Auction trust · policy
Payment holds, identity, and disputes — explained.
How RestorationEssentials handles auction payment holds, identity verification, and disputes — and the few capabilities it deliberately does not provide. The numbers come straight from our published auction schedule and our locked state machine — what you see here is exactly what the lot page, the bid rail, and the post-auction flow do.
Section 1
What your payment covers on a winning lot.
When a lot closes, the winning bidder is charged a server-computed settlement amount: the final accepted bid plus the applicable buyer fee.
Hammer
The final accepted bid in US dollars.
Restoration Essentials buyer fee — 5%
On the hammer, capped at $5,000 per lot. The cap prevents the buyer fee from compounding on high-hammer lots.
Hosted payment
The buyer completes payment in Stripe's hosted checkout. The app does not add a separate, independently computed processing line to the auction settlement total.
Settlement runs through Stripe’s hosted checkout. We never see or store card numbers; the buyer completes the charge in a Stripe-hosted surface and is sent back to the lot’s checkout-success page once payment captures. The first 25 auction lots waive the buyer fee, seller commission, and seller’s listing fee — the Buyer fee waived label appears on every line item during the waiver window.
Launch promotion
25 of 25 fee-free slots remaining
The first 25 auction lots list free — no listing fee, no seller commission, no buyer fee.
Section 2
What the platform payment hold means on a lot.
Once a winning bidder’s charge captures, the lot moves to PAID_HOLD. The platform records the payment while the inspection and dispute workflow runs. These are separate timing concepts:
24-hour grace
A one-day buffer between payment and inspection. The seller uses this window to ship or arrange transfer. The buyer inspection window does not begin counting down during grace.
14-day buyer inspection window
The buyer has 14 days from the end of the grace period to physically inspect the lot, book a video walkaround, and decide whether to confirm receipt or open a dispute. The lot stays in PAID_HOLD through this window.
7-day dispute window
The app separately derives a dispute cutoff from the auction close (nominally seven days plus a small implementation slack). The lot page is authoritative; a buyer may open a dispute only while the current payment state and cutoff allow it.
Payout may be queued for an operator’s review at the close of the applicable dispute workflow. Release is currently operator-mediated — there is no automated seller payout rail or instant seller-payout product. A clean state is not a promise about payout timing.
Section 3
Buyer identity verification — what it is, when it applies.
Verification is buyer-only. Sellers go through listing approval separately — the bidder identity gate is in front of placing a bid and in front of paying.
Identity verification is required to bid AND to pay out a won lot.
Two checks must be complete before the bid rail unlocks on any lot: identity verification, reviewed by the operator within one business day, AND a payment method on file (a $1 Stripe checkout that authorizes and holds a card). Verification and the payment method are independent — order does not matter, but both must land before bidding opens.
What you submit
Legal name, date of birth, an ID type (passport, driver's licence, or state ID), the last four digits of the ID, and an optional selfie storage key. Each piece of information round-trips to your bidder profile so a rejected submission can be corrected and re-submitted without re-typing the whole form.
How it's reviewed
Submissions land in an operator queue and are reviewed one at a time. Reviews usually complete within one business day. There is no instant / automatic verification on RestorationEssentials — every submission is reviewed by a human operator before buyer status flips.
Identity rows are gated to the buyer themselves — the bid POST 403s on a bidder whose kycStatus is not verified, and the same row gates the buy-side checkout POST. Sellers never see the buyer’s identity payload — only the bidder handle and the verification chip.
Section 4
How disputes work after a winning bid.
A dispute pauses payout while an operator investigates. Here is the exact path.
1. Who can open a dispute
Only the top bidder on the lot. The dispute POST is buyer-only — sellers cannot self-open a dispute against a buyer, and a non-winning bidder cannot spuriously flag a lot.
2. When a dispute can be opened
The authenticated winning buyer can open one while the current payment state and dispute cutoff allow it. In the paid flow this includes PAID_HOLD and RECEIPT_CONFIRMED when the displayed cutoff has not passed; the lot page is authoritative.
3. What a dispute does
Transitions the lot to DISPUTED and pauses the available seller-payout workflow while the operator reviews the report. There is no guaranteed resolution SLA; the dispute cutoff is an eligibility boundary, not a promise that a decision will be completed by then.
4. How a dispute is resolved
An operator reads the dispute reason, may request information from both parties, and can record a buyer-favor outcome (the workflow moves to REFUNDED) or a seller-favor outcome (the workflow moves to RELEASED). The current route rejects a split outcome. A recorded state does not promise card-refund timing or automatic seller payout.
5. How you reach a moderator
There is no in-app mediator chat today. Opening a dispute is the canonical way to flag an issue; the operator inbox receives a notification email on submission. If you need to add context after opening, reply inline to the email thread on file.
Section 5
What the platform deliberately does not provide.
These are real gaps. RestorationEssentials may add capability in some of them later — this list is the honest snapshot of what the platform cannot do today.
Read the absent-capability list
No legal escrow representation. The product uses the term payment hold for its internal workflow. This page does not characterize that hold as legal escrow or as a third-party custodial service.
No Stripe Connect integration.There is no “Express payout” or “instant payout” product for sellers. When a lot closes cleanly, the payout is queued for release and run by an operator — that is the existing path.
No automatic refund or chargeback rail. Refund requests and card-level reversals require the operator and payment-operations path available for the transaction. A card issuer controls a chargeback, and no insurance or chargeback guarantee is offered.
No in-app moderator chat. There is no real-time chat with a dispute mediator. Disputes are filed via the lot detail page and resolved by an operator over email, not in a live surface.
No self-service dispute resolution. Resolutions are made by the operator — not by the buyer and seller negotiating directly. A buyer cannot withdraw a dispute unilaterally; only an operator action transitions the lot out of DISPUTED.
No instant verification.Review time is up to one business day. There is no “instant KYC” product or third-party identity-verification vendor branding — every submission is reviewed by a human operator.
No SLA on dispute resolution. The dispute cutoff controls eligibility, while the operator inbox controls review timing. A dispute that reaches the cutoff does not auto-refund or auto-release; only an explicit operator action moves the workflow forward.
Related surfaces
Where the process lives in the product.
The above sections describe the policy; the surfaces below are where each of these steps actually happens on the product.
- Auction pricing — fees, listing tiers, and process (the dollar-by-dollar breakdown of what is charged at settlement).
- Buyer FAQ (the five top-of-mind buyer questions — refund, devices, instant access, etc.).
- Full Auction Policy (buyer and seller duties, transaction risk, defaults, refunds, and review boundary).
- Browse live auctions (the lot detail page reads from the same four-step state machine this page describes).