Pressurised to bid at auction and now cannot pay.

T120girl

Please don't tell me how stupid I am, I know. 

I recently bid on a number of items in a returns and faulty goods auction. It was the strangest software I have seen. As I was bidding the clock did not count down and I got over 50 emails in 20 minutes telling me to bid again because I was outbid. I had no mails at all telling me I had won an item. 

Now they are demanding £2000 from me. Thats with the vat and fees. I don't have that sort of money. I have listed the items I do want and am prepared to pay for but they will not accept that. They agree to delete one lot where they got the description wrong but not the ones I want to delete. eg 3 identical watches.
Where do I stand legally? Will they take me to court? Is it best to keep emails going to reach a solution?

thanks , Tracey.

Grumpelstiltskin

Read the terms and conditions of the auction.
Normally it is when the hammer falls the lot is yours.
I guess they won't post the items until you have paid?
Will they take you to court? No one here knows the answer to that.
You  have learned an important lesson, know what you are doing when you bid in an auction.

T120girl

Grumpelstiltskin said:

Read the terms and conditions of the auction.
Normally it is when the hammer falls the lot is yours.
I guess they won't post the items until you have paid?
Will they take you to court? No one here knows the answer to that.
You  have learned an important lesson, know what you are doing when you bid in an auction.

Thats not very helpful. I already said I was stupid and it was a mistake. Garden sheds and cookers won't fit in the post.

tacpot12

T120girl said:

Grumpelstiltskin said:

Read the terms and conditions of the auction.
Normally it is when the hammer falls the lot is yours.
I guess they won't post the items until you have paid?
Will they take you to court? No one here knows the answer to that.
You  have learned an important lesson, know what you are doing when you bid in an auction.

Thats not very helpful. I already said I was stupid and it was a mistake. Garden sheds and cookers won't fit in the post.

I think Grumpelstiltskins advice to read the terms and conditions of the auction is good advice. You might find someonthing, such as what happens if there is a software glitch, that would allow you to legally rescind the contract.

The T&Cs will also tell you which country's laws govern the auction. 

It's not clear from your post why you kept increasing your bids and bidding on additional items when the software didn't seem to be working. I think you need to analyse and make notes on what the software did and why you did what you did. How do the software mislead you?  You will need these if they take you to court, and they might, so make these notes now. If you don't, you are setting yourself up to lose at court - not just the £2000, but the court fees, and possibly their legal costs as well. (The judge may decide that you have not paid them for no good reason)

If you can find evidence of other people who have misunderstood the same software, get PDF copies of the problems they had. You will need PDF copies of the emails your received, and you should get screen prints of the software. If you think that you need to show the bidding process, be careful. Perhaps a friend would sign up, providing you cover the cost of their bid, wich should clearly be no more than they are willing lose. You need to be set up to video the biddingg process, and capture it at high resolution. Sharing your screen in a zoom meeting and recording the meeting is one option to do this. Check that you are completely familiar with how to record before starting any bidding.  

If you have home insurnace, check to see if you have legal expenses cover. If you do, call the legal hotline for further advice. 

mspenguin

Assuming the auction house works similar to John Pye I think you'll struggle to get out of it. The Ts & Cs are usually very clear about how the bidding format works and the additional fees on top. They also usually state quite clearly additional storage costs if you do not arrange removal of goods by a set day (so your costs might go up).

Unless you can evidence the software was faulty on the day I think I'd be trying to find a way to pay and sell the goods to recoup costs as £2k is worth taking further.

T120girl

Thank you, of course I have already read John Pye's T & C's and I think I'm stuck. It's not worth the stress and extra fees of a legal appeal.

So I have a pile of bargains to pay for and collect in 2 days. Should be fun!
Next time, ha ha! not likely, I will know that there is no notification of  a winning bid and ignore the bombardment of " outbid, bid again" emails that appear every couple of seconds. A prize for plonker of the day accepted. : )

RFW

T120girl said:

Thank you, of course I have already read John Pye's T & C's and I think I'm stuck. It's not worth the stress and extra fees of a legal appeal.

So I have a pile of bargains to pay for and collect in 2 days. Should be fun!
Next time, ha ha! not likely, I will know that there is no notification of  a winning bid and ignore the bombardment of " outbid, bid again" emails that appear every couple of seconds. A prize for plonker of the day accepted. : )

If you can't afford to pay for it all then that's it, you seem to say that now you can.

Whilst you are in the wrong and it may get pursued further if you don't pay, it's unlikely they'll take it further. At this stage they haven't lost anything more than time. They are still able to sell the items again.
If they went to court they could only demand for any losses they have made and you can explain to a judge what happened. They can't claim for all the money without holding on to the stock until a court case proceeds. That is very unlikely.

I used to be an auctioneer and had several non payers. It's a massive pain. It was never worth going to court for, for several possible reasons. Anyone who didn't pay up at an auction is unlikely to be able to nail down for any funds even if there's a cut and dry case. The other reason is that you still had the stock to sell, so sometimes it would go for less the next time and sometimes more.

fenwick458

T120girl said:

Next time, ha ha! not likely, I will know that there is no notification of  a winning bid and ignore the bombardment of " outbid, bid again" emails that appear every couple of seconds. A prize for plonker of the day accepted. : )

how do you know someone wasn't bidding against you?

theoretica

With a normal local auction house you can arrange not to collect the item but to pay and then for the auction house to include it in their next sale (charging you sale fees) so you get some money back.  I don't know if this might be an option.

RFW

theoretica said:

With a normal local auction house you can arrange not to collect the item but to pay and then for the auction house to include it in their next sale (charging you sale fees) so you get some money back.  I don't know if this might be an option.

Many auctions will offer that. There's always the possibility that you'd just lose all your money after auction fees. So if you are unfamiliar with the auction process you'd really need to be careful doing that.

pearl123

Are you able to show proof that you recieved repeated emails? Plus, is there any reason why this should make you over-bid? If so then perhaps show them the emails and explain your issue.