How Bid Budi works, and who is responsible for what

There is no buyer’s premium on this platform. What you bid plus the cleaning deposit is what you pay. The facility sets the deposit on each unit — it can choose the standard amount, a different one within limits, or none — so the amount that governs your sale is the one shown on that auction’s own pages. Bid Budi collects it with your payment and passes it on to the facility. Whether it comes back to you is the facility’s decision; see Collecting.

No. The bid is VAT-inclusive: you pay what you bid, and your total does not change with the tax status of the facility you happened to bid with. Where VAT applies it is extracted from the price, never added to it. VAT is not currently in force on this platform, so no VAT is shown on anything — which is different from VAT of zero, and the money screens say so.

You are issued an invoice for the goods, rendered by the platform on the facility’s behalf as auctioneer, because the facility is the supplier. The cleaning deposit is not on it — it is not payment for the goods.

2 hours by default, and the clock runs on service time rather than wall time: it starts when the award notification of record is delivered rather than when the auction closed, it runs between 05:00 and 21:00 SAST, and it pauses outside those hours so a unit that closes at midnight does not expire while you are asleep. The absolute deadline is shown on your payment screen, and a facility may set a different window on its own auctions.

By email, always. On your account page you can also ask for notices on WhatsApp, once you have confirmed your mobile number with a code we send you — a message that starts a payment clock is not something to send to a number nobody has checked. Email still carries anything that has no WhatsApp version, so adding WhatsApp adds a channel rather than switching one off. You cannot turn every channel off: if we could not reach you at all, a deadline counted from delivery would not be fair to hold you to.

Where a notice goes out on two channels you may get two messages, and exactly one of them is the notification of record — the one whose delivery starts the clock. It is the email wherever email is on, because the email carries the full text while a WhatsApp message is a shorter version of it inside a template WhatsApp approved in advance. Which message it was is recorded, so if you ever dispute a deadline there is a single answer to what you were told and when it reached you.

The award passes to the next highest bidder, who has to accept it before their own clock starts. Nothing is charged to you, because nothing was taken from you. If nobody behind you pays either, the unit is not written off: it goes back to be reviewed and listed again, for a short run, and everybody who bid on it is told. A first payment default as the original winner suspends your bidding for a set period — time-boxed and appealable, not permanent, and longer if it happens repeatedly. Losing the right to bid never cancels an obligation you already have: if you owe clearance on another unit, you can still pay for it and still collect it.

Shortly after you pay. The facility is paid 0 days after your payment clears, not on collection or clearance, and its payment includes your cleaning deposit. Until then Bid Budi holds the funds, and the deposit sits in an account of its own, never mixed into anybody’s proceeds.