Terms of Service

This is an unreviewed draft. It is not legal advice, it has not been checked by a qualified adviser, and it does not bind anyone.

It was written to give a solicitor a starting point by describing, as accurately as possible, what the Encave software actually does today. It has not been reviewed. Do not publish it, link to it as live terms, or rely on it, until a solicitor has reviewed it and the highlighted details have been filled in.

Several clauses describe mechanics that are only partly built, or not built at all. Those are marked with a drafting note, and the open questions at the end of this page list every decision the business and its solicitor still have to settle. The first of them — who holds the alcohol licence for a sale arranged on Encave — should be settled before anything is launched.

1. Who we are, and what Encave is

1.1 Encave is operated by [[COMPANY_LEGAL_NAME]], [[LEGAL_FORM_AND_JURISDICTION]], whose registration number, if it has one, is [[COMPANY_NUMBER]], and whose registered or principal address is [[REGISTERED_ADDRESS]]. Its VAT number, if it is registered for VAT, is [[VAT_NUMBER]]. In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean [[COMPANY_LEGAL_NAME]], and "Encave" means the website at encave.app and the services on it.

Drafting note. Nothing in the codebase evidences the operator's legal form or where it is registered, so this draft does not assume a company registered in England and Wales. The operator could be a sole trader, a partnership, an LLP, or registered in Scotland or Northern Ireland, and the answer changes clause 1.1, the governing-law choice in section 26, and which register a consumer can check. The code also carries two different production domains, so encave.app has to be confirmed rather than inferred.

1.2 Encave does two things. It gives you a private cellar, where you record the wine you own, what you paid for it and when it is ready to drink. It also runs a marketplace, where members list wine for sale and other members bid on it or buy it.

1.3 We are an intermediary, not the seller. When you buy a lot on Encave, the contract of sale is between you and the seller. It is not with us. We never take possession of the bottle, we never inspect it, and we do not hold title to it at any point. We provide the listing surface, the bidding mechanism, payment handling and a dispute process.

1.4 Because we are not the seller, we do not and cannot promise that any lot is authentic, that it is in the condition described, or that its stated provenance or storage history is accurate. Everything a listing says about a bottle comes from the seller. Section 6 explains what the seller promises and what our condition indicators do and do not mean.

1.5 These terms apply to everyone who uses Encave, whether you are browsing, keeping a cellar, bidding, buying or selling.

1.6 Your account and your cellar are free. There is no listing fee and no seller commission. Our only charge for running the marketplace is the buyer's premium described in section 10. Delivery is set by the seller and paid by the buyer; we do not keep any part of it. Duty, VAT and any warehouse charges on wine held in bond are not ours either, and section 9 explains how they work. We may change what is free, and section 23 sets out how.

Accepting these terms

1.7 You accept these terms when you create an account. The sign-up form asks you to tick a box confirming that you agree to them. Our Privacy Policy and our Cookie Policy explain how we handle information about you. They are notices, not contract terms, and we do not ask you to agree to them as part of this contract.

1.8 You also accept these terms if you keep using Encave after we have changed them in the way section 23 describes.

1.9 If something elsewhere on Encave says something different. Lot pages, the fee breakdown, the soft-close panel and the block explaining who you are buying from all make statements in their own words, and some are more specific than these terms. Where a statement on a lot page is about that lot — its price, its condition, its timing, or who the seller is — that statement governs that lot. These terms govern everything else. Nothing anywhere on Encave reduces a right the law gives you.

1.10 These terms are in English only. You can read them, print them and save a copy at any time at encave.app/legal/terms, and we will give you a copy on request. We do not file a separate copy of your contract for you, and we do not subscribe to any external code of conduct.

Drafting note. The software records nobody's acceptance. There is no stored consent record, no timestamp and no version number against which a tick can be evidenced, and until these drafts are finished the sign-up links pointed at pages with no content on them, so every account created so far agreed to a blank document. Worse, the acceptance checkbox only exists on the password sign-up route: the passwordless "magic link" route goes through the authentication library's own account creation and never passes through it, so an account can exist having agreed to nothing — and, as clause 2.6 notes, with no date of birth either. A terms-acceptance record, with the version accepted and the date, and the checkbox on every account-creation path, both need building before these terms are relied on.

2. Who may use Encave

You must be 18 or over

2.1 You must be 18 or over to hold an account, to bid, to buy or to sell on Encave. It is a criminal offence to sell alcohol to a person under 18, and it is an offence to buy alcohol on behalf of a person under 18.

2.2 You must not use Encave if you are under 18. You must not bid or buy on behalf of anyone under 18, and you must not let anyone under 18 use your account.

2.3 Here is exactly what our software checks, so that you know what our age statement rests on. When you create an account with an email address and a password, we ask for your date of birth and we refuse to create the account if the date you give is less than 18 years ago. That is a check on the date you type. It is not a check on you. We do not ask for a document, we do not use an age-verification service, and we do not check your date of birth against any other record. Where our screens say "age verified", they mean only that a self-declared date of birth passed that arithmetic — which is the wrong word, and we are changing it to "age declared".

2.4 We do not re-check your age after sign-up. There is no age check when you bid, at checkout, when you pay, or when the wine is delivered.

2.5 We may at any time ask you to verify your identity, and we may suspend or close your account if you do not, or if we have reason to believe you are under 18. Where we offer identity verification, it is carried out for us by [[IDENTITY_PROVIDER]] on its own pages, and we receive only the outcome, not your document.

Drafting note. Clause 2.1 is a statement of law, not a product fact, and needs checking per jurisdiction: the offences for England and Wales sit in the Licensing Act 2003, Scotland is governed by the Licensing (Scotland) Act 2005, and Northern Ireland is separate again. Encave delivers to Scotland, so the point is live rather than academic — see section 3.

Four things need building before clause 2.1 can be relied on at all. First, the passwordless sign-in route collects an email address only, applies no age check, and creates an account with no date of birth that is not blocked from anything. Second, nothing anywhere in the software reads the age flag again after sign-up, so there is no age gate on bidding or buying. Third, there is no Challenge 25 policy in the product or in writing, and an age-verification policy is a mandatory condition of every premises licence. Fourth, the age-checked delivery services the carrier code names are not actually being bought (clause 12.10). Until an age gate exists at bid and at checkout, and an age check exists at the door, no party to a sale has the statutory due-diligence defence if alcohol reaches a minor.

Where we operate

2.6 Encave delivers to Great Britain mainland only. When you create an account with an email address and a password, we require a Great Britain mainland delivery address and we will refuse an address outside that area.

2.7 Postcodes we do not currently serve are Northern Ireland (BT), the Isle of Man (IM), the Channel Islands (JE and GY), the Scottish islands (HS and ZE), the Scottish Highlands (KW and IV, both in full) and parts of Perthshire (PH19 to PH26, PH30 to PH44, PH49 and PH50). The postcode checker on the site is the operative rule, and we may change the area we serve.

2.8 We do not restrict browsing or account creation by your location, only by your delivery address.

Drafting note. The address requirement in 2.6 is true only of the password sign-up route. The passwordless route creates an account with no address at all, so an account can exist with no delivery address and is not blocked from anything. That belongs in the same engineering fix as the age gate and the acceptance record.

Buying for yourself

2.9 You must buy on Encave as a private individual, for your own use, and not for resale. If you want to buy wine in the course of a business, contact us at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]] first.

Drafting note. Nothing in the software enforces clause 2.9. The public site says that "trade-buyer throttling" keeps the platform within the alcohol wholesaler registration exemption for private individuals, and that throttle does not exist: the account fields it would use are never written, there is no job that calculates them, and the review queue the site implies is an empty page. Either the throttle gets built, or that claim comes off the site, or both. Separately, approval under the Alcohol Wholesaler Registration Scheme is needed to sell alcohol wholesale to a trade buyer, and a trade buyer has to check the seller's approval — so the unenforced restriction leaves that exposure live for Encave and for sellers.

Before you sign in

2.10 You can upload a photograph before you have an account — for example to scan a label, or to start a listing. If you do, these terms apply to that upload. We identify it with a short-lived cookie rather than an account, we may send it to our artificial-intelligence provider to identify the bottle, and a photograph that ends up in a listing is public (clause 20.4). Do not upload anything you are not willing to make public, and do not upload anyone else's photographs.

Drafting note. Uploads are accepted with no session at all, under a seven-day cookie, into a storage prefix that is served publicly with no sign-in check, and the bottle-identification route is reachable on that same path. Section 20's content licence and section 2's eligibility rules otherwise assume an account holder who has accepted these terms. Either require sign-in before upload, or keep clause 2.10.

3. Alcohol licensing

3.1 Selling alcohol in the United Kingdom is a licensable activity, and who needs the authorisation for a sale arranged on Encave has not been settled. We are flagging that here rather than papering over it.

3.2 In England and Wales, the Licensing Act 2003 treats a sale of alcohol made at a distance as taking place where the alcohol is appropriated to the contract — in practice, where the seller packs the bottle. Carrying on a licensable activity without authorisation is an offence, and there is no exemption for a private individual. Scotland has its own regime under the Licensing (Scotland) Act 2005, which restricts the hours during which off-sales may be made and applies minimum unit pricing. Northern Ireland is separate again, and we do not deliver there.

3.3 Nothing in Encave records a premises licence, a personal licence, a designated premises supervisor, or an alcohol wholesaler registration, either for us or for any seller. Where we hold an authorisation ourselves, the authority that granted it is [[LICENSING_AUTHORITY]].

3.4 As a seller, you are responsible for holding whatever authorisation the law requires for the sales you make, and for complying with its conditions, including any restriction on the hours during which a sale may be made and any pricing rule that applies where you are.

3.5 This section will change once the licensing model is settled, and so will the sections that depend on it.

Drafting note. This is the single item that should stop launch. The choice is between Encave selling as principal or as a disclosed agent under its own premises licence, with a designated premises supervisor and every sale made or authorised by a personal licence holder, and restricting selling to sellers who hold their own authorisation. Either way the mandatory age-verification condition has to be met, which clause 2.4 shows it is not. Nothing in the product restricts the time of day at which a sale is made or dispatched, so Scotland's off-sale hours are not reflected anywhere, and nor is minimum unit pricing.

4. Your account

4.1 To create an account with a password you give us your name, a username, your email address, your date of birth, a password and a delivery address. You may also give us a phone number and a second address line.

4.2 Your username is public. It appears on your seller profile, and it is scrambled in public bid history so that other bidders cannot tell who is bidding. Your real name is not shown in public bid history. A seller sees your name and address only for an order they are fulfilling.

4.3 Keep your password to yourself, and keep it different from passwords you use elsewhere. Tell us at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]] as soon as you think someone else has used your account.

4.4 You are responsible for what is done through your account where you authorised it, or where you caused or contributed to it by failing to take reasonable care of your password or your email account. Where someone else has used your account and you did not cause or contribute to that, you are not responsible for what they did, and it is for us to show otherwise rather than for you to prove your innocence.

4.5 We do not currently verify your email address when you sign up with a password, and we do not offer two-factor authentication. Both of those are our choices, not yours, and both need building before clause 4.4 is fair to rely on. In the meantime, do not treat your Encave account as a secure store for anything.

4.6 One person, one account. Do not create a second account to bid on lots you are also selling, to evade a suspension, or to get round any limit we apply.

4.7 You can pause your account at any time. Deactivating it hides your profile, withdraws any live or scheduled listings, and schedules your personal data for deletion 30 days later. You can reverse that within those 30 days. You can also ask us to delete your account outright. What we delete and what we keep is set out in our Privacy Policy. Some records are kept because we need them for accounting, tax, and the integrity of past auctions and of other members' records: orders, bids, payment ledger entries, offers, messages, dispute records, the text of any feedback you wrote about someone else, and any on-arrival condition confirmation you made, including your note and your photographs.

Drafting note. No retention period exists anywhere in the code. The live "Your data on Encave" page already publishes concrete figures — "typically 6 to 7 years" for transaction and tax records, 30 days for deactivation — so the Privacy Policy, that page and this clause have to be revised in the same change and say the same thing. Two live documents that disagree are worse than one blank one. Note also that account deactivation withdraws live and scheduled listings without the bid check in clause 19.1, and that an account can be purged 30 days later while an order, a dispute, a return or a held balance is still open: see clause 19.7.

5. Listings: what a seller offers

5.1 Anyone with an account may list wine, subject to these terms and to section 3.

5.2 As a seller, you are offering to sell wine that you own, that you are entitled to sell, and that you can actually dispatch or hand over. You must not list wine you do not have.

5.3 A listing is either a timed auction or a fixed-price lot. Section 8 explains how and when a contract is made in each case.

5.4 You set the start price and, if you want one, a reserve and a Buy It Now price. A reserve must be at least the start price and must not be more than the Buy It Now price.

5.5 You set the postage you will charge for Great Britain mainland delivery, or you offer collection only. Once the first bid is placed on an auction, your postage figure is locked and you cannot raise it.

5.6 What can travel. A bottle larger than 1 litre, wine stronger than 24% ABV, or a larger lot is collection-only or needs our review before it can be sold for delivery. A parcel carries at most six bottles, so a bigger lot travels as more than one parcel.

5.7 Editing a listing. You may correct a listing freely before the first bid. After the first bid, you must not change anything that matters to a bidder — the wine, the vintage, the quantity, the bottle size, the condition record, the photographs, the tax status or the postage.

Drafting note. Nothing in the software prevents an edit after bidding, and nothing voids or re-confirms standing bids when a listing, its photographs or its condition record change. As things stand a bidder is bound by clause 7.8 while the other side can move the subject matter, which is the kind of imbalance the unfair terms rules are aimed at. Bids should be voided automatically on a material edit. The same question arose on relisting, and for a lot whose auction winner did not pay it is now answered: offering it again creates a new lot, and no bid from the first auction carries over — so there is no standing bid to be bound by details that have since changed. A relist is also the one route around every edit lock in this section, lawfully, because the new lot has no bidder to protect; that is why the seller re-confirms the condition record and the photographs before it publishes. The question remains open for a lot the seller withdrew.

6. What a seller promises about the wine

6.1 As a seller, you promise that everything you say about a lot is accurate and complete to the best of your knowledge, and that you have not left out anything a buyer would want to know.

6.2 In particular, you promise that:

(a) you own the wine or are authorised to sell it, and it is free of anyone else's claim;

(b) the wine is what the listing says it is — producer, wine, vintage, bottle size and quantity;

(c) the condition you have recorded is accurate, including the fill level, the labels, the capsule and the cork;

(d) anything you have written about storage or provenance is true, and you are not presenting a guess as a fact;

(e) the photographs are your own photographs of the actual bottles in this lot, show them as they are now, and are not retouched to hide a fault;

(f) you have told us and the buyer whether UK alcohol duty and VAT have been paid on the wine; and

(g) you are not selling counterfeit, refilled or tampered wine.

6.3 You must answer the condition questions honestly, and you may leave a part unassessed. Where a listing says a part was "not assessed", it means nobody recorded it. It does not mean the part is in good condition. We do not treat a blank as the best grade, and buyers should ask the seller before bidding.

6.4 Condition grades, fill levels, storage history and provenance notes are the seller's statements, attributed to the seller on the lot page. We do not check them against the bottle.

6.5 "Verified" on a listing has one narrow meaning. Where a lot shows that the condition was verified, it means only that the seller supplied all three required photographs — front label, back label and fill level. It does not mean that we, or anyone else, has authenticated the wine, inspected it, or confirmed anything about it. Where the full photograph set is missing, the lot page says so. We are changing that label to "photo set complete", because "verified" tells buyers the opposite of the truth.

6.6 Seller reputation figures are calculated by us from what has happened on the platform: how often a buyer's on-arrival check matched the condition the seller declared, how often lots were dispatched by the deadline, and how disputes were resolved. Percentages are shown only once there are at least ten samples. They describe a seller's record. They are not a statement about any particular lot.

6.7 Information the law requires about food and drink. As a seller selling to a consumer at a distance, you must make the mandatory particulars available before the purchase is concluded: allergens (wine will normally need "contains sulphites"), the actual alcoholic strength by volume, the net quantity, and the name and address of the food business operator. Put them in the listing.

Drafting note. The product cannot currently satisfy clause 6.7. The alcoholic strength is often not recorded at all — which is why section 9 has to estimate duty — and nothing asks for allergens or for an operator name and address, because there is no field for them. The provision is Article 14 of retained Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011. It needs a build before a trade seller can comply, and before we can say that lot pages carry the mandatory particulars.

6.8 For a lot held in bond, you additionally promise that the wine is currently held in an HMRC-approved bonded warehouse, that UK alcohol duty and VAT have not been paid on it, and that you are authorised to transfer ownership of it at that warehouse. You must give the warehouse name and the wine's ABV, and you must confirm those points before the lot can be published.

Drafting note. We check none of clause 6.8. The software records the seller's confirmation, writes a literal placeholder where the warehouse reference should be, asks for no bond evidence and no confirmation from the warehouse, and does not check that the named warehouse is HMRC-approved. The warehouse names in the system today are development test data and should not be treated as partners. Nothing allocates the obligations HMRC places on the owner of duty-suspended goods, identifies who is owner of record, incorporates the warehouse's own terms, or says what happens if the warehouse refuses the transfer.

7. How bidding works

Bid increments and the minimum bid

7.1 Bids go up in fixed steps, set by the current bid:

7.2 The minimum you can bid is the current bid plus one step. A reserve does not raise that minimum: you may bid below a reserve, and the lot simply does not sell unless the bidding reaches it.

7.3 We do not show bidders what the reserve is, and it does not set the minimum bid. The lot shows only whether a reserve exists and whether it has been met. Where your maximum (section 7.4) reaches the reserve, we bid on your behalf up to it and the lot sells at the reserve, not at your maximum. Where no bidder’s maximum reaches it, the lot ends unsold.

Your maximum, and proxy bidding

7.4 Every bid on Encave is a maximum. You tell us the highest hammer price you are willing to pay, and we show you the all-in total that corresponds to it before you commit (section 9). We then bid on your behalf, raising your bid only by the minimum needed to keep you in front, so you may win for less than your maximum.

7.5 Your maximum is never shown to anyone — not to the seller, not to other bidders, and not in bid history.

7.6 If another bidder's maximum is higher than yours, they take the lot and the price moves to one step above your maximum, capped at theirs. If your maximum is higher, you keep the lot and the price moves to one step above theirs, capped at yours. If two maximums are exactly equal, the bid that was placed first wins, at that amount.

7.7 Raising your own maximum while you are already in front does not move the visible price.

A bid is a binding offer

7.8 A bid is a binding offer to buy. If nobody outbids you, you buy the lot, at up to the all-in total shown on the bid button. You confirm every bid on a separate step; nothing on the bid ladder or on the mobile bar commits you.

7.9 Mistakes. There is no way in the software to retract or amend a bid; you can only raise your own maximum. If you mistype a maximum, tell us immediately at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]] and we will correct a demonstrable input error on a lot that has not yet closed. Before you confirm, check the lot, the condition, the photographs, who you are buying from and the all-in total.

Drafting note. An absolute bar on retracting or amending a bid, with no way to correct a mistyped maximum, does not meet regulation 11 of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, which requires appropriate means of identifying and correcting input errors before the order is placed, and a blanket bar is also likely to be an unfair term. The correction route in clause 7.9 is manual and is not built: there is no retraction state on a bid and no server action that would do it. Either build a short retraction window for a demonstrable input error, or confirm 7.9 as an operational commitment the business will actually keep.

7.10 We will refuse a bid if the lot is not a timed auction, if it is not live, if the auction has ended, if you are the seller, or if your maximum is below the minimum bid.

7.11 Bid history is permanent. We keep bid records, in a form that no longer identifies you by name, even after an account is closed, because they are part of the record of how an auction ran.

7.12 Bidding on a lot held in bond. Before you bid on a lot held in bond we ask you to confirm that you understand the in-bond basis and what taking the wine out of bond would cost (section 9).

Drafting note. The confirmation in 7.12 is recorded against the bidder and the lot, and the tick box is required in the interface — but the bid path never reads it, so a bid placed without it is accepted. Either the bid path checks it, or the tick box is decorative and clause 7.12 should come out.

Soft close

7.13 A bid in the last 2 minutes extends the auction by 2 minutes, up to 10 times.

7.14 Each extension runs from the moment of the bid, not from the old end time, so a late bidder always leaves everyone else a full 2 minutes to respond. Ten extensions is the cap, so a lot can close at most about 20 minutes after its advertised end. Once the cap is reached, the lot closes at its then end time and will not move again.

7.15 Every extension is recorded on the lot, with the original advertised close, so you can always see how far past it a lot has run. If your bid moves the clock we tell you, and we tell you if you are then outbid during an extension.

7.16 Soft close, bid increments, reserves and proxy bidding apply to timed auctions only. They do not apply to fixed-price lots.

8. How a contract is made

8.1 A listing is an invitation to treat, not an offer. A bid, or an offer you make under clause 8.5, is your offer to buy.

8.2 Fixed-price lots. When you start checkout on a fixed-price lot, we create an order, reserve the lot for you and hold it for 10 minutes (section 11). The first buyer to start checkout reserves it, and it is theirs if they pay within those 10 minutes. A second buyer who tries during that window is told the lot is reserved pending payment. If the first buyer does not pay in time, the order is cancelled and the lot goes back on sale.

8.3 Accepted offers. If a seller accepts your offer, that creates an order and starts the same 10-minute window.

8.4 Timed auctions. Where the reserve is met, the seller accepts the highest bid automatically at the close of the auction. At that moment we create the order, tell you that you have won, and start the payment window — 3 days for a lot won at auction, not the 10 minutes that applies to a checkout already in progress (section 11). Where the reserve is not met, no contract is made and the lot ends unsold.

Drafting note. When this was first drafted it described what should happen rather than what the software did: a timed auction closing with a winning bid was marked sold, no order was created, the winner was never told, and the payment window never started — so the obligation in clause 7.8 was asserted in the interface and enforced by nothing. That path has since been built, and clause 8.4 now describes it. Non-payment has since been built too: the order is cancelled, both sides are told, the seller's stock is freed, and the default is counted against the buyer's account as evidence for clause 19.3 — nothing is charged and nothing is restricted automatically. The winner is now also reminded 24 hours before the window closes, by email as well as in the account, which is the same notice clause 12.3 already gives a seller before their dispatch deadline; before that, a winner heard once at the close of the auction and then nothing until the order was cancelled. Clause 8.4 deliberately does not promise that reminder, because a term promising it would turn a courtesy into a condition of the cancellation and invite an argument that an unsent reminder excuses non-payment. Two points still need a decision. First, the 3-day window is a figure chosen in the code, not one anyone has agreed commercially. Second, the lot still stays marked sold rather than being relisted automatically, deliberately, because relisting days after an auction closed is the seller's decision — and the seller can now make it, from the lot's own page, which creates a fresh lot carrying no bids. What is still unsettled is the underbidder: there is no second-chance offer, and the only notice they get is the ordinary wishlist alert any member would get when a matching lot is published. That needs settling as product, not as drafting, and clause 8.4's automatic acceptance would not cover a new contract formed days later at a lower price in any case.

8.5 Offers and counter-offers. On a lot that invites offers, you can offer a price and the seller can accept, decline, or counter. An offer is an offer to buy at that price. It binds you while it stands, and it stands until the seller answers it or you withdraw it. You can withdraw an offer at any time before the seller accepts it. A counter-offer ends the offer it answers, and becomes an offer from the seller that you can accept, decline or counter in turn. Acceptance creates an order and starts the 10-minute payment window.

Drafting note. Offers, offer recipients and counter-offers are live in the product, and an accepted offer is one of only two paths that create an order — but nothing expires an offer, nothing provides a way to withdraw one, and nothing limits how long one stands. Clause 8.5 needs either a build or a different rule, and the business should decide whether an offer ought to be irrevocable in the way a bid is.

8.6 Confirmation. We show you the order in your account, with the price, the lot and what you paid.

Drafting note. Regulation 16 of the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 requires confirmation of the concluded contract on a durable medium, including the pre-contract information, within a reasonable time and no later than delivery. Nothing in the product sends an order confirmation document at all. It needs building, and it is the natural place to carry the seller's information under clause 14.8 and the cancellation form in clause 14.4.

9. The price you see before you bid

9.1 Every rung of the bid ladder is priced all in, before you commit. The figure on the bid button is what you would pay in total, not the hammer price, and you can open the breakdown at any time.

9.2 The all-in total is the hammer price, the buyer's premium and delivery. That is the committed total on every lot, in bond or duty paid. UK alcohol duty and VAT on the wine never form part of the amount you commit to by bidding, and we never charge them.

9.3 We also show the total as a percentage above the hammer price, so you can compare it with what other auction houses charge.

9.4 We will not introduce a charge after you have bid, on the basis you committed to. If a figure is not in the breakdown, we are not charging it. Where a lot is held in bond, what it would cost to take the wine out of bond is shown alongside the committed figure before you bid, and you choose at checkout whether to incur it (clause 9.8).

9.5 Delivery is set by the seller and paid by the buyer. It appears in the all-in total once you have selected a delivery address. Before you have selected one, and on a collection-only lot, there is no delivery figure in the total.

9.6 Our commitment on price. The total we show you when we invite you to buy includes every charge we require you to pay. Where a charge cannot be worked out in advance, we tell you how it will be calculated. We add no payment surcharge, and nothing that costs extra is selected for you by default.

In bond and duty paid

9.7 On a duty-paid lot, UK alcohol duty and VAT are already inside the price the seller is asking. They are the seller's responsibility, nothing further is added, and Encave charges no duty and no VAT of its own. There is no choice of basis to show on a duty-paid lot, so there is one figure.

9.8 On a lot held in bond, duty and VAT have not been paid. The committed total still contains no duty and no VAT. Alongside it, we show what duty and VAT would add if you later took the wine out of bond, and what the wine would have cost on that basis. That figure is information, not a charge. We show both bases on an in-bond lot because UK wine catalogues mix them; on a duty-paid lot there is nothing to compare.

9.9 If you buy a lot held in bond, you choose at checkout whether to keep it in bond or to release it for delivery. Keeping it in bond transfers ownership at the same warehouse and leaves duty and VAT deferred. Releasing it for delivery makes UK alcohol duty and VAT payable before the wine can leave the warehouse, and delivery applies.

9.10 How the out-of-bond figure is worked out. Duty is calculated from the quantity, the bottle size and the ABV, at the rate for that ABV, and VAT is charged on the hammer price plus the duty — not on the wine alone. The amounts are calculated at checkout, from the winning price and the rates in force at that point, and then fixed on your order. They are not recalculated when the wine physically leaves bond.

9.11 Where we have no recorded ABV for a lot, the duty figure is an estimate. We say so on the line, and we tell you what strength we have assumed for that style of wine. The assumption is chosen to be cautious, but it is an assumption: the real figure may be higher or lower. The in-bond figure is exact either way.

Drafting note — read this before publishing clauses 9.9 to 9.11. Nothing in the product collects duty or VAT, and nothing remits them. The payment path charges exactly three things: the hammer price, the buyer's premium and delivery. On an in-bond lot released for delivery the duty and VAT are calculated, recorded against the order and displayed on the checkout page, and then left out of the charge — so the card is debited less than the page quoted, and the duty and VAT the platform calculated are collected from nobody. There is no duty-point record, no return and no deferment account.

Three warehouse charges that appeared in the previous draft — a bond transfer fee, a warehouse release fee and a bonded delivery fee — have been removed, because no listing path ever captures a figure for them. Every bonded listing is created with those three fields empty, nothing writes them, and the checkout arithmetic reads an empty field as zero, so they are always £0. They should not be described as charges until something collects a figure for them.

Before any of this is published, settle: who the taxable person is, when the duty point arises on release from bond, who calculates and who remits, and whether the warehouse charges are real. UK duty rates have been banded by ABV since 1 August 2023, and the easement that treated wine between 11.5% and 14.5% as 12.5% ended on 1 February 2025, so the bands in the code need checking against the current rates. Finally, the lot page tells buyers that duty and VAT are calculated at "rates applicable when the wine is released", which is wrong in the same way the previous version of clause 9.10 was wrong. Fix that string in the same change.

10. Fees, and who pays them

10.1 The buyer pays one charge to us. The seller pays nothing.

10.2 The buyer's premium is currently £2.50 plus 5.00% of the hammer price. On a £500 hammer price, that is £27.50. The current rate is always shown on our fees page and in the breakdown before you bid, and it is fixed on your order when the order is created, so a later change to our rates does not reprice an order already placed.

10.3 VAT on the premium: [[PLATFORM_VAT_REGISTERED]]. If we are not registered for VAT, the premium we quote is the price you pay, and no VAT is added to it. If we are registered for VAT, the premium is quoted before VAT and the VAT is shown as its own line in the breakdown.

Drafting note. Whether the business is registered for VAT is a company fact that cannot be read from the code, so both branches are drafted and the answer has to come from the business. The code currently assumes not registered and prints a breakdown note reading "5% + £2.50, VAT included", which is incoherent: a business that is not registered charges no VAT, so there is none to include. Fix that string in the same change, and note that the answer also changes the position under the Price Marking Order.

10.4 This charge is called the buyer's premium wherever you see it — when you bid, at checkout, on your receipt and in your payment history. It was previously labelled "Buyer Protection" in some places, which was one charge under two names; older records may still carry the old label.

Drafting note. Nothing in the product defines what "Buyer Protection" protects, and the fee is our revenue, not a reserve held for the buyer. A fee named for cover whose scope is stated nowhere is a misleading claim about the extent of what we promise. Renaming it is the safe fix. Defining the cover is not automatically safer: a promise to indemnify a buyer against a contingent loss in return for a fee may be a contract of insurance, and effecting or carrying out contracts of insurance is a regulated activity, so take advice before describing any cover at all. The only thing the product actually ties to the fee is clause 16.14 — on a seller-fault full refund, the premium comes back.

10.5 Sellers pay no commission and no listing fee. Our seller commission is 0%, and our fee configuration cannot be changed to introduce one.

10.6 "You keep 100% of the hammer price" is subject to the following, each of which is about putting a sale right:

(a) where a dispute is resolved with a refund, the refund is funded from your held sale proceeds (section 16);

(b) where a dispute outcome puts return postage on you, that comes from your held proceeds too;

(c) where you miss the dispatch deadline, the buyer is refunded in full from your held proceeds (clause 12.3); and

(d) where the parcel is lost or damaged in transit, the buyer is refunded in full from your held proceeds (clause 12.8).

10.7 We do not charge a dispute fee.

10.8 Delivery is set by the seller, shown in the all-in total once a delivery address is selected, and paid by the buyer. We keep no part of it: it is held and reimbursed to the seller.

10.9 On a lot held in bond that is released for delivery, duty and VAT are payable before the wine can leave the warehouse. They are not our charge. Read the drafting note at the end of section 9 before relying on this.

11. Paying, held funds, and when the seller is paid

Paying

11.1 When you buy a fixed-price lot, or a seller accepts your offer, we create an order and reserve the lot for you. You then have 10 minutes to pay. We show you a countdown. A lot won at auction works differently: you get 3 days from the close of the auction (clause 8.4), because you may not have been at the screen when it ended.

11.2 If you do not pay within that time, the order is cancelled. On a fixed-price lot it goes back on sale. On a lot won at auction it does not: it stays marked sold, and whether to offer it again is the seller's decision. If they do offer it again, it becomes a new lot with its own lot number, open to everyone, and no bids from the first auction carry over to it. We do not charge you anything for that. The only other consequence we apply is that we may restrict or suspend an account that repeatedly fails to pay for lots it has committed to, and we will tell you before we do and give you a chance to explain (clause 19.3).

11.3 While a lot is reserved for you, nobody else can buy it.

Drafting note. This was three minutes, which was very short for a consumer marketplace: not enough time to fetch a card from another room, to clear a 3-D Secure step-up that lands in a banking app on a second device, or to add a delivery address the account did not already have, and so likely an unfair time limit under the Consumer Rights Act. It is now ten, which is long enough for each of those without keeping a second buyer meaningfully waiting. The figure is still one chosen in the code rather than one agreed commercially, and it is worth reviewing against real checkout completion times once there are any. The scheduled job this clause also needed now exists — the deadline is applied every minute rather than whenever somebody next happens to load a page, so the moment a lot returns to sale no longer depends on who was looking.

Held funds

11.4 When you pay, your payment does not go straight to the seller. "Held funds" is our record of what your payment is for — the sale proceeds, the delivery charge to be reimbursed to the seller, and our premium — and of when each part becomes payable. On a lot held in bond, the duty, VAT and any warehouse amounts are recorded separately again. The payment itself is taken and processed by our payment provider.

11.5 Held funds are not a deposit and not a savings balance. They are there to settle this transaction. They earn no interest, and they cannot be withdrawn for any other purpose.

11.6 We never fund a refund or a return label out of our own money. Everything paid out of held funds comes from what the buyer or the seller has put in.

Drafting note. This subsection has been rewritten to stop short of saying that Encave holds or controls your money, and it is the part of these terms most likely to be a regulatory problem. Receiving a buyer's payment, holding it, allocating it between the parties, funding refunds from it and releasing it to a seller looks like money remittance, and so like a payment service under the Payment Services Regulations 2017. The commercial-agent exclusion is available to an agent acting for one side only, and Encave acts for both. Carrying on a payment service without authorisation or registration is an offence, and describing a Encave-held balance in the terms creates exposure even where a third party does the actual holding. Take advice, and consider routing the whole flow through Stripe Connect so that the regulated party is Stripe, then say so here.

Note too that money movement is not implemented at all today. Releases and refunds are entries in our own ledger, not transfers. Card payment through Stripe is coded but switches on only when live keys and a webhook secret are configured and demo mode is off; otherwise an internal demo path runs. Seller payout accounts exist but no payout call is ever made. None of section 11 can be relied on until the payment and payout paths are live.

When the seller gets the money

11.7 The seller is paid 48 hours after delivery is confirmed, provided no dispute is open. We call those 48 hours the protection period.

11.8 You can release the money sooner. Accepting the item releases payment to the seller and closes our in-app dispute process for that order. It does not end your legal rights — see clause 11.11.

11.9 If you do nothing, payment releases automatically when the 48 hours are up. We show you the date and time on the order.

11.10 Once payment has released, our in-app dispute process is closed for that order. If a problem comes to light after that, write to us at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]]: clause 16.3 explains what we can and cannot do at that point.

11.11 The end of our process is not the end of your legal rights. Nothing in this section, and nothing you click in the app, shortens a time limit the law gives you, removes a remedy, or takes away a right you have against the seller.

11.12 Where a dispute is open, we freeze the held funds until it is resolved.

Drafting note. The 48 hours are supposed to start on a carrier "delivered" event, and all three carrier integrations are stubs with no inbound tracking, so in practice no automatic delivery event ever arrives. How the protection period actually starts in the live product has to be decided and then stated here. Separately, the app currently tells a buyer that accepting an item "closes the dispute window for good" — that wording must go, because it is not true of their legal rights and it is the sentence a buyer actually clicks through.

Seller payouts

11.13 To be paid, a seller must complete onboarding with our payment provider, Stripe, and accept Stripe's own terms for payment recipients. Stripe decides what identity and business information it needs from you. If Stripe will not onboard you, or a payout fails at Stripe, we cannot pay you until that is resolved, and we may withdraw your listings in the meantime. We do not see or hold your bank details.

12. Delivery, collection and dispatch

12.1 On almost every lot, the seller arranges delivery. The seller buys the courier label after you have paid, packs the wine and sends it. You never buy a label yourself. Your postage is held and reimbursed to the seller when funds release.

12.2 The seller must dispatch within 3 days of the order and must enter the courier and tracking number on the order. Tracking is required.

12.3 We remind the seller 24 hours before the deadline. If the deadline passes with no tracking, we refund the buyer in full from held funds and record a non-dispatch strike against the seller's account. Before we do either, we will tell the seller and give them a short chance to respond. A strike is a record. We may take it into account if we later restrict an account, it does not by itself trigger anything, and we will not restrict or suspend an account on an automated basis without a person reviewing it.

Drafting note. There is no notice-and-respond step today: the refund and the strike are automatic. Nothing reads the strike count and there is no threshold, so the previous draft recorded a consequence that leads nowhere. An automated strike that led to restriction or suspension would be a solely automated decision with significant effects, needing a lawful basis, human review and an explanation. The open-ended demand that a seller top up held funds (clause 16.17) needs the same notice step and a stated limit.

12.4 The couriers we currently accept tracking from are Royal Mail, Parcelforce and UPS. We do not accept Evri. We have no arrangement with any courier. The seller buys the label in their own name, and the contract of carriage is the seller's.

Drafting note. UPS is an explicitly disabled scaffold that returns no quotes, and all three carrier integrations make no outbound call at all. Confirm whether UPS should be listed while it does nothing.

12.5 Delivery is to Great Britain mainland only, to the address you have selected as your delivery address.

12.6 Delivery within 30 days. Where the seller is a trader and you are a consumer, the wine must be delivered within 30 days of the contract unless you have agreed otherwise. If it is not, you can give the seller a further, reasonable deadline, and if that passes you can treat the contract as at an end and get your money back (section 28 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015). The 3-day dispatch deadline in clause 12.2 is our own rule and sits inside that.

12.7 On a collection-only lot, you and the seller arrange the handover between yourselves, through the messages on the lot. We show an approximate collection area — the district, and a map deliberately fuzzed by roughly a kilometre — not the seller's address. You are responsible for your own safety and for checking the wine when you collect it.

12.8 If a parcel is lost or damaged in transit, the buyer is refunded in full from held funds. The seller makes any claim against the courier. We do not claim on your behalf.

12.9 Risk, and when the wine becomes yours. The contract of sale is between you and the seller. When risk in the wine passes is a matter for that contract and for the law that applies to it, and the answer is not the same for a sale by a trader to a consumer as it is for a sale between two private individuals. What we do is this: while a parcel is in transit the buyer is protected by clause 12.8, and we do not release the seller's money until delivery is confirmed and the protection period has run.

Drafting note. The previous draft had the platform fixing risk at delivery on a contract it is not a party to, which sits badly with clauses 1.3, 25.5 and 26.4. Risk is left to the sale contract here. The solicitor should decide whether Encave should state a rule at all, and if so how it squares with section 29 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 for trade sales and with the Sale of Goods Act 1979 default for private sales.

12.10 Some courier services include an age check on the doorstep, and our carrier code names such services. No age-checked delivery is actually being bought today, because our carrier integrations are not live: sellers hand parcels over themselves and type the tracking number in by hand. Do not rely on a doorstep age check.

Drafting note. Two different constants define the dispatch deadline, one as 3 working days and one as 3 calendar days, and the one actually enforced is calendar days, which is what clause 12.2 states. Pick one, state it once, and make the code read a single constant. The same inconsistency exists on the buyer's return dispatch deadline in clause 16.19.

13. Who you are buying from: trade sellers and private sellers

13.1 This is the most important thing to check before you bid. Your rights as a buyer depend on whether the seller is selling in the course of a business or as a private individual, and the two are not the same.

13.2 We ask each seller once, before their first listing, whether they are selling as a business. We show their answer on every lot they list. We do not work it out, and we do not guess. Nothing in a seller's tax status or trading history on Encave answers the question, and we do not use any of it to answer it.

13.3 A seller's declaration is their own statement about themselves. We do not verify it.

13.4 Where a seller has declared that they sell in the course of a business, and you are buying as a consumer, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives you rights against that seller. The wine must be of satisfactory quality (section 9), fit for any particular purpose you made known to the seller (section 10), as described (section 11), and must match any sample (section 13) or model (section 14) you were shown; and the pre-contract information the seller had to give you forms part of the contract (section 12). If the wine does not meet those standards you have a short-term right to reject it within 30 days (section 20), a right to repair or replacement (section 23), and a right to a price reduction or a final right to reject (section 24). For the first six months, a fault is taken to have been there from the start unless the seller shows otherwise (section 19(15)). How a trader may describe a lot is governed by Part 4 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which replaced the 2008 unfair trading regulations on 6 April 2025 and covers misleading actions (section 226) and misleading omissions (section 227). Those rights are against the seller, not against us, and our 48-hour process in section 16 does not replace them or shorten them.

13.5 Where a seller has declared that they are not selling in the course of a business, those duties on traders do not apply, and neither do the unfair trading rules. A private seller is still not free to misdescribe the wine. Under the Sale of Goods Act 1979, a private seller must have the right to sell the goods and they must be free of anyone else's charge or claim (section 12) — that is your route if a bottle turns out not to have been the seller's to sell — goods sold by description must correspond with that description (section 13), and goods sold by sample must match the sample (section 15). The satisfactory quality and fitness duties in section 14 do not apply, because they apply only to sales in the course of a business. A false statement of fact that induced you to buy may also be actionable as misrepresentation.

13.6 A lot may be listed without a declaration. Where that happens, the lot says so. Which rules apply then has not been established, we do not infer it, and you should ask the seller before you bid.

13.7 There is an unresolved point you should know about. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 takes outside the meaning of "consumer", for its rules on goods, an individual buying second-hand goods at a public auction at which individuals have the opportunity of attending the sale in person (section 2(5)). Encave's timed auctions run online only, so there is no sale an individual can attend in person. Whether that places a lot inside or outside the exclusion has not been settled, and the lot page tells you that we do not take a view either way. If a lot falls inside it, the rights in clause 13.4 would not apply.

13.8 This section sets out which rules apply to a sale. It does not say how a dispute would be decided, and it is not legal advice.

Drafting note. The position on section 2(5) needs settling once, and the answer has to be the same in these terms, in the lot-page copy and in section 14. For the 2013 Regulations the point is close to settled the other way: regulation 5 defines a public auction as one where consumers can attend in person, so an online-only auction is not one. Taking that position, aligning the lot-page copy with it and building the cancellation flow is the recommended route. Taking no view has the practical effect that no cancellation information is given at all, which is itself a misleading omission and fails the transparency requirement in section 68 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

14. Changing your mind, and cancelling

14.1 Two different things can be cancelled: the service we supply to you, and the purchase you make from a seller.

Cancelling our service to you

14.2 We supply you a service, and the buyer's premium is what you pay for it. If you are a consumer buying at a distance, you have 14 days from the day our contract is made to cancel that service contract.

14.3 By bidding or buying, you expressly ask us to start providing our service straight away, within that 14-day period, and you acknowledge that you will lose the right to cancel it once we have fully performed it — that is, once the lot has been sold to you and the transaction is complete. If you cancel while we are part-way through, you pay a proportionate amount for what you have had.

14.4 To cancel, tell us at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]], or at [[REGISTERED_ADDRESS]]. You can use this form, but you do not have to:

To [[COMPANY_LEGAL_NAME]], [[REGISTERED_ADDRESS]], [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]]:

I hereby give notice that I cancel my contract for the supply of the following service: the Encave buyer's premium on lot ............

Ordered on: ............

Your name: ............

Your address: ............

Signature (only if you send this on paper): ............

Date: ............

14.5 Where you cancel in time, we refund what you have paid us within 14 days, using the same means of payment you used.

Drafting note. Regulation 36 of the 2013 Regulations requires an express request before performance begins inside the cancellation period, and regulation 37 requires the consumer to acknowledge that the right is lost on full performance. Clause 14.3 is drafted to do both. Nothing in the product captures that request or that acknowledgement, and there is no cancellation route of any kind, so as things stand a buyer could cancel within 14 days and reclaim the premium. This needs a build, and the request and acknowledgement belong at the confirm step.

Cancelling a purchase from a seller

14.6 Where the seller is a trader and you bought at a distance as a consumer, you will normally have 14 days from receiving the wine to change your mind and get your money back, including the basic outbound delivery you paid. The seller must refund you within 14 days of getting the wine back or of your proof that you have sent it. The seller may reduce the refund if you have handled the wine more than you needed to in order to inspect it. You pay the cost of returning it only if you were told so before you bought. Some goods are outside the right, and a purchase at a public auction is outside it — which runs into the unresolved question in clause 13.7.

14.7 Encave does not currently provide any way to exercise a cancellation right. There is no cancel button on a paid order and no cancellation flow in the software. If you want to cancel, contact the seller through the order, and contact us at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]] if you cannot reach agreement.

14.8 Our dispute process has routes for "changed my mind" and "ordered by accident" (section 16). These are goodwill routes, not a statutory cancellation right. They need the seller's agreement or our decision, you bear the return postage, and the buyer's premium is not refunded. Do not treat them as the 14-day right.

14.9 Information a trade seller must give a buyer. As a trade seller, before a consumer buys from you, you must give them your geographic address and contact details, your complaint-handling policy, the fact that they have a 14-day right to cancel and how to use it (with the model form), who bears the cost of returning the goods, and any after-sales commitment you are offering. The buyer must be able to keep a copy.

Drafting note. The platform collects none of that from trade sellers, has no field for it, and has no durable-medium delivery, so regulation 14 is not satisfied and the pre-contract information that section 12 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 makes a term of the contract is not being given. Clause 16.16, which puts return postage on a change-of-mind buyer, only works if the buyer was told in advance — which today they are not. This is the sharpest gap in the product after licensing and age, and it needs a decision and a build rather than drafting.

15. Feedback, reviews and messages

15.1 You can leave feedback about the other party to an order you were part of. Only the buyer and the seller on an order can leave feedback on it. Every rating and comment on Encave comes from a real transaction on the platform; we do not accept feedback from anyone else, and we do not publish a rating that is not tied to an order.

15.2 What we do to keep feedback genuine: we tie every piece of feedback to an order between the two people involved; we publish it as written; we do not edit a rating to improve it; we never pay for, reward, or ask for positive feedback; and we remove feedback that breaches these terms — abuse, threats, details that identify someone, content about a different transaction, or feedback we have reason to believe is not genuine.

15.3 You must not offer or accept anything in return for feedback, write feedback about your own transaction through another account, or arrange for anyone else to write feedback for you.

15.4 Keep feedback factual and about the transaction. Clause 6.6 explains how our reputation figures are calculated.

15.5 Buyer-seller messages are for the transaction. Do not use them to take a sale off the platform, to advertise, or to send anything you would not want recorded.

15.6 We may read messages, feedback and dispute content where we need to in order to resolve a dispute, investigate a breach of these terms, or comply with the law.

Drafting note. Since 6 April 2025 it has been a banned practice to publish consumer reviews, or information about reviews, without taking reasonable and proportionate steps to check that they are genuine, and to submit or commission fake reviews. Clause 15.2 describes checks that are only partly real: the transaction link exists in the data model, but there is no screening and no written removal process. Write the process down before publishing 15.2, and keep clause 6.6 accurate about how the reputation figures are computed, because presenting them misleadingly is a misleading action in its own right.

16. If something is wrong when it arrives

Raising it

16.1 Check the wine against the listing and the photographs as soon as it arrives.

16.2 Only the buyer can raise a dispute. A seller cannot open one, but can respond, counter, escalate and inspect a return. There is normally one dispute per order; if a second, separate problem comes to light inside the claim period, tell us and we will deal with it.

16.3 When you can raise it. In the app, you can raise a dispute at any time after payment and up to the moment payment releases to the seller — in practice, within the 48-hour protection period after delivery, or sooner if you accept the item. After that, the in-app process is closed. A claim that the wine was not as described, that its condition was worse than shown, or that it is not authentic can still be made to us by email at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]] for at least 30 days after delivery, and we will deal with it — although by then we may no longer be holding the money, so what we can do may be limited to helping you deal with the seller.

Drafting note. A 48-hour window, with a one-click accept that closes it, is far shorter than a buyer's statutory remedies and is likely to be unfair: it hinders the consumer's right to take legal action and restricts the evidence available to them. In a wine marketplace the defect is often only discoverable on opening the bottle, which will almost never be inside 48 hours. The 30-day email route in clause 16.3 is not built. Keep the 48-hour funds release, but build a claim route that stays open for at least 30 days on description, condition and authenticity, and take "closes the dispute window for good" out of the app.

16.4 How to raise it. Tell us what is wrong, in your own words. Each reason tells you what evidence helps — a short description, and photographs for some reasons. If you cannot provide a photograph, tell us anyway. We will accept a claim on a reasoned description and ask for evidence afterwards. You can attach up to eight pieces of evidence.

Drafting note. Today the description minimum of 20 characters and the photograph minimums of three on some reasons are gates on raising a claim at all. A buyer who has thrown away the packaging, or whose claim is that the parcel never arrived, cannot pass them. They should be requests made after the claim is accepted, not conditions of making it.

16.5 The reasons cover, among others: not as described; the wrong wine, vintage, bottle size or quantity; condition worse than shown; missing items; arrived damaged or leaking; parcel not arrived; and suspected counterfeit. There are also buyer-side reasons: changed my mind, ordered by accident, wrong address given, not collected, damaged after delivery, and opened and no longer wanted.

16.6 A suspected counterfeit claim comes to us straight away.

How it gets resolved

16.7 The parties settle it first; we decide only if it is escalated. When you raise a dispute we freeze the held funds, and the seller responds. Either of you can propose an outcome, and a proposal lapses after 48 hours.

16.8 On a seller-fault claim where a return would be appropriate, the seller has four options: accept a full refund with no return; accept the return at the postage figure you proposed, exactly as you proposed it; counter with a different return postage figure; or reject the claim and escalate it to us.

16.9 The outcomes available are: release payment and change nothing; a partial refund with the buyer keeping the wine; a full refund with no return; a full refund once the wine is returned; a partial refund after a partial return; a return with the buyer paying return postage; a return with the seller paying; redelivery at the buyer's cost; and escalation to us. Which of them are available depends on the reason, and a buyer cannot propose that their own claim be rejected.

16.10 If you cannot agree, either of you can escalate to us. We will look at the photographs, the listing and the messages. Where we decide an escalated dispute, we can order one of three things only: a full refund with no return, a partial refund with the buyer keeping the wine, or release of payment to the seller. Anything that needs the other party's agreement, or needs the bottle to travel, is outside what we will decide.

16.11 Held funds stay frozen while we review. We aim to decide an escalated dispute within [[ESCALATION_DECISION_TARGET_DAYS]], and we will tell both of you if we need longer and why. A person decides it; we do not decide disputes automatically.

16.12 Our decision decides how the held funds are released. It is not arbitration, it is not an independent dispute resolution scheme, and it does not affect your legal rights against the seller or your right to go to court.

What a refund includes

16.13 Where the outcome is a full refund — with no return, after a return, or a return with the seller paying postage — the refund is the hammer price, the delivery you paid, and the buyer's premium.

16.14 The premium comes back on a seller-fault full refund. That is the one thing in the product that the fee in clause 10.4 is actually tied to.

16.15 Where you are returning the wine because you changed your mind, the refund is the hammer price and the outbound delivery only. The premium is not refunded.

16.16 A partial refund is the amount agreed, and cannot exceed the hammer price plus delivery plus the premium.

16.17 Refunds are funded from the seller's held sale proceeds. The premium portion comes back out of the fee the buyer paid, not out of the seller's money. If the held proceeds are not enough, we will tell the seller what is needed to complete the refund and why, and give them a chance to respond before anything further happens. We do not fund refunds ourselves.

Returns

16.18 Where an outcome involves a return, the buyer must send the wine back within 3 days. The seller then has 48 hours from delivery of the return to inspect it; if they do not, the return is treated as accepted. Where a seller rejects a return on inspection, it comes to us.

16.19 Who pays the return postage depends on the outcome. The seller pays on a seller-fault return; the buyer pays on a change-of-mind return or a redelivery, and only where the buyer was told so before buying (clause 14.6). Where no quote is available we use £8.50 as the return label cost.

16.20 Every dispute has a reference code, and we keep a record of each step and who took it.

17. Illegal content, reporting, and complaints about content

17.1 Listings, photographs, messages and feedback are content that members create and other members see, so Encave is a service through which users encounter each other's content.

17.2 How to report something. Tell us at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]]. Say where the content is and what is wrong with it. You do not need an account to report something.

17.3 What we do about illegal content. We remove content that is illegal when we become aware of it, whether through a report or otherwise. We may also remove it on our own initiative, suspend or restrict the account behind it, preserve evidence, and report it to the authorities where we should.

17.4 Complaining about what we did. If we remove your content, restrict your listing or suspend your account, you can complain at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]] and a person will look at the decision again. If we decide not to act on your report, you can ask us to look again in the same way. Section 24 sets out our timescales.

Drafting note. There is no reporting tool in the product, no content complaints process, and no moderation queue: reporting is an email address, and the help pages are empty, so these terms must not cross-refer to a help article. The Online Safety Act 2023 requires a user-to-user service with UK links to set out in its terms how illegal content is dealt with and to provide a reporting route and a complaints procedure, and the business also needs an illegal-content risk assessment and a children's access assessment on file. None of that exists.

18. Things you must not do

18.1 Do not bid on your own lots. Our software blocks it, and you must not attempt it through any other account.

18.2 Do not shill bid. Do not arrange for anyone else — a friend, a family member, a second account, an associate — to bid on your lots to inflate the price or create the appearance of demand. Do not bid with no intention of paying.

18.3 Do not place a bid you do not intend to honour, and do not use bids to probe other bidders' maximums.

18.4 Do not misdescribe a lot, conceal a fault, reuse someone else's photographs, or present stock or borrowed images as photographs of your bottles.

18.5 Do not sell counterfeit, refilled, relabelled or tampered wine, or wine you do not own or cannot dispatch.

18.6 Do not manipulate feedback or reputation: no inducements for feedback, no feedback written through another account, and nothing arranged with anyone else to make your record look better or someone else's look worse.

18.7 Do not take a sale off the platform to avoid our fees, or ask a buyer or seller to deal with you directly after contact has been made through Encave.

18.8 Do not use another member's account, create more than one account, or use Encave if we have suspended you.

18.9 Do not scrape the site, use it through an automated tool or bot, or interfere with the bidding mechanism.

18.10 Do not upload anything unlawful, abusive or infringing, and do not put other people's personal information into a listing, a note, a message or a dispute.

18.11 Do not use Encave to launder money, and do not buy or sell on behalf of anyone subject to financial sanctions. When a sale is set up we check the names of both the buyer and the seller against the UK Sanctions List. Where a name looks like a possible match, or where we cannot complete the check, we may refuse or stop the transaction, hold funds, and report the matter. A possible match is not an accusation: it means a person has to look, and we may ask you for identification to rule it out.

Drafting note. When this was first drafted no screening existed at all, and the note said so. It now does: lib/sanctions/ mirrors the FCDO UK Sanctions List daily and screens both parties at order creation, recording every check including the clear ones. Three things still need deciding, and two of them are commercial rather than technical. First, SANCTIONS_SCREENING_MODE defaults to "monitor", which records and flags but lets the sale proceed; "enforce" blocks anything that is not clear, and should be on before real money moves. Second, enforcing needs somebody to clear a flag — without that, a false positive strands a customer with no appeal. Third, this screens names only: no date of birth, no nationality, no ownership or control test, and nothing on beneficial ownership, so it will not catch a designated person using a name we do not hold. Note also that the OFSI Consolidated List, which most integrations still point at, stopped being updated on 28 January 2026 — any future supplier claiming to screen against it is checking a frozen file.

18.12 If you breach this section we may cancel bids, withdraw lots, reverse a sale, suspend or close your account, and tell the other party and, where appropriate, the authorities. Clause 19.2 and 19.3 apply to how we do that.

19. Withdrawing lots, suspension, and ending your account

19.1 A seller can withdraw a listing at any time before a bid is placed. Once a lot has a bid, the seller cannot withdraw it. A seller who needs a bid-on lot removed must contact us at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]], and we will decide.

Drafting note. Account deactivation withdraws a seller's live and scheduled listings without applying that bid check, so a seller can remove a bid-on lot by deactivating their account. That is a gap for engineering to close, not a drafting point.

19.2 We may withdraw a listing, cancel a bid, restrict what an account can do, or suspend or close an account where we reasonably believe that these terms have been breached, that a listing is inaccurate or unlawful, that a lot is counterfeit, that a user is under 18, that bidding has been manipulated, or that we are required to act by law. We will tell you what we have done and why, in every case, unless the law prevents us.

19.3 Notice and a chance to respond. Except where we are dealing with fraud, a safety risk, unlawful content, or something we have to act on immediately, we will give you notice before we restrict or suspend your account, and a chance to respond. You can ask us to look again at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]], and a person will review the decision. We do not restrict or suspend accounts on a purely automated basis.

19.4 We may refuse a listing. We will tell you why.

19.5 If we suspend you, bids you have placed may be cancelled and lots you have listed may be withdrawn. Held funds already allocated to a transaction stay allocated to that transaction and are released or refunded in the normal way: suspension does not take your money. We will deal with any order you have already paid for, by completing it or by refunding you.

Drafting note. Suspension and closure set an account status and withdraw live and scheduled listings. Nothing inspects, completes or refunds a paid order held by a suspended user, and refunds only ever flow through the dispute, non-dispatch and lost-parcel routes, so clause 19.5 is a manual commitment today, not something the software does. Separately, if a seller is a business, the retained Platform-to-Business Regulation requires a statement of reasons before a restriction or suspension, at least 30 days' notice of a change of terms, and an internal complaint-handling system. Clauses 19.2 to 19.4 and section 24 are drafted towards that; the internal complaints process still has to be built.

19.6 You can close your account at any time (clause 4.7). Closing it does not cancel orders you have already committed to, and does not release you from obligations you have already incurred.

19.7 If someone leaves part-way through a transaction. If you deactivate or delete your account while an order, a dispute or a return is open, or while funds are held on a transaction you are part of, that transaction continues and you remain bound by these terms for it. We may keep your account open for that purpose, and may delay closing or deleting it until the transaction is finished.

Drafting note. Nothing in the product checks for an open order, dispute, return or held balance before deactivating an account, or before purging it 30 days later. A seller can deactivate mid-order, and the counterparty is left with no one to deal with and no clause telling them what happens to the lot, the money or the dispute. Clause 19.7 needs a build.

19.8 We may stop offering Encave, or any part of it. If we do, we will give you reasonable notice, let you complete open transactions, and let you export your cellar data.

20. Your content, and photographs in listings

20.1 You keep ownership of everything you put on Encave: your photographs, your condition notes, your storage history, your tasting notes and your messages.

20.2 By uploading content for a listing, you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, resize and display it for the purposes of operating and promoting Encave and the lot, and to keep it as part of the record of a sale after the lot has ended. You can withdraw a listing, but we may keep listing content as part of the transaction record.

20.3 You promise that you own the copyright in every photograph you upload, or have permission to use it. Do not upload a producer's, a merchant's or another seller's photographs.

20.4 Listing photographs are public. Anyone can see them, including people who are not signed in, and they remain retrievable after a lot has ended. Photographs you attach to a dispute, or to your private cellar, are not public.

20.5 Metadata. We do not currently strip metadata from the images you upload, so a photograph taken on a phone can carry the place and the time it was taken, and on a listing photograph that is public along with the image. That is a defect on our side that we need to fix, not a risk for you to manage. Our Privacy Policy says more.

Drafting note. Stripping metadata on upload is a few lines in the image pipeline. Warning the user does not discharge the obligation to build data protection in by design and by default, and it shifts onto the data subject a risk the platform created. Once stripping is in place, clause 20.5 should be deleted rather than reworded.

20.6 We may remove content that breaches these terms. Clause 17.4 is how you complain about that.

20.7 Everything else on Encave — the site, the software, our drinking windows, our valuations, our reputation scoring and the name Encave — belongs to us or our licensors. Some catalogue reference data is licensed from, or contributed by, third parties and remains theirs. You may use any of it to use Encave. You may not copy it, resell it, or build a competing product from it.

Drafting note. The previous draft claimed the wine catalogue outright. LWIN identifiers are loaded from a local file with no contract, endpoint or credential anywhere in the repository, and producer records are enriched from Wikidata and Wikimedia. The licence position on that reference data is a contract question in its own right and should not be papered over with "or our licensors".

20.8 If you think something on Encave infringes your copyright, tell us at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]] with enough detail to find it, and we will look into it.

21. The cellar, drinking windows, valuations and AI features

21.1 Your cellar is private by default, with three exceptions set when your account is created: your tenure and your seller profile are visible, and your public tasting notes contribute to community note summaries. You can change all three, and the rest of what you share, in your privacy settings.

Drafting note. The live "Your data on Encave" page says the cellar is private by default without naming the exceptions. Both have to say the same thing, and the three defaults should be reviewed: a default that is on is not a choice the member made.

21.2 Drinking windows, sell prompts, valuations, market figures and community medians are estimates and opinions, not facts. We show you the evidence behind them so that you can judge them yourself, and where we have had to assume something we say so. We do not promise they are accurate, and you should not treat them as a valuation for insurance, probate, lending or tax, or as financial advice.

21.3 A bottle's value can fall. Nothing on Encave is investment advice, and we are not authorised to give it.

21.4 Some features use artificial intelligence: identifying a bottle from a photograph, reading a receipt you upload, drafting a condition description, summarising members' tasting notes, and answering questions about your cellar. AI output can be wrong. Check it before relying on it, and particularly before publishing it in a listing — a condition description you publish is your statement under section 6, however it was drafted.

21.5 Using those features sends content to a third-party AI provider. Our Privacy Policy explains what is sent, where it goes, and how to stop your notes being used.

22. Our responsibility to you

22.1 Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for:

(a) death or personal injury caused by our negligence;

(b) fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;

(c) anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

22.2 If you are a consumer, nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights, including your rights against a seller under section 13.

22.3 What you can expect from our service. We must supply our service to you with reasonable care and skill (section 49 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015) and within a reasonable time (section 52), and what we say about ourselves or about our service is binding on us where you take it into account (section 50). If we fall short, you can require us to perform again, or get a price reduction, under sections 54 to 56. We do not exclude or limit our liability under section 49, and the cap in clause 22.6 does not apply to it.

22.4 We are responsible to you for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking these terms or failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss that is not foreseeable.

22.5 We are not responsible for:

(a) the wine — whether it is authentic, whether it is as described, whether its provenance is accurate, or whether it is fit to drink. That is the seller's responsibility, and your rights in respect of it are against the seller;

(b) what a seller or a buyer does or fails to do, including a seller who does not dispatch, misdescribes a lot, or will not deal with you;

(c) anything that happens in a transaction arranged off Encave;

(d) a courier's delay, loss or damage, beyond the refund in clause 12.8; or

(e) decisions you take on the strength of an estimate, drinking window, valuation or AI output (section 21).

22.6 Our liability to you for anything other than the matters in clauses 22.1 and 22.3 is limited to the greater of [[LIABILITY_CAP]] and the total amount you have paid in the transaction the claim relates to.

22.7 Availability. We will use reasonable endeavours to keep Encave available, including through the close of an auction, but we cannot promise that it will be uninterrupted or error-free. Where an auction is materially affected by a failure on our side, we may extend it or run it again. We are not responsible for a bid you could not place because of a fault in your own connection or device.

Drafting note on clause 22.6. A cap is a commercial decision the business has to make, and it has to be reasonable on a platform where a single lot can be worth thousands of pounds and our only charge to the buyer is £2.50 plus 5%. A cap set at the fee we earned would not bind a consumer twice over: section 57(1) of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 makes a term excluding liability under section 49 non-binding, and section 57(3) makes a cap below the price the consumer paid non-binding. That is why clause 22.6 carves out section 49 expressly and has a floor at the amount paid, and why clause 22.7 is an endeavours statement rather than the blanket disclaimer for auction-close unavailability that the previous draft contained. There is no indemnity in this draft, for the same reason: an indemnity given by a consumer would almost certainly be an unfair term. Both the cap figure and the indemnity question need a decision before publication.

22.8 If you are using Encave in the course of a business, clauses 22.2 and 22.3 do not apply to you, and we are not liable to you for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of goodwill, or any indirect or consequential loss.

23. Changes to these terms

23.1 We may change these terms where there is a good reason to do so. The reasons are: a change in the law or in a regulatory requirement; a decision of a court or a regulator; a change to how Encave works or to the features we offer; a change to our fees; a change of payment, carrier or warehouse provider; and correcting an error or making these terms clearer without reducing your rights. That list is complete: we will not change these terms for a reason that is not on it.

23.2 We will tell you before a change takes effect, by email or on the site, and we will give you at least [[NOTICE_PERIOD]] notice of any change that affects your rights or what you pay. If you do not accept a change, you can close your account before it takes effect, at no charge, without losing anything already owed to you, and we will complete or refund any transaction already under way.

23.3 A change to our fees does not affect an order already placed. The fees fixed on your order are the ones that were shown to you.

Drafting note. The previous draft also said a fee change would not affect "a lot you have already bid on". It would. The rate is read live at the moment the order is created and snapshotted onto the order then, so a bid placed before a fee change and converted into an order after it is charged the new rate; nothing records a fee rate against a bid. If the business wants bid-time protection, the rate has to be stored on the bid. Separately, [[NOTICE_PERIOD]] should not be less than 30 days, which is also what the Platform-to-Business Regulation expects for business sellers. And the product has no terms versioning: it does not store which version anyone accepted, has no mechanism for notifying a change, and keeps no acceptance record, so clause 23.2 cannot be honoured until that is built.

23.4 The date these terms last changed is shown at the top of this page.

24. Complaints

24.1 If something has gone wrong, tell us at [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]], or write to us at [[REGISTERED_ADDRESS]]. Say what happened, give the order or lot reference, and tell us what you would like us to do.

24.2 We will acknowledge your complaint within [[COMPLAINT_ACKNOWLEDGEMENT_DAYS]] and give you an answer within [[COMPLAINT_RESPONSE_DAYS]]. If we need longer, we will tell you why and when you can expect an answer.

24.3 A complaint about a lot you bought is usually a matter between you and the seller, and section 16 is how we handle it. This section is for complaints about us and about our service, including a decision we made under section 17 or section 19.

24.4 Alternative dispute resolution: [[ADR_MEMBERSHIP]]. Whatever the answer, nothing in these terms stops you taking a matter to court.

Drafting note. The previous draft asserted as settled fact that the business is not a member of an ADR scheme. That is not something the codebase can establish, so it is now a placeholder. Whether to join a certified scheme, and what to tell a consumer when a complaint is deadlocked, is a decision for the business and its solicitor; the EU online dispute resolution platform is not a route for a UK trader and is not signposted here. There is no complaints page, no contact page and no ADR page in the product today, and the help pages are empty, so these terms must not cross-reference a help article.

25. General

25.1 These terms are the agreement between you and us about your use of Encave. Our Privacy Policy and our Cookie Policy explain how we handle information and are notices, not contract terms. These terms do not exclude or restrict your reliance on: what the listing said about the lot, and anything else the seller told you about it; the pre-contract information you were given, which the law makes a term of your contract with the seller; and anything we told you about ourselves or our service. Nothing here limits our liability, or a seller's, for misrepresentation.

25.2 If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

25.3 If we do not enforce a term straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.

25.4 We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another business. We will tell you if we do, and it will not reduce your rights. You may not transfer yours without our agreement.

25.5 These terms are between you and us. Nobody else can enforce them, except that a buyer may rely on section 6, and either party may rely on section 13, in a dispute between them.

25.6 How we contact you. We will contact you by email or through your account. We send two kinds of email: messages about your account and your transactions — outbid alerts, dispatch notices, order emails and dispute updates — which we send because you are using the service; and optional email about the market, about selling and about new features, which you can turn on and off in your settings. Every optional email says who it is from and carries a way to stop it.

25.7 Information about other members. If you are a seller, you receive the buyer's name and delivery address so that you can fulfil the order. That information is your responsibility in your own right. Use it only to fulfil that order, keep it no longer than you need it, do not reuse it for anything else, and do not add it to a mailing list.

25.8 Neither of us is responsible for a failure to perform caused by something outside our reasonable control, but this does not affect your right to your money back if you do not get the wine.

26. Governing law and jurisdiction

26.1 These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of Encave, are governed by [[GOVERNING_LAW]].

26.2 Jurisdiction is not exclusive. Either of us may bring proceedings in the courts of England and Wales. If you are a consumer, you may instead bring proceedings in the courts of the part of the United Kingdom where you live, and if we bring proceedings against you we will bring them there.

26.3 Clause 26.1 does not deprive you of the protection of any mandatory consumer law of the country where you live.

26.4 The contract of sale between a buyer and a seller is a separate contract, and these terms do not determine what law governs it.

Drafting note. Governing law and jurisdiction follow from the operator's legal form and jurisdiction of registration, which clause 1.1 shows is unknown. This document has been drafted throughout on the basis of the law of England and Wales, and would need checking against Scots or Northern Irish law if the operator turns out to be registered there. An exclusive jurisdiction clause against a consumer is likely to be unfair, which is why clause 26.2 is non-exclusive rather than the carve-out the previous draft used.