How to sell
An auction house account gives you your own site, your own catalogue and your own buyers. Everything below happens before a sale opens, so the sale itself runs without surprises.
Have something to sell?
Our member houses value items and sell them. Browse the houses and contact the one that suits what you have; they will tell you what it is likely to make.
Browse the houses- 1
Apply for a house account
Send us your trading name, address, company number, VAT number if you have one, a business email and a telephone number. Houses are reviewed by hand and approved by us — this is what keeps buyer confidence in the catalogue.
- 2
Decide how it runs
Choose whether bidders must be approved before they can bid (recommended for higher-value stock) and whether bidders must register separately for each sale. Both can be set either way, per house.
- 3
Load your stock
There are three ways to get lots in:
- Import from a link. Paste the address of an item page or a whole listings page and we read the title, description, category, condition, price and photographs.
- Import a file. Upload a CSV, or paste the page source you saved from your browser.
- Type it in. Add Lot in the dashboard, one at a time.
Imports arrive as a batch you review and approve before anything appears on the site — nothing goes live unreviewed.
- 4
Set the money on every lot
Each lot carries its own starting price, estimate range (a low and a high figure — this is the headline price buyers see), bid increment, an optional reserve, and an optional Buy-It-Now price. You can edit one lot, or tick a batch and change any field across all of them at once — including “set every estimate from the price the seller asked”, at the multiples and rounding you choose. Our own convention is 60–100% of the asking price, rounded to the nearest £10, with the starting bid placed at the low estimate.
Fixed-price and Buy-It-Now lots wait for approval before they go live; ordinary auction lots do not.
- 5
Open the sale
Timed sales can run from 7 to 45 days. Turn on soft close if you want bidding in the last two minutes to extend the clock. Withdraw any lot that is no longer available — if it already has a bid it is withdrawn rather than deleted, so nothing untoward can happen to a bid that has been placed.
- 6
After the hammer
Buyers are emailed, invoices are raised with the hammer price, buyer’s premium and VAT, and your results page shows what sold, what did not, and at what price.
Fees
A monthly subscription for the software, plus commission on lots sold. The exact figures are in your agreement — there are no listing fees and no charge for lots that do not sell.
Ready to start? Register your house, or read How to buy to see what your bidders will do.