Secondary Platform is a small, vetted directory for private circulation. It works on trust. These are the conventions every member is expected to follow.
1. Only list works you can actually sell
You may list a work only if you have a real, working relationship with whoever owns it. That means either:
- You own the work yourself, or
- The owner has authorised you to offer it as their gallerist, dealer, consignment-holder, advisor, or any other direct representative with their explicit consent.
If you are not the owner, be honest on the listing about how directly you’re working with them. The Platform asks you to declare your proximity to the owner, meaning direct to the owner, advising the owner, or working through another advisor, so the buyer knows what they’re dealing with. A listing posted at a removed level of proximity without disclosure is treated the same as misrepresentation.
You may not list a work that:
- you’ve heard about through a third party without a relationship with the owner,
- you’ve seen on another dealer’s inventory without a written agreement to co-offer,
- is in active dispute over ownership, or
- is co-owned, where not all owners have agreed to the offer.
When in doubt, ask. Listing a work you can’t actually deliver is the fastest way to lose your account and damage the directory’s reputation.
2. Be accurate
Artist, title, year, dimensions, medium, provenance, auction history, location: state what you know to be true and mark anything approximate as approximate. If you are unsure of a field, leave it blank rather than guess.
3. How the fees work
The Platform charges sellers in two places: a small flat fee to publish a listing, and a sale commission when a listing sells through the Platform.
Listing fee. Charged at publish, based on the asking range:
- Under €10,000: €15
- €10,000 – €100,000: €50
- €100,000 – €500,000: €150
- €500,000 and above: €500
The listing fee is refundable if you withdraw the listing within 24 hours of publishing AND no member has reached out, meaning no inquiry and no chat. After either condition is broken, the fee is final.
Sale commission.When a listing sells through the Platform, the seller is charged a flat percentage on the agreed price. The rate decays with the seller’s completed on-platform sales:
- 1st verified sale: 12%
- 2nd: 9%
- 3rd: 7%
- 4th – 9th: 6%
- 10th and beyond: 5% (locked floor)
The total platform fee — listing fee plus commission — is capped at €10,000 per sale, no matter how high the sale price goes. On a €5M work, that’s where our fee lands; on a €20M work, still €10,000. There is no buyer’s premium on top. The exact fee is shown to the seller before they confirm a sale.
4. Don’t structure deals to dodge the platform
The fee structure exists because the Platform delivers a vetted audience, image protection, dispute support, and a credibility infrastructure dealers can’t get from a private contact list. Deliberately structuring a transaction to avoid the sale commission, including finishing the deal off-platform after an introduction was made here, splitting payment across channels to under-report the agreed price, or omitting transactions from the “mark sold” flow, defeats how the Platform sustains itself and is grounds for suspension.
If a sale closes through the Platform, mark it sold honestly and on time. After the first introduction, members are free to continue conversations off-platform, but the sale that flowed from that introduction belongs in the “mark sold” flow.
5. Keep first contact on-platform
Use the in-app inbox for initial inquiries. Keeping first contact here gives both sides a written record if anything goes wrong later, and it’s what makes the Platform’s dispute support meaningful. Once a deal is in progress, move to direct channels if you wish.
6. Visibility is your choice
Each listing has three visibility modes. Open to verified members shows the full listing to every approved member. Blurred shows a blurred image and hides the artist, title, price, and provenance until the seller unlocks the full listing for a specific inquiry. This is useful for high-discretion works where the seller wants to vet the buyer before revealing details. Private room only hides the listing from the public directory entirely and only exposes it to buyers the seller invites. Pick what matches the work and the level of discretion you need.
7. Mark works as sold
When a transaction completes, the seller marks the listing sold from My Listings and enters the agreed price. The buyer confirms or disputes the price from their inbox. Once both sides agree, the Platform charges the seller’s saved card under the commission rules in section 3. Once a listing has been marked sold it is permanently locked and cannot be deleted or re-listed under the same record. Keeping this honest is what makes the directory work.
8. Drafts
You can save a partial listing as a draft and return to it. Drafts skip the required-fields check and don’t appear on the public directory. They’re held in your account indefinitely while it’s active. When you publish a draft, the listing fee is charged at that moment, not at draft creation.
9. Reports and disputes
If a listing looks wrong, a member behaves badly, or you suspect fraud, use the Report button on the listing or thread. An administrator will review and take action, including suspending the listing or member, opening a dispute thread, or asking for documentation as needed. Honest disputes happen; the goal is to handle them quickly and quietly.
10. The auction-fee lookup tool
The “What did the house take?” tool on the home page exists to demonstrate the cost difference between the Platform and the major auction houses. Use it as a member looking up works you’re considering, or as a way to explain Platform economics to your contacts. Members get 20 lookups per day. Automating the tool, scraping it, or using it to bulk-mine auction data for resale violates these rules and will be rate-limited or blocked.
11. Image protection
Every artwork image is protected in three layers. A discreet diagonal watermark and a corner identity tag are rendered on screen showing the viewing member’s identity and the moment the image was opened. The image bytes themselves carry standard EXIF provenance metadata declaring Secondary Platform as the source. A per-viewer noise pattern is embedded invisibly in the pixels of every served image as a forensic mark we can use, against a leaked image and the original, to identify the viewer the leak came from.
Right-click save and drag-to-download are also disabled on artwork views. Republishing any image from the Platform, by screenshot or any other means, is a violation of these rules and the Terms, and will result in suspension and removal of your listings.
12. Treat each other professionally
No spam, no harassment, no pressure tactics, no fishing for off-platform contact info from buyers who haven’t engaged with you yet. The community is small enough that reputation carries.
These rules are enforced by the platform administrator at their discretion. Repeated or serious violations result in suspension.