Catering Equipment Auctions vs Fixed Price: What Actually Gets You Paid

A lot of people typing "catering equipment auctions" into Google are not collectors. They are operators with a good combi or a tidy fridge to move, and they have heard an auction is the quick way to do it. Before you consign anything, it is worth understanding exactly how an auction pays you, because the number you walk away with is a long way from the number on the hammer.

Twenty five years in and around commercial kitchens, and I have watched plenty of good kit go through the room for a fraction of its worth. Here is the honest maths on both routes, so you can decide which one actually gets you paid.

How an Auction Takes Its Cut

An auction makes its money from two directions at once, and both of them come out of your machine.

The buyer pays a premium. On top of the hammer price, the winning bidder pays a buyer's premium, and on commercial catering and industrial kit in the UK that is commonly in the region of 15 to 25 percent, with VAT on top of that again. One major UK auctioneer publishes a buyer's premium of 25 percent plus VAT.

You pay a seller's commission. The auction house also takes a cut from you, the seller. Seller's commission on general goods commonly runs somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the hammer price, and there can be entry fees, photography or lotting charges, and an unsold fee if your item does not meet its reserve.

So the machine is paying at both ends. That matters more than it first looks, because of what the buyer's premium does to the bidding.

The Bit Most Sellers Miss: the Premium Lowers Your Hammer Price

Here is the part that quietly costs sellers the most, and it is not a fee at all. It is behaviour.

Trade buyers know they are paying that premium, so they subtract it from what they are willing to bid. If a dealer has a firm ceiling of £1,000 in their head for a fryer, and the buyer's premium is 20 percent plus VAT, they cannot bid £1,000. They work backwards: the most they can bid on the hammer and still land at their £1,000 ceiling is around £700. So they bid £700, or less.

That is the double squeeze. The premium comes off your hammer price before it is even bid, because buyers factor it in, and then your seller's commission comes off what is left.

The Auction Maths on a £1,000 Fryer

Take a used fryer that a trade buyer values at £1,000 all in. Rough, illustrative figures, not a promise, but this is the shape of it every time.

• The buyer's real ceiling is £1,000 total.
• With a buyer's premium of around 20 percent plus VAT, the buyer can only bid roughly £700 on the hammer to stay under that ceiling.
• Your seller's commission, say 15 percent, comes off that £700. That is another £105 gone.
• You are left with around £595, minus any lotting or unsold fees.

So a machine a buyer was happy to pay £1,000 for puts under £600 in your pocket. The other £400 was split between the auction house and the gap the premium opened up.

What It Costs You as the Buyer

The same maths works against you from the other side of the room.

The premium and the VAT land on you. Win a combi at £1,000 and you have not paid £1,000. Published UK terms checked in July 2026 ran from 18 to 25 percent on top of the winning bid, plus VAT in most cases. As an example calculation, at 20 percent that £1,000 machine is around £1,450 before it has moved an inch.

You buy it as seen, with all faults. The standard terms say the same three things almost everywhere: sold as seen, all faults, no warranty, whatever the catalogue said. Most sale houses do not test the equipment, so nobody has plugged that combi in before you paid for it.

The clock starts when you win. Miss the collection deadline and storage charges begin. One UK sale house publishes £60 a day. The pallet, the tail lift and the transport are yours to arrange and pay for on top.

None of this means there is never value in the room. It means the number to compare with a fixed price listing is the real landed number, not the one on the screen.

What Fixed Price Does Differently

A fixed-price marketplace removes both problems in one move.

There is no buyer's premium, so buyers do not subtract anything. The price they see is the price they pay, and they bid their real ceiling because there is nothing hidden on top of it. And there is no percentage cut taken from you on the sale.

On CaterBids, that is the whole model. Zero final value fees. You set a fair fixed price, a trade buyer pays it, and you keep it. Sell a £1,000 fryer and you keep £1,000, not £595. Listing is a flat five pounds, and the first 100 listings at launch are free.

You also keep control. No reserve to guess at, no unsold fee if the room is quiet that day, no watching your machine go for a third of its worth because two bidders did not turn up. You list it at what it is worth and it sits there, in front of trade buyers, until the right one takes it.

When an Auction Still Makes Sense

To be fair to the auction route, there are times it is the right call.

• A full closure, fast. If a site is closing and everything has to be gone by a fixed date, a single auction clears the lot in one go, and speed can be worth the discount.
• An insolvency or a receiver sale, where the process has to be seen to be open and the timeline is not yours to set.
• Odd, low-value or mixed lots that are not worth listing individually.

If you need everything gone by Friday and you do not care what it makes, an auction does that job. If you want what your kit is actually worth, that is a different job.

Which One Gets You Paid

Auctions are built to move volume fast and to pay the auction house from both ends. That is not a criticism, it is just what they are for. But for a single good machine, or a handful of them, the seller almost always leaves money on the table.

Fixed price is the other way round. It is slower than a single-day clearance, but it puts the full value in your pocket, because there is no premium eating your hammer price and no commission eating the rest.

Photograph the data plate, and on CaterBids CaterBot pulls the specs, dimensions and a pallet delivery quote back for you, so a fair, detailed listing takes a few minutes, not an afternoon of typing. Then you wait for a trade buyer and you keep what it sells for. For a full breakdown of the options, see our guide on where to sell used catering equipment.

That is the whole game: BUY, SELL, SAVE, with zero final value fees.

The Short Version

• An auction takes a buyer's premium from the buyer, commonly around 15 to 25 percent plus VAT, and a seller's commission from you, commonly 10 to 20 percent.
• Buyers subtract the premium from their bids, so it quietly lowers your hammer price before any fee is even charged.
• On a £1,000 machine, that combination can leave you with under £600.
• Buying, the premium and VAT land on you: a £1,000 winning bid is around £1,450 as an example, sold as seen, untested, with the collection clock running.
• Fixed price removes both: no premium, no final value fee, the buyer pays their real ceiling and you keep it.
• Auctions still suit fast full closures and insolvency sales. For a good machine sold on its own terms, fixed price gets you paid.

Figures in this guide are illustrative examples of typical UK auction fee structures, not a quote or a guarantee. Always check an individual auctioneer's current terms before consigning.