How this works

The basics

We're a marketplace for private number plates. Buyers come to us, search the catalogue, and contact whoever owns the plate they're interested in. That's it.

You're a dealer. The platform doesn't sell your plates for you — it puts them in front of buyers and forwards their enquiries to you. The sale itself, the negotiation, the paperwork, the transfer: all you. We're not in the middle.

Money flow: buyer pays you directly. We don't touch it. No invoices from us, no debits, no commission. The only money flow in our direction is the voluntary contribution after a sale, which is exactly what it sounds like. More on that in section 8.

Your dashboard

Once you're approved, a "My Listings" tab appears in your My Account menu. That's your control panel.

What each part of the dashboard does:

• Stats row at the top — total listings, how many are live, how many are awaiting approval, how many are sold, how many are flagged as stale.
• Add One — quick form for a single plate. Just the registration and a guide price.
• Bulk Add — paste a list of plates and prices, one per line, in the format REG, PRICE. Useful when you're importing inventory.
• The listings table — every plate you've listed, its status, its price, its last-confirmed date, and how many enquiries it's had.
• Per-row actions — edit price, mark sold, confirm still available, delete.

Adding listings

Single plate

Enter the registration and your guide price. That's it. The system normalises the plate format (uppercase, spaces stripped). If you've already listed that plate, it'll tell you and skip the duplicate rather than creating a second listing.

Bulk paste

Click "Bulk Add" and paste your inventory. One plate per line, registration and price separated by a comma. Like this:

A1 BCD, 4500
BG10 NES, 7950
J4 MES, 12000
SP01 RTY, 3200

The system processes each line independently. If line 7 has a problem, lines 1-6 and 8 onwards still get created — you just see an error noting which line failed and why.

What the guide price actually means

The guide price is what shows in the catalogue alongside your listing. It anchors buyer expectations. Buyers can (and often will) negotiate via the enquiry — the price isn't binding, it's just the starting point.

Price reasonably. If your guide is wildly above what comparable plates go for, you'll get no enquiries and the listing wastes space in the catalogue. If it's wildly below, you'll get tyre-kickers and you'll have to keep pushing the price up in negotiation, which annoys everyone.

The approval flow

When you submit a listing, it lands in "draft" status. Admin reviews it (basic sanity check — does the plate exist, is the price not obviously nonsensical, does the formatting look right), then publishes it. Typical turnaround is one working day.

What each status means:

Draft / Awaiting approval

Submitted by you, not yet reviewed. Not visible in the public search.

Live

Published. Visible to buyers, can receive enquiries.

Sold

Marked sold by you. Hidden from the catalogue, kept in your dashboard for reference.

Trusted dealer status

After a stretch of clean submissions, admin can flag you as a trusted dealer. When you are, your new listings publish immediately — no draft, no review, no waiting. The "Submit for approval" button changes to "Publish listing" and a "Trusted dealer" badge appears on your dashboard.

There's no application for this. It happens when admin decides you've earned it, usually after a few rounds of clean submissions. If you go quiet for a long time or start submitting noise, the flag can come off.

How enquiries reach you

Each plate has its own listing page in the catalogue with an enquiry form at the bottom. When a buyer submits that form, an email goes to:

• The dealer who owns the listing (you), using the email tied to your account
• The platform's own inbox, for the audit log

The email contains the buyer's name, email, phone number, message, and the plate they're enquiring about. You reply directly to the buyer from your normal inbox — your reply doesn't come back through us.

What we keep, what we don't

We log every enquiry on our side — buyer name, email, message, which plate, timestamp. That log is for audit and dispute purposes only. If something goes wrong and one of us needs to look back at what was said, the record exists.

We do not use that data to compete with you, share it with other dealers, sell it to marketers, or use it for our own outbound. The log is a safety net, not a data asset.

Response expectations

Reply within a day. Buyers shop multiple dealers and the first responder usually wins. If you can't respond within 24 hours, set an auto-reply on the inbox that the dealer account uses.

When a plate sells

Once a sale completes, open your dashboard, find the row, click "Mark sold." Done. The listing immediately disappears from the public catalogue.

The post stays in your dashboard with a "Sold" status so you can refer back to it. It's not deleted — just hidden from buyers. If for some reason the sale falls through (buyer pulls out, payment fails), you can republish it from the same row.

If the plate sold elsewhere

Same workflow — mark it sold. Doesn't matter whether the sale came through us or through your own channels. The point is keeping the catalogue accurate: if it's not available, it shouldn't show.

After the sale

The buyer relationship is yours. We don't follow up with them, don't solicit reviews, don't put them on a mailing list. If they want to come back to us for another plate, they will. If they want to deal with you directly next time, that's your relationship.

The 60-day confirmation cycle

Stale listings are the silent killer of marketplaces. A buyer enquires about a plate that sold three months ago, hears nothing back, decides the platform is dead. To prevent that, we have a 60-day confirmation cycle.

How it actually works

1. Day 0: you publish a listing (or you've just confirmed it). The clock starts.
2. Day 60+: our daily cron picks up the listing as "stale." Nothing changes for the buyer yet — it stays in the catalogue.
3. Soon after day 60: you get an email titled "Confirm your N listings still available on buyprivateplates.uk." It lists all your stale plates and contains a single big confirmation link. One click confirms everything in the email.
4. Day 67 (7 days after the email): if you haven't clicked, those listings get auto-demoted to draft so they stop showing in search. You get a follow-up email explaining what was moved and how to republish.
5. Republishing is one click from your dashboard. The 60-day clock resets to zero.

What the email looks like

Plain, short, no marketing. List of your stale plates with their prices, one prominent gold confirmation button, a deadline date.

The confirmation link is single-use and expires after 7 days. Clicking it logs you into your dashboard if you weren't already, shows a "thanks, everything confirmed" message, and refreshes the clock on every plate that was in the email.

Reactivating demoted listings

If you missed the email and your listings got moved to draft, no harm done. Go to your dashboard, find them (status will be "Awaiting approval"), and republish. Trusted dealers republish immediately. Standard dealers go back through the normal one-day approval window.

Voluntary contributions

We don't take commission. We don't charge fees. The platform is genuinely free for dealers to use. The only way money flows from you to us is the voluntary contribution after a sale.

It's a button on your dashboard. You decide if and when. You decide how much. There's no suggested amount and no minimum.

A useful frame

If I was paying a normal classifieds platform a commission on this sale, what would that be? Most platforms take somewhere between 2-10%. You don't have to match that. You don't have to give anything. But if you got a good sale out of us and feel like contributing towards keeping the site running, we appreciate it.

Why this model

Most classifieds platforms charge regardless of whether anything sells. That feels wrong. The platform should only get paid when it's actually producing value for the people using it.

Voluntary contribution from happy customers is a much better incentive than mandatory commission. It means we have to keep the platform working well, or you stop contributing. Which is exactly the discipline we want.

What gets accounts pulled

We're not a heavy hand on this. Most dealers never have an issue. But these are the things that have or could get an account pulled:

• Listing plates you don't actually control. If a buyer enquires and you can't supply the plate, that's a broken promise on our behalf.
• Consistently ignoring enquiries. If buyers report "I enquired and nobody replied" repeatedly, your account is the source of complaints.
• Wildly overpricing to anchor. Listing at 10x market with the intention of starting "negotiations" from there. Wastes buyer time.
• Marking sold then re-listing the same plate later as a "different" listing. Confuses the audit trail.
• Sharing your account with someone we didn't approve. Your account is tied to you, not a brand or team mailbox.

First instance, we email and ask what's going on. Repeat, account paused. Pattern, account pulled. We'd much rather you fix whatever's wrong than lose you — but the buyer experience comes first.

Common scenarios

Need help

If something isn't covered above, or you've hit an edge case, or you want to suggest a feature, or you're having a problem with another dealer or a buyer — just email. We respond to everything, usually same day.

Use whatever email is in your latest correspondence from us, or the one you applied with. Both reach the same inbox.