Bought
The most obvious bidding outcome is "bought". This is the one that you will most want to see, because this means that we have bought the car for you. You will see the price we got it for in the online auction system.
What will happen next is that we will calculate the F.O.B. price and then send you a full breakdown of the final cost by email. You will then be able to see your newly bought car in our online system in the "My Cars" section, from where you can also download invoices, see which ship it is booked on and all kinds of other things.
Sold
Given that "bought" means that we have bought the car for you, it's pretty easy to figure out that "sold" means that the car has been sold to somebody else.
In this situation, we will enter the final price that the car was sold for so that you can then refer to this. This can give you some good feedback as to where market prices for that particular year, grade, mileage, and model are currently at.
You just need to bear in mind that that the price of one car does not give you a complete picture of the market for all cars of this type. Remember that this car could well have been overpriced, so don't be put off if you find that one car seems particularly expensive.
On the other hand, if you find that your bids are always coming in too low for many cars, then you probably need to reconsider your bidding strategy. If this is happening regularly, then the market is telling you that you need to either increase your budget, or lower your expectation about the quality, age, or grade of car that you are trying to buy.
Having previously bought cars from both car dealers in the UK and also in Japan, I'd still use Integrity Exports as my first port of call for Japanese cars. They even give their opinion on cars I'd never have thought of.
Passed
This is the bidding result which some people seem to find a bit confusing, so let's look at it in detail.
First of all, remember that the seller has a certain target for the price that he wants the car to sell for. This is called the reserve price. Obviously, he would be very happy if bidding went above this price. However, this reserve price is the absolute minimum that he wants to get for the car.
So, what happens if the bidding peters out before it reaches the reserve price? Obviously, the auction house is not going to wait to see if slow bidding ever reaches the seller's reserve price. At some point, they have to make the decision to stop the live bidding, even though the car has not actually sold yet.
When this happens, we say that the car has "passed". Usually, when a car has "passed", we can approach the auction to negotiate a purchase.
Go to the next page “How Does Negotiation Work?” to find out more details about what happens if a car passes (fails to sell) in live bidding.
So, you may see a comment in our online auction system which looks like this:
"Passed for ¥570,000. Offers from ¥620,000."
Let's unpack what that means. First of all, "passed" means that the car failed to sell in live bidding, because the highest bid did not reach the seller's reserve price. Secondly, the auction has indicated that we can enter into negotiations for this car, but the minimum we will need to offer in order to do so is ¥620,000.
If we imagine that you are having us bid for this car, and your maximum bid price is ¥700,000 then, of course, we would immediately enter into negotiations to try to buy it for you because your maximum price is above the minimum ¥620,000 that we need to offer.
Now, just because we can make offers from ¥620,000, does not mean that the seller will necessarily accept our ¥620,000 offer. In the course of negotiations, we may find, for example, that the seller is looking for ¥680,000. In that case, we would still try to negotiate him down to a lower price, but ultimately ¥680,000 is still within your budget (in this example), so we would proceed to buy the car for this price.
There is just one more thing that you need to bear in mind. That is that the auction operates a first come, first served system.
The first person making an offer at at least the minimum price gets the first chance to negotiate with the seller. This is why it is crucial that we know your full budget in advance so that we can immediately make an offer for the car, without having to wait for your feedback. (We don’t want to be put at the back of the line behind all the other potential buyers.) You see, even if we have more budget than the person in front of us, if the seller accepts that person's offer, then we never get the chance to make our offer anyway.
Although this may seem quite complex, most of this is handled by us in the background and is not something which you need to be too concerned about. The main reason for this explanation here is so that you can understand what is happening with your bids when you see comments in the system about cars being "passed" or bought in "negotiation".
We find that the most successful importers really understand how it all works - from the auction to the ship and beyond. Don't get left behind!
