An online bidder is a participant in an auction sale who places bids remotely via an internet platform rather than in person in the saleroom or via telephone. Online bidders have grown from a minor share of total auction participation in the early 2000s to a dominant presence in many auction categories by the mid-2020s, with the major houses now reporting that online bidders place 30 to 60 per cent of bids and account for a comparable share of hammer results in jewellery and gemstone sales. The growth has been particularly rapid since 2020, when travel restrictions accelerated the adoption of online platforms across both buyer and seller communities. Online bidding has democratised access to high-value international auctions and has materially expanded the geographic reach of the active market for fine jewellery and coloured stones.

Who online bidders are

The population of online bidders spans the full range of auction-market participants. Private collectors form the largest group, ranging from small-scale buyers placing modest bids on items of personal interest to substantial collectors who will bid into the seven figures online for major pieces. Institutional buyers — museums, private foundations, dealer-stockholders — increasingly bid online, with the convenience and audit trail of the platforms suiting institutional procurement requirements. Trade buyers — dealers acquiring stock, jewellers acquiring material for resetting, gem merchants acquiring inventory — are heavy online bidders, particularly in coloured stones and signed pieces where the supply is limited and the distribution geographically dispersed. International buyers from regions where physical attendance at New York, London, or Geneva sales would be impractical have particularly benefited from the platforms.

Behavioural patterns

Online bidders tend to bid somewhat differently from saleroom and telephone bidders. The reduced friction of clicking a bid button, compared to raising a paddle or instructing a telephone agent, can encourage more rapid escalation in active competitive bidding. Conversely, the inability to read the room — to gauge the energy of the saleroom, the body language of competing bidders, the auctioneer's pacing — can leave online bidders less able to time bids strategically and more likely to bid at predictable increments. Experienced online bidders develop intuitions for managing these effects and often pre-set their maximum bid limits before the sale begins.

The use of telephone bidding has not disappeared; for substantial bids, particularly in jewellery and coloured stones above the highest price tiers, telephone bidding via a senior auction-house representative remains common. The combination of telephone bidding (with the saleroom representative as the buyer's agent) and online bidding (with the buyer placing bids directly) is now the norm, with the highest-value bidders frequently using both channels in parallel.

Implications for the trade

The growth of online bidding has had three principal effects on the gem and jewellery trade. First, the active market for specialist material — Burmese ruby, Kashmir sapphire, period signed pieces, fine coloured stones generally — has expanded geographically, with buyers from regions previously not represented in the European and American salerooms now participating actively. This has contributed to the price escalation in fine coloured stones over the past decade. Second, the importance of provenance documentation, condition reports, and laboratory reports has grown, since online bidders cannot inspect pieces directly and rely on the documentation. Third, the auction-house brand's role as the trust intermediary has become more important; buyers willing to bid substantial sums online are doing so on the basis of trust in the auction house's authentication and condition representation.

For sellers consigning to auction, the broader online bidder pool has generally been positive, with more competitive bidding pushing prices upward at the top of the market. For dealers, the effect has been mixed: direct buyer access to auction lots has cut into the margin opportunities that traditional dealer-buyer relationships supported, but has also created new sources of supply through dealer-to-dealer online bidding.

The future

The growth of online bidding is likely to continue, with platforms becoming more sophisticated, the integration with virtual reality and high-resolution video improving the remote-inspection experience, and the user demographics of the active auction market continuing to expand. Whether online bidding will displace saleroom attendance entirely is unclear; the saleroom remains an important context for major collectors and for the social and reputational aspects of the auction market. The likely outcome is continued co-existence, with saleroom attendance retaining its importance for the most significant lots and online bidding becoming the default for everything else.

Further reading

• Sotheby's — auction services
• Christie's — auction services
• Phillips — auction services
• Bonhams — auction services