Pricing
An auction has to earn something on every lot, and we would rather tell you exactly what and exactly when than bury it in small print you discover at checkout. This page is the whole list.
It is generated from the same figures the invoices are calculated with, so what you read here is what you will be charged. If a rate changes, this page changes with it on the same day.
One fee for buyers
10% of the hammer price
One fee per bottle for sellers
€ 7,00 to list it
No monthly costs
No subscription, ever
Nothing hidden
If it is not here, we do not charge it
If you are buying
Every purchase carries the buyer's fee. Everything else on this list is something you have chosen — a shipment, cover for it, a few weeks of storage — or a tax neither of us sets.
All of it is visible before you commit: on the lot page while you are bidding, and again in the order summary before you confirm anything.
The commission on a won lot, and the only charge on this page that applies to every single purchase. It is what pays for the catalogue, the inspection, the photography, the bidding platform and the people answering your questions about a fill level.
It is calculated on the hammer price and shown on the lot page while you are still bidding, so the figure you are working towards is never a surprise. Set your maximum with it in mind and the invoice will look exactly as you expected.
We ship worldwide through PostNL, DPD, FedEx and DHL, and the rate depends on the destination and on how many bottles are travelling. Which of the four carries your parcel is our decision rather than yours, because after five years of doing this we know which one performs where. Our shipping calculator gives you the figure for your own country before you place a bid rather than after you have won.
Rates are set by the carrier and do change. Check them again if you are bidding on something months after you last looked — it is the one number on this page we do not control.
Optional cover against loss and breakage in transit, calculated on the hammer price plus the buyer's fee. Couriers do not accept liability for glass, so without it a broken bottle is simply a broken bottle.
It is added at checkout by default and you can take it off in one click. What it does not cover is the condition the bottle was already in — a seal that was weeping when it was photographed is not a transit loss.
A tax on alcohol rather than a fee of ours. It is charged per bottle at the rate of the country the bottle is going to, worked out from the volume and the strength, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with what you paid for the whisky.
We add € 0,50 per bottle for reporting and paying it to the authorities on your behalf, and nothing else. The calculator on our excise page will tell you the exact figure for a bottle before you bid on it.
There is no charge for paying us by iDEAL, by Bancontact, by bank transfer or with an ordinary European consumer credit card. A surcharge of 3,5% applies to cards issued outside the European Union and to business cards, because those cost us materially more to accept.
It is the card that decides it, not your address, and it is shown before you confirm the payment. A bank transfer avoids it entirely and is available to everybody.
Won bottles can stay with us rather than travel immediately, which is how most regular buyers combine several auctions into one shipment. The first 10 weeks are free of charge and cover at least two more auctions.
After that a storage fee of 3,5% of the hammer price plus buyer's fee is charged for the year ahead, with a minimum of € 5,00. That same sum is the value your bottle is insured for while it is with us.
An invoice for a won lot is due within 3 days. That is short for an auction house, and it is short on purpose: the bottle you bought belongs to somebody who is waiting to be paid for it, and our sellers are the reason there is anything to bid on at all.
Settling quickly is what lets us settle with them quickly in turn. A seller who is paid within days of the auction closing tends to consign again, and that is what keeps the catalogue worth opening.
Charged when an invoice is left unpaid past that term, after the reminders have gone out. A bid is a binding commitment and an unpaid one costs the seller a sale they had already made, which is why it exists at all.
If there is a genuine problem, tell us before the reminders start rather than after. That conversation is always easier than the one that follows a fee.
If you are selling
Selling with us costs a fixed amount per bottle and nothing else. The driving, the packing materials, the inspection, the photography, the catalogue entry and the settlement all come out of that one figure, and we take no share of what the bottle makes.
There is no monthly charge, no minimum consignment, no fee for withdrawing your money and no cost to having an account that is quiet for a season.
The two lines worth planning around are the listing fee and the reserve price fee. The rest of this list is either optional or in your favour.
Charged once per bottle, when it goes into an auction. It covers the whole of what happens to a bottle before anybody bids on it: unpacking, checking, identifying, photographing under our own lights, writing up the specification and the condition, and putting it into the catalogue.
It is due whether or not the bottle sells, and it is the figure to weigh up when you are wondering whether something is worth listing at all. A bottle that does not sell can be relisted once at no further charge, so an ambitious reserve costs you a wait rather than a second fee.
We do not take a share of what your bottle makes. The hammer price is yours in full, and the listing fee above is the whole of what selling through us costs — there is no second deduction waiting at settlement.
It is a rate rather than a promise carved in stone, which is why it sits in this list at all. It is published here and on your settlement statement, and any change would apply to auctions you enter after it, never to bottles already listed.
A reserve is the floor below which you will not sell, and setting one is entirely optional. The fee is charged only on lots that carry one, and never on a lot that simply fails to reach it — an unsold reserved bottle costs you nothing beyond the listing fee.
Reserves are worth using sparingly. A bottle passed in twice usually says more about the reserve than about the whisky, and the room reads a lot that keeps reappearing as one nobody wanted.
Our collection routes pick bottles up at the door at no charge, and sellers elsewhere in Europe can ask us for a shipping label rather than arrange a courier themselves. Getting a consignment to us is not something we charge for.
Bring the bottles to one of our depots instead and you get 25% of the listing fee back on every one of them, rising to 50% when the Whiskybase IDs come with them. That is the one line on this page that moves in your favour.
Payouts go by bank transfer to the account on your profile once the auction has been settled and the buyers have paid. There is no withdrawal fee, no minimum threshold and no charge for the transfer itself.
What arrives is the hammer price less the fees above, itemised bottle by bottle so you can check it line by line. Keep your bank details current — an out-of-date IBAN is the single most common reason a payout sits waiting.
And what we never charge for
A price list only tells you half the story. These are the things people most often assume carry a fee somewhere, and none of them do — not at sign-up, not at settlement, and not in a footnote further down.
The catalogue, the photographs, the magnifier, the specifications, every past result we have ever published: all of it is open, and none of it is behind an account. You can follow an entire auction from the outside without telling us who you are.
Signing up adds the watchlist, the alerts and the bidding, and signing up costs nothing either. The only fee near an account is the one-off verification below, and that only matters once you actually want to bid.
Send us a photograph of the label and we will tell you what we think it will make, honestly, including when the answer is that it is worth less than the listing fee. We would rather say so than take seven euro from you to prove it.
That estimate is free whether you go on to consign the bottle or not, and there is nothing to sign. Plenty of people ask us once a year purely to keep their insurance valuation current.
Placing a bid costs nothing, raising it costs nothing, and being outbid at the last minute of a closing evening costs nothing at all. You are only ever charged on a lot you actually win.
The same is true of a maximum bid that never gets used: leave one on a lot, watch it sail past you, and there is nothing to pay. An account that bids on forty lots and wins none of them owes us nothing.
Our own collection routes come to the door and cost nothing, and sellers elsewhere in Europe can ask for a shipping label instead of paying a courier. Getting whisky to Groningen is our problem, not yours.
Bringing it to a depot yourself is better than free: you get part of the listing fee back for every bottle, and more of it again when the Whiskybase IDs come with them.
A bottle you have won can stay in our warehouse for 10 weeks without a storage charge, insured, in the dark, upright and at a steady temperature. That window is long enough to cover at least two more auctions.
It is what makes combining purchases worthwhile: win in three consecutive auctions, pay for one shipment, and pay nothing for the waiting in between.
No withdrawal fee, no payout threshold, no charge for the bank transfer and no monthly cost for holding a balance with us. When an auction has settled, what is yours is transferred to your account.
There is no subscription anywhere on this platform, no premium tier and nothing that quietly renews. If a fee is not on this page, we do not charge it.
The small print, in full size
Two figures above are not really fees at all: one is a verification, the other is tax. Both change what you actually pay, so they belong on the same page as everything else rather than three clicks away in a terms document.
Nothing here is unusual for an auction house. It is written out plainly because the alternative is you finding it out at checkout.
A one-off, non-refundable charge taken the first time you set up bidding on your account. It is the only charge on this page that buys you nothing directly, which is exactly why it is worth explaining.
It runs a real payment through our payment partner, and that single transaction settles two questions at once. It establishes that the person bidding is an adult, which we are obliged to do because we sell alcohol — and it spares you the alternative, which is uploading a photograph of your passport to a whisky auction. It also proves the account behind your registration is real and is yours, which matters on a platform where a bid is a binding commitment made days before any money moves.
The rest is simple arithmetic. The amount is small enough not to matter to a genuine buyer and just enough friction to make throwaway accounts pointless, so nobody sets up ten of them to run a price up. It is charged once and never again — not per auction, not per year and not per bottle.
VAT is added to our fees — the commission, the listing fee, the storage and our shipping charges alike. Every figure on this page is shown excluding VAT, so add it in your head when you are working out a maximum bid.
The rate is not a flat Dutch one. It is the rate of the country we deliver the bottles or the service to, so a German member sees the German rate and a Belgian member the Belgian rate. Bottles collected here in Groningen, and services delivered to a Dutch member, carry the Dutch rate of 21%.
Your invoice always shows the VAT as its own line, with the rate it was worked out at, so you can check the sum rather than take our word for it.
Bids, hammer prices, fees and payouts are all in euro. If your card or your bank account is in another currency, the conversion is theirs rather than ours, and their rate is the one that applies — a good reason to check what your own bank charges for it.
Nothing is taken while an auction is running. Buyers are invoiced once the closing evening is over and the lots have been allocated; sellers see the listing and reserve fees deducted from the settlement rather than billed up front. Storage is the only charge that arrives on its own schedule.
The buyer's fee, the shipping estimate and the excise duty are all shown on the lot page while you are still bidding, and again in the order summary before you confirm. Afterwards every invoice and settlement statement in your account itemises each line individually.
These figures come from the same settings the invoices are calculated with, so this page cannot drift out of date. A change applies to auctions entered after it, never retroactively to a bottle already listed or a lot already won.
Questions about money
If a figure on this page does not match what you are seeing in your account, tell us before you pay rather than after. Nine times out of ten it is a shipping estimate that has not been recalculated, and it takes a minute to fix.
Take the hammer price, add 10% for the buyer's fee, add VAT on that fee at your own country's rate, then add shipping and — outside the Netherlands — the excise duty for your own country. That is the whole calculation.
You never have to do the arithmetic yourself. Every one of those lines is shown on the lot page while the bidding is still open, and again in the order summary before you confirm anything.
No. The buyer's fee is the commission, and it is the only percentage we take from a buyer. There is no separate premium, no platform charge and no lot fee hiding behind it.
Everything else on your invoice is either a service you asked for — a shipment, insurance on it, some extra weeks of storage — or a tax that goes to a government rather than to us.
The listing fee of € 7,00, and nothing more. A reserve that is not reached costs you nothing extra, and you are free to let the bottle run again in the next auction at no further charge.
If you would rather have it back, we will send it to you and you pay only the shipment. Most sellers relist once with a lower reserve, because a bottle that has already been photographed and catalogued costs nothing to try again.
Without. Every figure on this page is exclusive of VAT, and VAT is added on top — on the commissions, on the listing fee, on storage and on the shipping we invoice.
The rate is not a single Dutch one. VAT is charged at the rate of the country we deliver to, so what a German member pays and what a Belgian member pays are different numbers on the same fee. A bottle collected from us in Groningen never leaves the Dutch tax area at the moment of sale, so it carries the Dutch rate of 21% whatever your own address says.
Your invoice always shows the VAT as its own line, with the rate it was worked out at, so you can see exactly what was added and to what. Members outside the EU do not pay it, but may well meet import charges of their own instead.
3 days from the invoice. It is a short term and we are not apologetic about it: somebody consigned that bottle and is waiting to be paid for it, and we cannot settle with them any faster than you settle with us.
Sellers are the reason there is a catalogue at all, and a house that pays them promptly is a house they come back to. If the term genuinely does not work for you on a particular invoice, say so before it runs out rather than after.
Because a real payment is the only reliable way to establish that an account belongs to an adult with a working payment method. € 5,00 goes through our payment partner once, and that single transaction settles both questions.
It is also the cheapest fraud prevention there is. An auction where anybody can bid without ever proving they can pay is an auction where the winning bid means nothing, and sellers are the ones who suffer for it.
Almost certainly not. The free window runs for 10 weeks from the moment a lot is allocated to you, which comfortably spans two further auctions, and combining shipments is exactly what it is there for.
Past that point storage is 3,5% of the hammer price plus buyer's fee for the year ahead, with a minimum of € 5,00. That is also the sum your bottle is insured for while it sits with us.
Easily. iDEAL, Bancontact, a bank transfer and an ordinary European consumer credit card all carry no surcharge whatsoever. The 3,5% applies only to cards issued outside the European Union and to business cards, which cost us considerably more to accept.
It is the card that decides it rather than where you live, and it is always shown before you confirm the payment. If you see one you did not expect, a bank transfer will get round it.
Tell us straight away. A bid is a binding commitment and an unpaid invoice costs a seller a sale they had already made, but a conversation on the first day is a very different thing from silence for three weeks.
Left alone, an overdue invoice attracts a late payment fee of 3,5% once the reminders have run their course, and repeated non-payment ends in the account being closed. Neither is a place anybody wants to end up.
Only in the sense that a percentage of a larger number is larger. The rates are identical whether a lot makes forty euro or four thousand, and there is no premium band, no tiering and no minimum commission.
The listing fee works the other way round: it is a flat amount per bottle, so it is a meaningful share of a cheap bottle and almost nothing on a rare one. That is worth bearing in mind when you decide what is worth consigning.
There is not, and there never has been. You can hold an account for years, watch every auction, bid in none of them and pay us nothing at all — beyond the one-off registration fee that let you bid in the first place.
Everything we charge is tied to something specific: a bottle listed, a lot won, a shipment sent, a month of storage used. If it is not on this page, it does not exist.
