Secure payments
Winning a lot should be the exciting part of an auction. Paying for it should be the dull part — a few taps in the banking app you use for everything else, and done.
So we offer the methods people in our part of the world actually use, we let Stripe do the handling, and we keep your card details as far away from our own systems as it is possible to keep them. This page sets out what you can pay with, what it costs, and who is holding what along the way.
Stripe handles the money
Your card details never reach us
iDEAL and Bancontact
No surcharge, settled instantly
Cards and bank transfer
For everyone outside the Benelux
Every payment verified
Strong authentication as standard
What you can pay with
Which of them you see at checkout depends on where you are registered. Everybody gets iDEAL, Bancontact and a bank transfer; the card route is offered everywhere except the Netherlands and Belgium, where the two bank methods already do the job at no cost.
You choose the method during checkout, after the delivery step and before you confirm the order — so you can see the whole total, shipping and all, before you commit to anything.
Dutch bank accounts
The way almost every Dutch buyer pays us. You pick your own bank, confirm the payment in your banking app, and you are back on the site a few seconds later with the order already settled.
There is nothing on top of the amount: no surcharge, no fee, and no card details to hand over. Because the money moves immediately, an iDEAL payment also releases your bottles for shipping straight away.
No surcharge
Belgian bank accounts
Belgium's equivalent of iDEAL, and it behaves in exactly the same way: confirm the payment in your own banking app and the order is settled before you are back on the page.
Also free of any surcharge, and also immediate — which for a Belgian buyer makes it the quickest route from winning a lot to having it packed.
No surcharge
Everywhere except the Netherlands and Belgium
Visa and Mastercard, handled entirely inside Stripe. Dutch and Belgian members are not offered the card route, because iDEAL and Bancontact do the same job for them at no cost.
Cards issued outside the European Union, and business cards, carry a surcharge — that is the interchange we are charged ourselves, passed on rather than spread across everybody's buyer fee. When it applies, the amount is shown on the card before you confirm anything.
Surcharge on non-EU and business cards
Anyone, anywhere
A plain transfer to our account, using the reference on the invoice. Available to every member whatever their country, and the usual choice for larger orders or where a card limit would get in the way.
The one thing to know is that it is not instant. A transfer takes a few working days to reach us, and bottles are only released once it has — so if you are in a hurry, one of the other three will serve you better. A proof of payment is always welcome and often speeds things up.
No surcharge, but not immediate
This list changes now and again — a method gets added when enough of you ask for it, and one would be retired if it stopped being used. What is on this page is what the checkout is offering today.
The honest bit
There is no handling charge, no processing fee and no percentage added for the privilege of settling your invoice. Pay by iDEAL, by Bancontact or by bank transfer and the amount that leaves your account is the amount on the invoice.
There is exactly one exception, and it is a card that costs us money to accept. Cards issued outside the European Union, and business cards wherever they come from, are charged to us at a materially higher rate than an ordinary European consumer card. Rather than fold that into everybody's buyer fee, we pass it on to the people it applies to.
It is decided by the card, not by your address — a European member paying with a card issued elsewhere will see it, and it is shown on the card in your account and again at checkout before you confirm. If you would rather not pay it, a bank transfer is always available and always free.
Leave an invoice unpaid past its term and a late payment fee of 3,5% follows, which is the one charge on this page you have complete control over. VAT is added to our fees at the rate of the country we deliver to, and every rate we charge is listed in full on the pricing page.
Who handles the money
There is a reason a whisky auction should not be writing its own card processing, and it is the same reason we do not distil our own whisky. Payments are somebody else's craft, and we have handed them to somebody who is very good at it.
Stripe processes payments for millions of businesses in more than forty countries. Everything you pay us goes through them.
Every payment on this site is processed by Stripe, one of the largest payment providers in the world and the one our banks, our accountants and our auditors are all comfortable with. When you pay, you are dealing with their systems, not ours.
They are regulated as a payment institution in Europe, they hold the card scheme certifications, and they are the ones carrying the compliance burden that comes with touching card numbers. That is precisely why we use them rather than build it ourselves.
Card numbers are entered into a field that belongs to Stripe, inside our page. They travel from your browser to Stripe directly. They do not pass through our servers, they are not written to our database, and they are not in any backup we hold.
What we get back is a token: a reference that lets us charge a card without ever knowing what it is. If our systems were read cover to cover tomorrow, there would be no card number in them to find.
European rules require most payments to be confirmed by you personally — a fingerprint, a face, a code from your banking app. That is what makes iDEAL and Bancontact feel the way they do, and it is why a card payment sometimes bounces you into your bank for a moment.
It is a small interruption in exchange for something worth having: a payment nobody can make on your behalf, including us.
We keep what an invoice needs: who paid, how much, when, by which method, and whether it succeeded. For a saved card we keep the last four digits and the expiry, which is what lets you tell one card from another in your account.
We do not sell any of it, we do not pass it to sellers, and we do not use it for anything beyond running your account and satisfying our own bookkeeping obligations.
If something has to be refunded — an order that could not be fulfilled, an overpayment, an excise adjustment after a bottle leaves the EU — it goes back to the account or card the money came from. We cannot send it somewhere else, and we would not want to be able to.
How long it takes is the bank's business rather than ours. A card refund typically shows within a few working days; a transfer back to an account is usually quicker.
An amount you do not recognise, a payment that failed but left your account, an invoice that does not match what you won: send it to us and we will look at the transaction from our side, where every payment is logged against the order it belongs to.
Nothing about a payment problem gets better by waiting, and almost all of them turn out to be something we can see immediately.
Before you check out
Anything about a specific payment is better asked directly — we can see the transaction against your order and tell you what actually happened.
No. The card field on our checkout belongs to Stripe, and what you type into it goes to them rather than to us. We receive a token that lets us charge the card, plus the last four digits and the expiry date so you can tell one saved card from another. The number itself is not in our systems at any point.
Because you are registered in the Netherlands or Belgium, where iDEAL and Bancontact already cover it — instantly, and without the surcharge a card can carry. If you have a genuine reason to need the card route, tell us and we will look at it.
When the card was issued outside the European Union, and on business cards. It is the card that decides it, not your address: a European member paying with a card issued elsewhere will still see it. The surcharge is 3,5%, and it is shown against the card in your account and again before you confirm the payment. A bank transfer avoids it entirely.
Usually one to three working days from within Europe, longer from outside it. Bottles are released once the money is with us, so a transfer sent on a Friday afternoon will not have your order moving before the middle of the following week. Sending us the proof of payment does no harm at all.
Not one we impose, but your own bank or card issuer may well have one — and for a large order that is the thing most likely to get in the way. If a payment is refused for that reason, a bank transfer will go through where a card will not.
Almost always this is a reservation rather than a charge, and it falls off by itself within a few days. Send us the date, the amount and the method and we will check it against our own record of the transaction — and if it really did go through, it is reconciled against your order rather than lost.
Orders are settled one at a time, because each one has its own invoice, its own shipping and its own excise position. What you can combine is the shipping: leave won bottles with us and they can travel together later in a single parcel.
A reminder, then another, then a late payment fee of 3,5%. A bid is a binding commitment, and an unpaid one costs the seller a sale they had already made. It is much better to tell us there is a problem than to let the reminders run.
By bank transfer to the account on your profile, after the auction has been settled. That is the only route out — we do not pay sellers by card — so keeping your bank details current is worth two minutes of anybody's time.
Open an account once, and from then on winning a bottle and settling for it is a matter of a few taps in the app you already use.
