Terms for Buyers | Wine Owners

Key things worth knowing when buying wine through Wine Owners.

Wine Owners operates a peer-to-peer trading exchange. That means you are entering into a contract directly with your seller who is likely to be a private collector: please be prepared to honour your contract of sale. Sellers offer their wines for sale at a price that they wish to achieve before commission. Buyers can simply buy the wine, or can choose to bid less than the offer for sale price. Sellers can match to the highest bid, or might adjust their selling price or make no change. A very high proportion of offers for sale are from private sellers.

Please be respectful with your bids as unduly low bids are off-putting to sellers.

You will be able to see if the seller of particular offer for sale is private (consumer) or Trade on the buy screen. If you are not completely sure that you will be able to honour a purchase please do not trade.

As a buyer you have the right to request an inspection report when you trade. It’s a sensible precaution, and strongly recommended for more expensive wines or older vintages. Inspection is charged at cost and is currently £10.80 per case including VAT. If you request an inspection report and the wine turns out to be not as described, you can cancel your purchase, and your inspection report fee and buyer commissions are refunded in full. It is not possible to return wine after delivery that has not been previously inspected.

Bids will expire after a month. Bidders are able to renew bids for a month at a single click in their expired bids page, or can amend bids and set any other time period for their bids to remain active.

Check the location of the wine that is offered for sale if you wish to minimise delivery fees. You can transfer wine to your own account in the same warehouse free of charge, or you can ask us to open a new storage account in a new warehouse on your behalf. Wine Owners collection management tools make it easy to keep track of all wines across different storage locations.

Purchased wines are automatically added to your online collection management when the transaction completes. At point of purchase, you can specify which cellar you wish the system to add your completed purchase into.

If you are bidding on a wine, offers for sale automatically match to exactly corresponding bids (price, bottle size, case size, number of cases, duty status and the country in which the wine is stored that must correspond to your specified default delivery preference - or option for you to organise collection) and trigger a transaction.

This means pre-filling your bid and buy preferences is mandatory if you want to place a new bid on the exchange. Once completed, your bids are binding. You will be able to define your bid preferences so that your chosen parameters are defaulted when you place a bid. Your invoice relating to a transaction will contain inspection and delivery defaults that reflect your bid and buy preferences.

Bids expire after a month. Bidders are able to renew bids for a month at a single click in their expired bids page, or can amend bids and set any other time period for their bids to remain active.

Buyers pay a commission, a small settlement fee that covers the cost of transfer of wine between accounts in a warehouse and any delivery fees if the wine is to be moved.

Once you have bought a wine from your seller counterparty, you will need to fund your account within 48 working hours, which is done by bank transfer. UK buyers can use Faster Payments via their bank. Overseas buyers can additionally use money transfer platforms such as https://transferwise.com to get better rates than are typically offered by banks.

Wine Owners provides an assured trading process that protects buyer and seller. Once you have funded your account, the seller will not be paid by us on your behalf until the wine is confirmed as being ready to transfer (and after an inspection report has been accepted by the buyer if requested at point of purchase).

A buyer’s personal information will not be disclosed to the counter party seller, with the exception that in the case of non-payment, Wine Owners may disclose buyer details to the seller so that the contract can be fulfilled, or escalated to mediation if there is a valid reason for the buyer asking to break the contract with their seller counter party.

Please do not sell-on wine that is purchased on the trading exchange before it is in your possession. If in the rare event a seller cannot fulfil a trade, any losses caused by back-to-back trading that creates obligations on you as a trade seller to supply wine to a buyer shall not be recoverable by you. In the case that a rare wine is irreplaceable an alternative may be offered to you by the seller.

Payment is required for wines purchased before movement of wine is instructed from the seller to you, typically routed through a Wine Owners storage header account. Wine Owners does not offer credit arrangements. Please pay within 48 hours of a trade.

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