How does Cotw work?

CarsOnTheWeb holds various auctions every week, each one featuring a hundred or so used vehicles. Depending on where your interests lie, you can take part in the Belgian, French, German, Spanish or Italian auctions. By entering specific selection criteria, such as the make, type of vehicle, year of manufacture, mileage or other options, one mouse click gives you access to a range of vehicles ‘customised’ to your requirements. Every year, over 10,000 vehicles find a new owner via the Cotw auction website. Find out how our company works.

 

 

How do I make a bid?

 

Registered users can view the various auctions 24 hours a day and make an offer for the cars of their choice. To enable the bidding for the auctions to be as efficient, user-friendly and properly ordered as possible, we operate with an automatic bidding system.

 

When you place a bid, you have the choice of:

Immediately entering a maximum bid

Allowing the system to raise the bid gradually until your maximum bid is reached

  • 1. Your maximum bid is shown immediately; it is not kept secret from other bidders.
  • 2. If another bidder has entered a higher maximum amount, you are outbid. Our system will automatically send out a message when your maximum bid is passed by another bidder, so that you can adjust your limit if you want to.
  • 3. If at the end of the auction non-one has bid a higher maximum amount, you win the auction.
  • 1. Your maximum bid is kept secret from other bidders and for the seller. The automatic bidding system compares your bid with that of other bidders and bids on your behalf, meaning that only as much of your limit as necessary is offered to obtain or maintain the highest bid. The system keeps on doing this until your maximum amount is reached. This means that you do not have to keep on bidding each time someone else makes a bid higher than yours.
  • 2. If another bidder has a higher maximum amount, you are outbid. Our system will automatically send out a message when your maximum bid is passed by another bidder, so that you can adjust your limit if you want to.
  • 3. If at the end of the auction no-one has bid a higher maximum amount, you win the auction. The attractive feature here is that if the car is sold to you, this method means that sometimes you will pay appreciably less than the maximum price you had in mind.

 

Buy now!


 

The ‘Buy Now’ option is an extremely attractive new function at our auction website. For a number of the vehicles being offered, CarsOnTheWeb knows exactly what price the supplier wants to receive for these specific cars. From now on, these vehicles are indicated by a special ‘Buy Now’ icon, along with the selling price. When this is the case, you can buy the car immediately at this price. The car is then automatically allocated to you and taken out of the auction. This transparent way of working gives you the advantage of being certain of buying the vehicle and the price you are buying at. It also means you can calculate in advance what profit margin you want to sell the car on at.

Even if the ‘Buy Now’ function is activated, you can also decide to go through the normal auction process and make a lower offer than the price indicated. However, there is a risk here that the car will not be allocated to you or that another bidder uses the ‘Buy Now’ button. If that should happen, making a quick decision gives you total certainty!

 

 


NEW: BLIND AUCTION!


Besides our regular dynamic auctions and our buy now auctions, we launch a new type of auction: the blind auction. A blind auction is another term for a sealed bid auction in which bidders simultaneously submit bids to the auctioneer, in this case CarsOnTheWeb, without the knowledge of the price bidden by other participants. During the auction all the bids are kept secret from other bidders. At the end of the auction, the highest bidder evidently is declared the winner*, but there is still 1 step to take before the car can be allocated. As in a regular auction the highest offer will be passed on to the seller and when the selling party accepts this bid the vehicle will be allocated. You can recognize the blind auctions by the following icon:


*NB. If there are 2 or more equal highest bids, it is always the user who placed the bid first, who wins the blind auction.



Highest bid?

 

At the end of an auction, all of the participants are notified of the final result and whether you had the highest bid at the end of the auction. If you are the highest bidder, there are still 3 steps to go through before the vehicle is actually allocated to you:

 

  • Your offer is passed on to the seller. You will receive an answer within 48 hours as to whether the seller has accepted your bid.
  • If the seller accepts your bid, we will send out a sales agreement to the buyer.
  • After the sales agreement has been sent back ‘approved’, the vehicle is finally allocated to you.

 

 

After confirmation and payment, we can then proceed with the actual delivery and transfer of legal ownership of the vehicle.

Click here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Logistics and Transport

 

CarsOnTheWeb will organise the transport of all vehicles sold from Belgium, France, Spain, Italy or Germany (the physical location of each vehicle is stated at the time of the auction). The costs involved for transporting and arranging the transport of the car are always borne by the buyer. Once the full amount has been paid, we will send out a notification stating the earliest time and place where the vehicle will be made available for delivery to the buyer.

To be able to make the vehicles you have bought available for you quickly and efficiently, CarsOnTheWeb in Belgium has centralised all vehicles at one central collection depot in Tienen/Tirlemont. This depot is located close to the motorway between Brussels and Liège, and operates long and flexible opening times.

In addition to this depot in Belgium, CarsOnTheWeb has also organised a second hub in Amberg close to Nürnberg/Nuremburg in the east of Germany. The aim is to be able to guarantee better service for our customers in Eastern Europe. If requested, CarsOnTheWeb will transport the cars purchased from Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and Germany once a week to Amberg (Germany); a single location where our Eastern European customers can come and collect their vehicles. This hub operates as a kind of ‘gateway’ to all countries in Eastern Europe, such as the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, etc.

One pick up location = shorter delivery times = attractive transport charges!
A transport overview for each country.

 


Administration

 

After you have made your purchase, CarsOnTheWeb will provide you with all the documents required for the legal transfer of ownership, including any specific forms required if you are exporting the vehicle to countries inside or outside the EU.

Need help? For every transaction you can always rely on the assistance of our central customer service department in Belgium or the local customer service in France, Spain, Italy and Germany. We can assist you in 9 different languages.

Our customer service.

 


REGISTRATION PAGE

 

To access the auction section of the website, you must go through a simple registration process via the registration page. Registration is FREE OF CHARGE, but we do ask you within 7 days of completing your registration to provide us with a copy of your passport and a certificate or extract (e.g. from the trade register) by e-mail or fax, providing documentary evidence that you are a professional car trader. Not until we have received these 2 documents can we activate your login and password, enabling you to play an active part in our auctions.

Registering is entirely free of charge.

Now create an account

 

CarsOnTheWeb does not sell or rent the personal details of users to third parties for marketing purposes. CarsOnTheWeb uses this information solely as set out in this privacy policy.