Bidding: Eligibility, Deposits, and Why a Bid Can Be Rejected

New sales use direct payment only after explicit agreement. The buyer pays the seller outside ReVend; both pay 0% ReVend transaction commission. The buyer reports payment and the seller separately confirms receipt. Administrators and finance record these declarations in the purchase or sales dossier, with optional reference and a reason for corrections. ReVend does not check a bank account. Existing escrow dossiers retain their current handling.

Sign in, open /auction/browse or a shared lot link, and review an accessible lot from another seller. Browse includes open lots and private lots your organization has been admitted to. Your bids use the confirmed business identity of your own organization. The platform checks whether that identity may bid before accepting a bid; a refusal includes an explanation.

Accepting a private invitation

Open the seller’s invitation link with the exact invited, verified email address. Sign in with an existing account or register your own organization; registration, confirmation and password recovery keep the invitation destination. You do not join the seller’s staff. A forwarded link, a matching company name or the same email domain does not grant access.

An administrator or manager confirms the organization’s buyer identity if needed, then explicitly accepts the invitation. The lot opens after acceptance, and authorized colleagues in that buyer organization can use its ordinary lot link too. A commercial user must ask the seller to invite an administrator or manager using that person’s email address. Acceptance does not waive verification, deposit or bidding rules.

If the link has expired, ask the seller for a renewed link. For a revoked or unavailable invitation, ask for a new invitation. If you used the wrong account, sign out and reopen the original link with the invited account. A refused invitation reveals no private title, price or photos. After access is revoked, existing bids and purchases still carry their obligations.

If a private auction ends without a sale, it remains an unsold Auction record and is not automatically published on public Market. Open lots retain their existing no-sale relisting route.

One confirmed identity for your own business

An organization administrator or manager confirms your buyer identity on the lot page. Commercial users can use that confirmed identity, but cannot confirm it themselves. For a new buyer, ReVend proposes the legal name of their organization, or its organization name when no legal name is available. Bids, buy-now and deposit requests use the same identity.

If exactly one identity exists from earlier auction activity, confirm that existing company. Previous bids, collateral, verification and restrictions stay attached to it. If several identities exist, contact Support for review; they are not merged automatically. If the displayed company is wrong, contact Support before confirming. Creating another company in your address book does not replace your bidding identity. Confirming it again does not create a duplicate.

Verification tiers

Bidding companies carry a verification level: basic, verified or premium. The level is set by ReVend platform staff on /admin/auction/bidders, alongside blocklist state and strike totals; there is no self-service document upload. The platform risk policy names a minimum level for bidding (default: verified). A company below it is not refused outright — it lands in the deposit path with the reason verification_required.

Pre-bid collateral, not escrow

Bidder deposits answer one question: may this company bid on this lot without extra security? They are admission rules before a bid — nothing to do with paying for a won lot. The eligibility panel on the lot page shows one of not_required, requires_deposit, pending_deposit, eligible, blocked, expired, released or forfeited, always with the reason: a high-value lot, a new bidder, a verification requirement, a seller or platform requirement, an API key without a bound bidder identity, a blocklist entry, an anti-gaming control or too many active strikes.

The defaults are platform-owned and live on /admin/auction/risk-settings: lots of 10,000 and up ask for 10 % with a minimum of 250, new bidders need one successful auction before the requirement lifts, and a pending request expires after 72 hours. When a deposit is required the bidder requests it from the lot page; the request appears on /admin/auction/bidder-eligibilities, where platform staff confirm, block, release or hold it. Bidding stays blocked until the status is eligible.

Winning does not turn bidder collateral into payment. For a new direct-payment lot, the buyer pays the seller outside ReVend. With prepayment the seller must confirm receipt before dispatch; an agreed payment term can permit earlier dispatch. No escrow or ReVend transaction commission is created.

The checks

Before a first bid or buy-now purchase, explicitly accept the published direct-payment terms on the lot page. Without agreement you cannot participate; requiring escrow does not count as consent. A valid bid must land while the lot is live, name a bidder company, be a positive amount, and reach the minimum: the current high bid plus the increment from the platform table, or the starting bid when nobody has bid yet. The bidder’s tenant may not be the seller’s tenant. A company holds one active bid per lot — a new bid flips the previous one to outbid. Eligibility must be green, the anti-gaming score below the high threshold, and the company not blocklisted. Bids through the public API additionally need an API key bound to a bidder principal. Any failure rejects the bid with a specific reason: invalid amount, bid below minimum, no bidder company, high-suspicion control, blocklisted, deposit required, deposit pending, eligibility expired, extra verification required.

Bids are binding

There is no retract button. A bid is a commitment, and the only exceptions — the seller materially changed the lot, an unmistakable typo, a technical fault on the platform side — go through admin review. Retracted bids count against the anti-gaming retraction signal, which is the polite way of saying the platform remembers.

Buy now, and what you see

Some lots carry a buy-now price. While the lot is live and bidding has not reached that price, an eligible buyer can close it at once; the platform ends the auction, creates the deal and opens /auction/purchases. On the lot page a bidder sees only their own bids, never the full history — that view belongs to the seller. Bids and lot changes arrive over Realtime with a 30-second refresh as safety net, and the previous high bidder gets an outbid notification the moment they are no longer on top.

Your purchase after winning

Once your winning result is settled, open My purchases at /auction/purchases. Your purchase dossier brings together the agreed amount, payment reference and status, delivery progress, device details, shared documents and evidence, and messages with the seller. Core, Market and Escrow modules are not required to handle your own purchase. An old link to your own Auction deal also opens this dossier.

Active administrators, managers, commercial users and finance colleagues in the recorded buyer organization can read the dossier, send messages and download files shared for that purchase. The dossier remains available after a private invitation is withdrawn or the Auction module ends. That does not restore access to new private lot information or bidding. Suspended accounts and organizations or former team members do not receive this access.

Administrators and finance colleagues can report a problem or add a dispute response. For existing escrow dossiers only, accepting delivery authorizes release of the escrow balance; an open dispute prevents release. A release or refund decision does not prove a bank transfer. New direct sales use the buyer’s payment report and the seller’s separate receipt confirmation.

The seller can reply through the chat in their sales dossier after the Auction sale has closed. Delivery arrangements and follow-up remain possible; the agreed price is not reopened.

Auction invoice drafts use one lot line at the agreed total. The device count does not multiply the lot price.

To share a file with your buyer, upload it in Documents, open Manage links, choose the Auction sale by purchase number and select Share with customer. Linking alone keeps the file internal. Hiding it again revokes access through the purchase dossier.