A lot exists before it is listed
Long before a vehicle appears on a screen, somebody has photographed it, written down its serial numbers and recorded what is wrong with it. That record is the whole product. An auction is not selling you a car; it is selling you a description of a car, and the quality of that description is the difference between a good house and a bad one.
This is why the catalogue entry matters more than the photographs. Photographs show what a camera was pointed at. The written condition report is where a house commits itself in a way it can be held to.
The clock is the mechanism
An online auction replaces the auctioneer's chant with a countdown. Bids raise the price in fixed increments, and when the clock reaches zero the highest bid wins — unless the seller set a reserve that was never reached.
The weakness of a plain countdown is obvious once you have lost to it: a bid placed in the last second wins over a bid that was higher a minute earlier but never got the chance to respond. Houses that care about the outcome extend the clock whenever a late bid lands, so the lot goes to the highest bidder rather than the fastest connection.
Winning is the start of the paperwork
The hammer settles the price. It does not move the vehicle, transfer the title or pay anybody. What follows is an invoice, a deposit with a deadline, the balance, a bill of sale and a transport booking — usually in that order, usually over one to three weeks.
Read the terms before you bid rather than after you win. The deposit percentage, the payment window and the consequences of missing it are decided by the house and vary wildly between them.
From the auction floor
See how this works on a real lot.
Every listing carries its inspection report, its full specification and its bid history. Read one before you decide what it is worth to you.