Olive Auction is a neutral online marketplace operating timed auctions and fixed-price allocations as electronic auction brokerage. Olive Auction is not an auctioneer, holds no licence to conduct public auctions and does not need one for this activity; it never owns, holds, stores or takes title to any lot, and it never receives or holds the buyer's money. The contract of sale forms directly between the winning bidder and the consigning mill at the moment a lot closes sold (or, in a salvage window, at the moment the consignor accepts the standing bid or the bidder reaches the reserve). Olive Auction is not a party to that contract. In these terms "mill" means the consigning producer, "buyer" the winning bidder, "lot" the unit of sale, and "hammer price" the final price at close.
Members are 18 or older and able to enter binding contracts. Prices and bidding are visible to registered members only; bidders appear to others as paddle numbers. Producers consign under their own terms on the producer side, oliveauction.com/terms.html. Keep your details current; whatever happens under your sign-in counts as yours. False information, bids or sales left unhonoured, shipments that never leave — any of those can cost the account, and for producer accounts we give the reasons and the complaint route in §16.
The amount entered is a sealed maximum; the Olive Auction system bids the minimum needed on the bidder's behalf, one increment at a time, never past the maximum. The earliest-placed maximum wins ties. A bid in the final two minutes extends the lot by two minutes. Lots may carry a confidential reserve; a lot closing under reserve is passed, except that where the closing bid reaches at least half the reserve, the consignor and the leading bidder receive a 24-hour salvage window in which the consignor may accept the standing bid or the bidder may raise to the reserve. Bids are binding offers to purchase; a bid can be cancelled before close only for an obvious input error, on request and at Olive Auction's discretion. Olive Auction may pause, extend, void or re-run a sale affected by a technical fault, and may remove a listing that breaks the law or these terms.
Shill bidding has no place here. A consignor does not bid on their own lot, and does not arrange, encourage or allow anyone else to bid on it — to lift the price, to walk a lot toward its reserve, or for any other reason. Bidding activity is monitored — including for accounts that bid on lots consigned from the same connection — and a mill found to have shill-bid, directly or through an associate, has its account and the associated bidding account suspended and its listings delisted, any affected sale is void, and the matter may be reported to the relevant authorities. Shill bidding is unlawful in most jurisdictions. Flags raised by monitoring are reviewed by a person before any account action is taken.
An allocation is a fixed-price sale of a stated quantity; ordering reserves the quantity at that price. A first-press futures lot is the advance sale of oil from a coming pressing: the listing states the expected pressing and dispatch window, and the buyer pays before the oil exists. If the pressing fails, falls short or misses the stated window by more than 30 days, the buyer may cancel and the mill refunds in full within 14 days. The buyer's payment for a futures lot goes to the mill, not to Olive Auction, and carries the credit risk of that mill; Olive Auction does not guarantee delivery or refund.
The buyer's whole cost is the hammer price and the mill's carriage. Carriage belongs to the mill: every lot carries the mill's carriage rate, and the rate for the buyer's own country is shown on the lot before bidding opens. Carriage is paid to the mill with the hammer and carries no commission. Our commission is charged to the consigning mill alone, under the producer terms — no part of it is added to what the buyer pays. On lots refunded for transit damage Olive Auction retains 10% of hammer; where the lot was shipped outside the packaging standards in §9, the full commission stands.
The buyer pays the mill directly, by the rails the mill publishes (bank transfer, PayPal, Revolut, Wise) or as otherwise agreed between them, referencing the order number. Which rails a mill may publish depends on its delivery record: a new mill settles through buyer-protected rails only, and further rails open as its lots deliver. Olive Auction never receives, holds or transmits the buyer's payment and provides no escrow or payment guarantee; it separately invoices the mill for its commission as an ordinary business fee. The mill receives the buyer's name and delivery address at settlement and ships within the window in §9 once payment is confirmed. A mill that cannot fulfil a paid order in full — short pressing, breakage, over-allocation, whatever the cause — refunds every payment received for the unfulfilled quantity immediately, to the buyer's original payment method; sitting on a buyer's money for oil that will not ship ends the account. Non-payment by a buyer or non-delivery by a mill is a matter between those parties; Olive Auction may assist, may void the affected sale, and may suspend the accounts involved. Because Olive Auction never receives the buyer's payment, it has no obligation to refund it: the buyer's remedies for non-delivery lie against the mill and through the protections of the chosen payment rail, and any goodwill payment Olive Auction chooses to make remains voluntary. Finding each other here and then closing the sale elsewhere to duck the commission costs both accounts.
The mill is the seller of record: it is responsible for VAT or sales tax on the sale, for issuing any invoice or receipt the buyer's or its own law requires, and for its own export formalities. Import duties and taxes on cross-border shipments are the buyer's responsibility unless the listing states otherwise. Where platform-reporting rules such as Council Directive (EU) 2021/514 ("DAC7") apply, Olive Auction reports the seller data those rules require to the competent tax authority.
EU and UK consumers buying from professional sellers have the statutory 14-day right of withdrawal on auction wins and allocations, counted from delivery. To exercise it, tell the mill in a clear statement (the settlement contact in your account) within the period; the mill reimburses all payments including standard delivery within 14 days of receiving the goods back or proof of return, and the buyer bears the direct cost of returning the goods. The right does not extend to bottles or tins whose seal has been broken after delivery, for hygiene and food-safety reasons. Nothing in these terms limits mandatory consumer protection of the buyer's country of residence.
The consigning mill is the food business operator responsible for the lot: for the accuracy of the listing's food information, for compliant labelling on the delivered goods including date of minimum durability, for traceability and for any recall. Listings carry the mandatory food particulars before bidding opens. Carriage is charged as the lot stated when bidding opened. Where a real delivery cost turns up that the listing could not have covered — a remote or island address, an oversize consignment, a courier surcharge — the mill revises the figure before the buyer pays and gives its reason; the buyer is told at once and is free to withdraw from the sale without penalty. Once the buyer has paid, the figure stands. Consigned lots ship tracked within five working days of settlement as the standard, in the packaging set out in the producer terms; an order still undispatched after fourteen days is cancelled, the buyer is released with any payment returned in full, and the mill's producer account is terminated permanently. Damage claims are filed from the buyer's account page and require photographs of bottle, packaging and label within 48 hours of delivery; the mill reships or refunds. Transit damage is never the buyer's cost.
US-bound shipments are exported by the mill. FDA Prior Notice is required for every food shipment regardless of value or quantity and is the shipping mill's (or its courier's) obligation. Olive Auction bears no liability for refusal, hold or destruction of a shipment lacking Prior Notice.
Millennial and monumental designations refer to official catalogue entries (tree number, measured trunk circumference), never to certified age. Laboratory values are displayed as reported by the named laboratory and method. Consignors warrant the accuracy of dossier data and indemnify Olive Auction against claims, losses and costs arising from inaccurate declarations, non-compliant labelling, unsafe goods or infringing uploads.
All content of this site — text, page copy, editorial portraits, territory guides, the structure and presentation of lot dossiers, page layouts, graphics and code — is the property of Olive Auction or its licensors and is protected by copyright and related rights. © Olive Auction, all rights reserved. The tree index, the mill registry and the catalogue constitute databases in which Olive Auction holds the sui generis database right of Directive 96/9/EC (and equivalent rights elsewhere), reflecting substantial investment in obtaining, verifying and presenting their contents. Extraction or re-utilisation of the whole or a substantial part of any such database — and repeated or systematic extraction of insubstantial parts — needs a written licence first.
Material a mill uploads — lot and profile photographs, labels, texts and dossier documents — remains the mill’s property. By uploading, the mill grants Olive Auction a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to reproduce, adapt and display that material on the site, in the catalogue and journal, and in Olive Auction’s own promotion of the site and its lots across any medium, with attribution to the mill where practical.
Automated access — scraping, crawling for content reuse, harvesting of prices, dossiers, mill profiles, tree records or member data, and any use of site content or data to train, fine-tune or ground machine-learning systems or to build or seed a competing marketplace, directory or valuation service — is not licensed. Ordinary search-engine indexing of public pages is welcome. Prices and bidding data are member-gated and confidential; going around that gate breaks these terms, and anti-circumvention law with them. Quotation of short extracts with attribution and a link is welcome; wholesale reproduction is not. Olive Auction terminates infringing accounts, revokes access, and pursues injunctive relief, damages and account of profits where its rights are infringed.
"Olive Auction", the olive-branch device, the sale formats and names used by Olive Auction, and the trade dress of this site are used in trade by Olive Auction and protected against passing off and unfair competition, whether or not registered. No consignor, member or third party may use the Olive Auction name or marks to imply endorsement, partnership or origin without written consent. Domain names, page structures and process descriptions are not there to be imitated in a way that would confuse the trade or the public.
Olive Auction supplies the marketplace with reasonable skill and care but as an intermediary: it does not inspect, taste, store or handle any oil and is not liable for the acts, omissions, solvency, goods or descriptions of mills or buyers, nor for loss of profit, business or data, nor for events outside its reasonable control (including outages of hosting, mail or payment infrastructure). To the fullest extent the applicable law allows, Olive Auction's total liability to a mill is capped at the commission that mill paid in the twelve months before the event, and to a buyer — who pays Olive Auction nothing — at €100. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or any liability that cannot lawfully be limited, and nothing limits the statutory rights of consumers.
Olive Auction may amend these terms. Producer accounts receive notice of amendments at least 15 days before they take effect (immediately where law or security requires); continued consigning after that date is acceptance. Amendments do not apply retroactively to sales already closed. The version date stands at the foot of this page; the English text prevails over any translation.
Olive Auction provides a single point of contact for members and authorities via the contact form. Illegal-content notices are reviewed and answered with reasons. Producer accounts may complain through the same form about suspension, delisting or the operation of the marketplace; complaints are handled individually, in order, with a reasoned reply, and Olive Auction is willing to engage in mediation over unresolved platform-to-business disputes.
If a provision of these terms is held invalid, the rest stands. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. Accounts and the rights under these terms stay with the member who holds them; Olive Auction may assign to a successor of the business. These terms and the pages they link to are the entire agreement between Olive Auction and the member concerning the marketplace, and are governed by the law of Olive Auction's establishment, without prejudice to §8 and to mandatory consumer law; consumers may also sue and be sued in their country of residence.
Version of 22 July 2026. The English text prevails over any translation.
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