Marketplace · Escrow · Own product · Beta
Provaux.Luxury, traded safely.
Selling luxury with the money held in escrow. Watches, handbags and jewellery — every listing reviewed, every payment held until the buyer is satisfied.
Provaux
Marketplace · Escrow · Own product · Beta
Selling luxury with the money held in escrow. Watches, handbags and jewellery — every listing reviewed, every payment held until the buyer is satisfied.
Provaux
01 · The problem
Selling a €3,000 watch to a stranger — or buying one — is a trust problem, not a technical one.
The buyer doesn't want to pay upfront to someone they don't know. The seller doesn't want to ship without seeing money. On the usual second-hand platforms you solve that with a meeting in a car park and a knot in your stomach.
Then come the other worries: is it genuine? What if the parcel disappears? Who pays for insurance? And what about the invoice if you trade professionally?
Provaux puts a trusted intermediary between both parties — not a company with a phone number, but a platform with every step built in: review, pay into escrow, ship insured, inspect, pay out.
02 · How it works
Fixed price or auction, with the attributes that belong to the category. Commission and estimated shipping cost are shown right in the form — no surprises afterwards.
A moderator reviews every listing before it goes live. Messages that try to take the deal off-platform are filtered automatically.
Buy now, join an auction with automatic bidding and anti-sniping, or make an offer in the chat with a payment deadline.
The buyer pays the platform, not the seller. The seller buys an insured shipping label; the cost is deducted from their payout.
After delivery the buyer gets 48 hours to 5 days, depending on the value. Happy? Confirm. Not happy? Open a dispute — an administrator decides.
The money goes to the seller, the commission invoice is created and queued for the accounts.
| Value of the piece | Commission | Inspection window | Extra protection |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to €500 | 12% | 48 hours | Tracking |
| €500 – €2.000 | 9% | 72 hours | Tracking + insurance |
| Above €2,000 | 7% | 5 days | Insurance + signature on delivery required |
One set of value thresholds drives commission, inspection window, insurance and signature requirements. Easy to explain, easy to adjust.
03 · What's inside
Not glued together from plugins, but built as one coherent whole.
Every listing passes through a queue. No fakes, spam or wrong prices make it onto the site.
Automatic bidding up to your maximum, reserve price, anti-sniping (the clock extends on a late bid), second chance and relisting.
Make an offer in the conversation, with a payment deadline. Real time, with an inbox and email notifications.
The payment stays on the platform until the buyer confirms. Release happens automatically after the inspection window, and never twice.
Real rates before publication, one-click labels, carrier tracking, insurance up to €5,000 and handling of lost parcels.
If something goes wrong, an administrator decides based on an immutable log of everything that happened.
Numbered PDF invoices, ready to be booked automatically via Yuki and Peppol. Built, not yet active
Every page is rendered on the server with structured data and shareable previews for social media.
Mandatory email verification, export or erase your data on request — while respecting legal retention periods.
04 · Under the hood
Buyer
Via Stripe, onto the platform balance. The seller sees nothing yet.
Seller
Label via Sendcloud; tracking comes in automatically.
Platform
The inspection clock starts at delivery. A dispute pauses everything.
Buyer
Or the window passes without a complaint.
Platform
To the seller's account, minus commission and shipping. Invoice follows.
Every movement of money happens inside a database transaction: either everything happens, or nothing. Four background processes watch auctions ending, payments being released, parcels in transit and offers expiring. Chat and statuses update live, no refreshing.
Security was tested the way an attacker would: two attack scenarios against the running app, with findings fixed straight away. Every design decision is numbered in the documentation — so a year from now we still know why something works the way it does.
05 · Why this is different
The first design could, in theory, pay the seller twice. Completely rebuilt and proven against the real payment API — not against a simulation.
The value of the piece determines commission, inspection window, insurance and signature requirement. One table, no exceptions — explainable in one sentence.
Real rates when creating the listing and when buying the label. What you see is what it costs.
Not just checklists: real attack scenarios against the running app. That is how we found, for instance, that the platform could block itself — and fixed it before there was a single user.
Every choice has a number and a reason. For a platform that manages other people's money, that is no luxury.
06 · What we learned along the way
A new version of the web framework quietly changed how pages read their parameters. Everything built, but three pages showed nothing.
A fixed check in a real browser after every change. “It compiles” is no proof that it works.
During the rename to Provaux one import was missing. Eight test suites green — and still the production server fell over.
A smoke test that sends every route through the real server before anything goes live. Never again a green test with a red server.
The shipping partner mixes two API generations, and a pickup at a service point counts as delivery.
Revised three times against the real API until every scenario was right, and everything written down in the documentation.
Because pages are rendered on the server, all visitors seemed to come from the same address — and the security layer blocked everyone at once.
The visitor's real address is passed on securely, so limits apply per person again.
07 · What's next
Auctions, escrow, shipping, disputes and invoicing work in the test environment and are tested automatically against the real payment and shipping systems.
Terms and conditions, DAC7 reporting and the move to provaux.be.
VAT checks, reviews and bank transfer for pieces above €2,000.
Dutch, French and German alongside English.
Invoices automatically in Yuki, sent via Peppol.
A platform with payments, shipping or auctions?