What to Check Before You Bid: a Bullion Auction Checklist

In the five minutes before you place a bid, run five checks and one number. The five checks: that the house stands behind its sales, what the full fee stack is, exactly what the lot is, its weight and purity, and whether the metal is real. The one number is your all-in cost against melt and dealer retail. If your all-in lands under what a dealer would charge for the same metal, it's a bid. If it lands above, it's a pass, no matter how good the estimate looked. Everything below is how to run those checks fast, on this lot and this sale, right before the hammer.

This post is the short, do-it-now version. Each check has a deeper piece behind it if you want the full reasoning, and we link them as we go. Think of this as the pre-bid habit, not the textbook.

Confirm the sale once: the house and the fees

Two of the five checks apply to the whole sale, so you do them once and they cover every lot you bid on.

First, the house. You want a real business that stands behind its sales, with a track record you can verify, published terms, reachable people, and a guarantee if a lot isn't as described. That is what "reputable" actually buys you, and it is different from "every catalog line is perfect." The full set of checks is in how to tell a reputable auction house from a risky one. Run them before you bid a dollar, then trust the house on what a house controls and verify the lot yourself on what you control.

Second, the fee stack. The winning bid is the smallest number you'll pay. On top of it sits the buyer's premium, shipping, a possible card surcharge, and any sales tax on a taxable lot. Those live in the terms, off to the side, and they turn a hammer estimate into a real cost. Read them once, up front. How the buyer's premium and auction fees work walks the whole stack, and what buyer's premium actually costs you shows why it decides more deals than the hammer does.

Confirm the lot every time: product, weight and purity, real metal

The other three checks apply to each individual lot, so you run them on every one you're serious about.

Confirm what it actually is. "One ounce silver coin" could be a recognized coin, a generic round, or junk silver, and they don't carry the same value because their premiums and resale differ. A named, specific product is easy to price. A vague description is a warning, not a bargain. If you want the full method for decoding a listing, it's in how to read an auction catalog before you bid.

Confirm the weight and purity. These are your melt inputs: content times spot is the metal's value. A lot that states a weight and a fineness is priceable. A lot that says "assorted silver" with no weights is not, and you can't value what you can't pin down. Purity is where beginners overpay, so read the fineness itself rather than the reputation of the name. Sterling is .925, not pure. For junk silver, the content is standardized at 0.715 troy ounces of silver per $1 face for US 90% coins and 0.60 for Canadian 80%, which is the easiest way to price a mixed bag. If a lot's stated grade and its math don't line up, that's the lot to ask about before the hammer, not after.

Confirm the metal is real, or plan to. Our software checks the price, not the physical piece, so authenticity is on you. Before a large buy you want a plan: the kitchen-table screens (weight and size against spec, the magnet slide, the ping, the ice test) and, on a four-figure lot or any gold, an instrument or a professional. The tests that actually work are in how to tell if silver or gold is fake. Buying from a vetted house is most of this protection, because the risk concentrates in unvetted private sales, but confirm the house offers a preview or a misdescription guarantee so you have recourse if the piece isn't what the catalog said.

The one number that decides it: all-in against melt and retail

Now you can do the only calculation that renders a verdict. For the lot you care about, take your likely hammer, add the premium, shipping, and any sales tax you'd owe to get your all-in cost, then compare that to the lot's melt value and to what a dealer charges for the same product. Under dealer retail is a potential deal. Over it is a pass. The full three-number method is in how to price any coin or bar before you buy.

Here's the math on one lot, with illustrative figures, not a live quote. Say a 10 oz .999 silver bar at an illustrative spot of $70 an ounce. Its melt is 10 x 0.999 x 70, about $699. You expect to win it at a hammer near $620. The house charges an 18% buyer's premium and $18 shipping, and this is investment bullion, so it's exempt from tax in Canada.

Your all-in works out to roughly $75 an ounce. If a dealer sells the same bar around an illustrative $78 an ounce, this is under retail and worth a bid. Notice the lot cost about 7% over melt even though the hammer alone looked like a steal under it, which is exactly why the all-in is the number and the hammer isn't. Set that all-in ceiling before the sale and stop when the bidding passes it.

The five-minute checklist

If a lot clears all six lines, bid to your ceiling. If any line fails and you can't resolve it before the hammer, let it go. There's always another sale.

Run the last check for free, or the whole sale at once

The one check you don't have to do in your head is the all-in. Drop a single lot's stated weight, purity, and the house's premium into Quick Check and our software returns the all-in cost per ounce against live spot and dealer retail, so you can see whether the number holds before you bid. Quick Check is free and it prices one lot.

When the sale has fifty or five hundred lots and the deals are buried in the ones nobody bothered to price, running that math by hand is an evening. The full catalog analyzer does the whole sale at once: it reads every lot, computes each all-in against live melt and retail, flags the ones that genuinely beat retail, and sets aside the non-bullion and the vague ones for review. Free values one lot. The paid app values the whole sale and flags every deal in it.

No hype, no hot tips. Just the five checks worth running before you raise your paddle, and the one number that turns a guess into a decision.