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We run an online whisky auction from a warehouse in Groningen. Once a month a catalogue of a few thousand bottles opens for about ten days, anyone with an account can bid on any of it, and when the clock runs out the highest bid takes the bottle. That is the whole idea; the rest is detail.
This page is the detail, condensed. What it costs, how the bidding actually behaves, how a bottle of yours gets from your cupboard into a catalogue, and where to read further on any of it. Two tracks — one for buying, one for selling — because almost nobody arrives wanting both at once.
An auction a month
Ten days of bidding
Buyer's fee
10% on the hammer price
Seller's commission
0% of what it makes
Answered by people
Who also pack the boxes
Two ways in
Buying and selling barely overlap: different steps, different costs, different things worth worrying about. Pick the one you came for and the rest of this page will follow you down.
An account, a maximum bid and a delivery address. Nothing is charged for taking part, for watching an auction, or for being outbid.
Send us a photograph, get a free valuation, and if it suits both of us we do the rest: collection, photography, description, auction and payout.
For buyers
Five steps, and the first one only ever happens once. After that the bidding itself takes seconds — the time goes into choosing the bottle, which is the enjoyable part and the reason any of us are here.
Bidding needs an account, and opening one costs a one-off fee excluding VAT. It is a verification charge rather than a subscription: it is what keeps anonymous accounts out of the bidding, which is precisely what you want when you are competing for a bottle.
After that there is nothing to pay for taking part. Watching an auction is free, bidding is free, and being outbid costs you nothing at all.
The catalogue opens for around ten days and can be sorted by name, by price or by the number of bids, and filtered down by distillery, bottler, vintage and age. Most buyers arrive with one distillery in mind and leave with something they had not heard of.
Open a lot and read it properly. The photographs, the fill level and the notes on condition are the description — there is no second, more honest version of the bottle held back somewhere.
Every bid is a maximum bid. You enter the most you are willing to pay and from that moment it is bid on your behalf, one bidstep at a time, spending as little of your maximum as it can and never a cent past it.
Which means you do not have to sit up on the closing evening. Decide the figure in daylight, leave it, and let the bid column do the arguing.
When an auction closes the invoice follows within a day: the hammer price, our buyer's fee of 10%, and any shipping, insurance and duty that apply. It is settled within three working days, by bank transfer or by card.
Nothing is a surprise by then. The costs page and the shipping calculator will both give you the whole figure before you place the bid rather than after it.
We pack for glass and hand the parcel to whichever of our four carriers is best on your route. You can also leave the bottles here free of charge for 10 weeks and combine them with what you win in the auctions after this one, which is the single easiest way to spend less on shipping.
Or come and get them. Collection from Groningen is always possible, always by appointment, and always carries the Dutch excise rate.
For sellers
The work is ours. You decide what goes in and what it is worth waiting for; the photography, the description, the storage, the buyers and the shipping are things you never have to touch.
Send us a photograph of the front and the back of the bottle, and the Whiskybase ID if you happen to have it. We come back with what we think it will make at auction and whether it is worth listing at all.
Nothing about that commits you to anything. A good number of the valuations we do end with somebody deciding to keep the bottle, which is a perfectly reasonable outcome.
We drive collection routes through the Benelux, Germany, Denmark and Sweden and pick bottles up at your door for nothing. You can also drop them at one of our depots in Belgium, Germany or Denmark, which takes 25% off the listing fee, or bring them to Groningen yourself by appointment.
Or send them in. Until the bottles are in our hands they remain your responsibility, so pack for glass: bottle upright, neck braced and nothing able to move.
Every bottle is photographed here, in the same light, against the same background, with the fill level and the state of the seal and the capsule recorded as they are. We write the description and put the lot into the next auction.
You are not asked to do any of that yourself, and you are not asked to guess a price either. If you want a floor under the bottle you can set a reserve for € 6,50; without one it starts at a low opening bid and finds its own level.
Your lot sits in a catalogue that bidders across Europe and well beyond it are working through for around ten days. A bid in the closing minutes extends the whole auction rather than ending it, so a bottle is never taken by whoever happened to click last.
If it does not sell, it can go into a following auction or come back to you. Nothing is disposed of without asking you first.
We take no percentage of what your bottle makes. The hammer price is yours, minus the listing fee that was agreed before it went in, and it is transferred once the buyer has paid and the parcel is on its way.
Selling on behalf of a company is no obstacle either: with a valid VAT number you can sell as a business seller, and the paperwork follows from there.
Tariffs
No listing that turns out to have a fee attached, and no percentage that appears at the end. These are all of them, read live from the same settings the invoices are built from — if a figure changes in our system it changes on this page on the same day.
Good to know
None of these are hidden anywhere. They are simply the eight that come up again and again in our inbox, usually a day or two after they would have been useful — so they are collected here rather than left scattered across the pages that explain them.
A bid on any lot in the closing minutes extends the entire auction, and it keeps extending until a full period passes with nobody bidding on anything. Then every lot closes at the same moment.
So the bottle goes to whoever was willing to pay most, not to whoever had the fastest connection at 22:59. It is also the best argument there is for leaving a maximum and going to bed.
There is no cooling-off period on an auction and no way to withdraw a bid once it is placed. If it turns out to be the highest one when the clock stops, the bottle and the invoice are yours.
Which is why the number to decide is your maximum, decided before the closing evening rather than during it.
Setting a reserve means the bottle does not sell below it. It does not push the bidding up towards it, and a reserve set optimistically is the most common reason a good bottle comes home again.
Without one the lot opens low and finds its own level, which on a bottle with an established market is usually the braver and better call.
A won bottle can stay here for 10 weeks at no charge, and bottles won in later auctions join it. One parcel of six costs a great deal less than six parcels of one.
Nothing happens automatically at the end of those weeks either. We write to you first.
It is a tax on alcohol charged per bottle at the rate of the country it is going to, worked out from volume and strength rather than from what you paid. We collect it and hand it over.
For some destinations it comes to more than the whisky did. The calculator will tell you the exact figure for a bottle before you bid, which is the sort of thing better known in advance.
Fill level, seal, capsule and label are photographed as they are, in the same light every time, and the notes say what the photographs show. There is no tidier version of the bottle held back.
So read the lot properly and use the magnifier. What you see on the page is what is coming out of the box.
A cork that has spent forty years drying out can fail in transit without anybody mishandling anything. Leakage that comes from a perished cork or a tired seal falls outside the insurance rather than inside it.
It is the single most common way an old bottle arrives disappointing, and no carrier and no policy anywhere treats it as a transit loss.
Everything happens in one building in Groningen: the photography, the racks, the packing and the answers to your e-mails. You can come and see it, collect bottles you have won, or drop off bottles of your own.
There are no walk-in hours. One e-mail or one call arranges it, and it means somebody is free for you rather than halfway up a rack.
Where to find what
Everything above is the short version. This is where each part of it is set out properly — with a line on what is actually on each page, so you are not opening five of them to find the one you wanted.
