# Watch Selling Cost Observatory — release-candidate method

**Status:** review required; not a published market dataset  
**Snapshot date:** August 24, 2026  
**Research question:** What publicly documented price bases and buyer/seller cost categories must an owner normalize before comparing watch-selling routes?

## Scope

The observatory records public, directly citable fee language from auction houses and marketplaces alongside method-only rows for dealer bids, negotiated consignment, and private sales. It does not rank venues, estimate a watch, infer confidential commissions, or claim that one public schedule applies to every country, account, lot, or future date.

Each row identifies the transaction route, operator or route class, market, fee side, price basis, summary, variable factors, source, access date, archive need, and review status. A fee is included only when the public source makes its basis and context sufficiently explicit. Negotiated or inaccessible terms remain labeled rather than filled with a guess.

## Definitions

- **Ask:** an offered price, not evidence of a completed transaction.
- **Bid or dealer offer:** what a buyer says it will pay under stated conditions.
- **Hammer:** the accepted auction bid before buyer premium and usually before taxes or other charges.
- **Buyer all-in:** hammer plus buyer premium and applicable charges; the exact composition must be labeled.
- **Transaction price:** the price agreed between buyer and seller before clarifying which costs it includes.
- **Seller gross:** sale amount credited before seller-side deductions.
- **Seller net:** cash remaining after every documented seller-side cost and adjustment.

## Inclusion rules

1. Use an official public page, sale overview, conditions document, or account schedule.
2. Record a location and date whenever the schedule is not global and timeless.
3. Preserve cumulative tiers as tiers; never apply the top percentage to the full price unless the source does.
4. Separate seller and buyer charges.
5. Record whether tax, shipping, collected sales tax, or another amount enters the fee base.
6. Mark negotiated terms as negotiated instead of inserting an industry percentage.
7. Keep sale-specific historical snapshots distinct from a current general schedule.

## Exclusions

The release candidate excludes fee claims visible only behind a login, scraped account data, private consignment agreements, anecdotal dealer spreads, promotional rates without eligibility context, tax/legal conclusions, and any rate that could not be reconciled with its operative terms. It also excludes the value of time, fraud exposure, return risk, and price uncertainty from the numeric fee field; those belong in a separate decision analysis.

## Update procedure

Before publication, a second human must open each source, compare the row word-for-word with the current schedule, archive a permitted snapshot or record why archiving is unavailable, and sign the change log. Rows with `review_required` cannot be quoted as current rates. On later checks, preserve the prior row in version control, update the access date only after a real review, and add a new snapshot when the schedule changes materially.

## Reproducibility

For a worked comparison, select one transaction date, currency, country, seller account type, listing category, and hypothetical sale amount. Apply cumulative tiers mechanically, keep taxes and shipping in separate columns, and show the complete arithmetic. Two reviewers should independently reproduce the calculation before any public chart or calculator default uses it.

## Limitations

Public schedules do not reveal negotiated seller commissions, discretionary waivers, every payment/insurance cost, likelihood of sale, realized price, or loss exposure. Operators can change terms. The current CSV is therefore a vocabulary-and-source map, not a forecast, endorsement, or promise of seller proceeds.