by five later on.
So a bid at the last second only buys the rest of the room another go. The auction ends when a whole extension period passes with nobody bidding on anything at all — which means a maximum set days earlier does the job a last-second bid was hoping to do.
Read the description as carefully as you look at the photographs, and open the magnifier on the seal, the fill level and the label. Lots are sold as seen and described, and a bid cannot be withdrawn once it is placed.
If a photograph leaves a question open, ask us — the bottle is in our building and somebody can go and look at it. Just do it in the quiet part of the week rather than during the last hour.
The bidding itself — the bidsteps, the maximum, the clock and what happens when two people arrive at the same number — is set out in full on the buyer guide.
The things bidders ask first
An alert finds lots you do not know about yet. You save a few keywords, and when a new auction opens we run them across every lot in it and tell you what came up.
The watchlist is for lots you have already found: you mark them while browsing and follow them from one screen for the rest of the auction. Most people use both — the alert brings the bottle to your attention, the watchlist is where you keep an eye on it.
Two or three is usually right. All of your words have to appear in the name of the lot, so each one you add narrows the result: a distillery on its own will find you something most months, a distillery with a vintage will find you the bottle you were actually waiting for.
If you want both, make two alerts. There is no limit, and each one can be paused or deleted on its own.
When an auction opens. The whole catalogue goes live at once, and that is the moment your keywords are matched against it — so an alert set up between auctions is ready for the next one.
You will get an email and a notification in your account, each with a link to the lot in question. The same lot will never be reported to you twice.
Nearly. It carries the hammer prices of the lots you are winning, the buyer's fee, VAT at the rate of the country you are shipping to, and an estimate of shipping and insurance based on your default address.
What it does not include is excise duty, which applies in some destinations and not others and can be significant. If you are shipping somewhere that charges it, read our page on excise duties before you set your maximums.
Almost certainly because its reserve price has not been met. Leading the bidding on a lot below its reserve does not win it, so counting it in your total would only give you a figure that was never going to be your invoice.
The "Almost there!" tab in your auction tools shows exactly those lots, with your bid and the reserve side by side, so you can decide whether to go further.
No. A week after an auction closes the watchlist is cleared, so you go into the next catalogue with a clean list instead of last month's bottles.
If a bottling is something you will always want to hear about, that is what an alert is for. Alerts stay until you delete them.
Yes, and it is the best homework there is. The search across past results covers our past auctions and shows what comparable lots actually made, which beats guessing at what a bottle "should" be worth.
Compare condition as well as name. A perfect label with the tube present is not the same lot as a tired one, however identical the whisky is.
It does not work here. Any bid in the final minutes extends the closing time for the entire auction, so a late bid simply hands everybody else another ten minutes — or five, later in the evening.
Set your maximum instead, whenever suits you. The system will bid it out one step at a time on your behalf, and an earlier maximum beats a later bid of the same amount.
An alert for the bottles you are hunting, a watchlist for the ones you have found, and a running total so the end of the evening holds no surprises. Ten minutes now, and the next nine days look after themselves.
