Auction platform fees run £250 cheaper per vehicle than rivals

Dealer Auction has published a self-authored list of platform quirks worth a skim if you buy or sell through it - the useful bits sit below the marketing gloss. Chief among them: buyer fees run about £250 cheaper per vehicle than rival auction providers on average, which adds up fast across a defleet programme, according to Dealer Auction.

The mechanics matter too. Proxy bids climb automatically in £50 increments, listings carrying 11 images draw double the bids of sparser ones, and the standard collection window is 72 hours - all worth building into remarketing workflow. Independent dealers have been able to sell on the platform since 2021, and it now partners with OEMs and fleets including Hertz. There's also a dual-listing link with Autotrader: list a vehicle on both using its VRM and mileage, and a sale on either side automatically pulls the listing from the other, per Dealer Auction.

Why this matters: the fee gap and the 72-hour collection clock are the two figures worth checking against your own defleet costs and yard space before assuming Dealer Auction is simply "another auction site". The Autotrader dual-listing sync is also worth testing on a small batch first, since a missed sync could mean a vehicle sold twice or not de-listed promptly.